Woodie On Planting Corn

As long as I knew him, Woodie didn't get in a big hurry to get the crops in.  Of course, since I first met him when he was 72, this might not be extremely surprising.  Woodie followed a four crop rotation on his farm, which consisted of four fields, so every year he had one corn field, one soybean field, one wheat field and one hay field, with the rotation of each field following that order.  Each field was about 30 acres, so when he made hay, he cut a third of the field at a time, usually about a week apart.  At that time, he was usually making first cutting hay in late June or early July.  It wasn't very pretty.  One year, I spent four weekends in a row at Woodie's, the first weekend baling hay, the second weekend was straw, followed by two more weekends of hay.  One or two years in his early 80s, he actually made a couple of cuttings of hay.  It was kind of like he got a second wind or something.

Anyway, when it came to planting corn, Woodie had two sayings.  The first one was that the best time for planting corn was when the honeysuckle was blooming, the time frame of which seems to vary, but generally seems to be around mid-May.  His other saying was that the best time was when the Catalpa trees flowered, which is usually around Memorial Day or early June  (I can remember the Catalpa blooms because our parochial school would walk to the park for field day during the last week of school, and I remember picking up one of the Catalpa flowers and trying to take it home to give to my mom because I thought it was so beautiful.  Yeah, I was a sappy kid).  I wasn't sure if somebody would have to choose between the two for which to follow, or if it had transferred from Catalpas to honeysuckle as later maturity corn hybrids came along and farmers started planting earlier and earlier.  Anyway, there are years like last spring where we might end up planting in those time frames due to the weather, but our family's current target starting time is the week of tax day.  Some of the bigger farmers are moving in late March if the weather is right.  Woodie would scoff at those guys (and us).

Also, I saw this on facebook, and immediately thought of Woodie, even though it was posted because another local farmer used to drink Goebel so nobody, especially his kids, would steal his beer: