This summer continues to fly by! On a spur of the moment, we snuck away to Shades State Park last Thursday for a few hours to meet some friends and do some hiking and grilling, but even that was cut short by other commitments.

School started for three of the kids this week. Ava, now a high school sophomore, is continuing full-time studies. Ivy and Emry, middle school students, take one class a day to be eligible for extra-circular activities while continuing home school studies for the rest of their course work. Co-op will start for Ivy, Emry, Onya and Ulise in a couple of weeks. At Co-op, homeschool families join forces to teach classes in a more traditional format one day a week.

We caught more rain last weekend. Irrigation is idle this week. Generally, crop conditions are pretty good here in Northern Indiana, but there are some spots in soybean fields where the beans are showing stress from too much water. That isn’t good, but hopefully corn yield will make up for some of that. The beans may still come around, but I’m sure some nitrogen fixing has been shut down.

The corn isn’t ‘made’ yet, but it is pushing down that road. We need some good and constant sunlight between rains to help fill the kernels. From fields I have been in, it appears the early and late planted have better ear set. Corn planted in the middle just doesn’t have quite as much girth (kernels around); it will have to try and compensate by adding kernel depth. Disease pressure has been light this year, but conditions have been right for disease to ramp up. Plant health applications continue to be applied by air and ground.

Soybeans are just starting to reach the critical time. Pods are setting. August weather usually determines the size of the bean crop. Last week we made an R3 growth stage plant health application to many of the soybean fields. This application included fungicide, insecticide and plant food. The goal of the application is to keep the plants happy, healthy, setting more pods and filling seeds.

This is likely the last trip we will make across soybean fields. Sometimes I wonder if a later plant food application would be beneficial, but by that time in the season, if guys haven’t ‘tapped out’, then likely they are tapped out and don’t want to spend any more on the crop.

Still, hard to believe it is the middle of August already!

The opinions of the author are not necessarily those of Farm Futures or Farm Progress.