In my rolling land there are sloughs that do not dry up in time to seed as usual. There is also an area where a slough spills over and keeps ground wet. With no rain I was able to get on it by May 25 but did not want to drag the press wheels of drill through the struggling crop. So I “Johny appleseeded” and worked fairly deep with 16” sweeps and a mounted tine harrow. The idea was not to grow more crop — too much difference in seeding dates. The objective was to keep the weeds out. It worked in spades and I would do it again in a heartbeat.
I took this picture on August 18, at swathing time. The broadcast seeding came up quickly and very thick and it did pod well by swath time, but there was not much seed. If it were a larger area that was worth leaving it would have been a fair yield. We had no killing fall frost until well into October.
