Planting Season's In Full Swing!

Planting season is a busy time here at Miller Farms! We've finished planting our peanuts and are currently planting cotton. We haven't planted any corn yet because those fields were too wet, and hopefully we won't have to plant any soybeans! If we plant soybeans, that means we ran out of time to plant cotton.

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This is Lance, his Uncle Jim, and farm employee Anthony loading peanut seed into the hoppers.

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We planted 150 acres of peanuts, 40 more than last year!
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You can see Jim planting in the background, and Lance is running our new tractor in the foreground.
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Lance is using the new tractor to row-till. Last year we bedded the peanut ground, (see the 1st picture in this post to see what bedded rows look like!) and that turned out not to be a good thing because of all the rain we had in the fall, the peanut combine picked up a lot of dirt with the peanuts. So this year, we disked the ground to flatten out the beds. We are using the row-till to lay off the rows to plant in.
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Look Mom! No Hands!



Wait...and now Lance is napping while he's driving the tractor?



What's wrong with him? He's gonna wreck! Maybe get a ticket!



Nahh...Look at this fanciness we recently acquired!



What the heck is that you ask? Why it's GPS for the tractor! We had a Trimble Guidance system installed! It has auto-steer which drives the tractor for you! It uses satellites which helps farmers to row-till, plant, plow, spray, and harvest more accurately! It lets you know when you've overlapped rows and keeps the tractor/rows straight as possible. Once you've driven over a farm once, it will always know where the rows are. The only thing you have to do is turn around at the end of the rows, otherwise you'll just keep on going, probably right into a tree. There is an alarm that sounds every so often in case you do go to sleep like Lance.

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Check out this cute doggie that joined us in the field a couple of days! He even has a cast on his right leg! He sure did like to try to hug you with it, lol.
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We've planted almost 200 acres of cotton so far, and this is what it looks like now.
We're going to plant around 500 acres of cotton this year.
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Here's what the peanuts look like at the moment...

They are just beginning to sprout from the ground!

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Speaking of growing things...

The grass in our yard is finally growing! It still looks pretty brown right around the house, but is improving everyday!
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Check out this rosebush that survived the house building! (Not many things did!)

What's my secret to growing great roses? I haven't touched it at all! It should live forever.
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I have been trying to spruce the place up a bit. I was tired of everything outside just looking like dirt.

So I planted some flowers in pots to put on my porch.
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And I planted 4 azaleas by the backporch.
Unfortunately one has died. I'm pretty sure it was dead before I even planted it. Considering they were bought for me at Christmas, I'm surprised any survived!
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When we were walking around the yard, figuring out what trees to save before we started building, we decided to keep this thing. It was in the winter, so we couldn't tell what it was, just that we thought it had some flowers on it at one point.
Turns out it was a blackberry bush. Yay! Unfortunately it has all kinds of little bitty trees and junk growing in with it. It even has a pretty good size sassafrass tree, which I haven't decided if I want to keep or not. Are there any blackberry bush experts out there? I've never had one!
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Our garden is actually surviving too!

I thought it was doomed when it rained 4 inches the day after I planted it. Most of it pulled through though. I only had 1 hill of squash come up out of 6, and about half of my okra drowned, so that will need to be replanted. I have 2 rows of tomatoes, bell pepper, okra, squash, and cucumber.
I have a few tomato plants, 1 regular and 4 cherry tomato plants, that already have small tomatoes on them. Yay! (As long as the peacocks don't find them!).