BEAN seeds are going in the ground!

When spring planting is around the corner, I always say that Ben will drive out to the field one day and doesn't come back for a couple months.

The girls and I went for a walk yesterday afternoon. We swung around by the shop like we frequently do to say "hi" to Daddy and Papa. When we came around the corner, Ben was fueling up the tractor and field cultivator to go work up the first field of the year. So we joined him! How fun that this year, we drove out to the field WITH him! Perfect timing!

This isn't actually the official start of planting though. It's just a test they're doing. We do a LOT of field tests to see what the results are before making a bigger adjustment. This particular test is to plant beans early. Common practice is to plant all the corn and then switch to planting beans, so beans are usually planted around a month after the corn. We've been hearing a lot about the potential benefits of planting beans early, so they decided to test it on 20 acres.

This is not a normal practice. In fact, when my father-in-law went to pick up the bean seed from one of the neighboring farmers who's also a seed rep, he asked if it was okay if he tells other people about it. I imagine it'll sound something like this: Do you want to know what the Nelsons are up to? They're planting BEANS right now! Not sure how that's going to go! Ha!

I see this as one of the benefits of us having a lot of crop acres - we can do a lot of these "field trials" and test different techniques. I imagine that someone with less acreage might want to be more conservative and only do what they know works best for them. A good test also needs to be done on a decent size scale, otherwise it could just be other variables affecting the results.

The pictures are fun, but not the best quality...phone was almost dead, squirmy toddler, lots of bumps...

I love these kinds of family pictures! Molly was freaked out - the chocolate (notice her lips), chips and music helped calm her down though.

At the very tip of the tree on the left was a big hawk waiting for us to kick up some mice. Pretty cool. 

I'm always amazed at how different the view is from the back of a field. We drive by this field ALL the time and look at it from the road, but when you're in back of the field looking toward the road, it's so different. Weird, but true.