 The leaves continue to turn yellow and fall from
the plants. That's normal. This week the nights have started to cool
down, but the days have been around 90 F. This area of the field has
the greenest leaves: over the ridge the plants are almost completely
yellow.
Click here to see how much the color has changed from one month ago.
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 Our
row has really turned colors since Monday! Plants in this row are
still ahead of surrounding plants. If it were to freeze in the next
few days the leaves would turn yellow even faster. You can see one
plant in the middle has lost most of its leaves -- that's our second
plant that we have watched all summer.
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 Our first plant doesn't have any solid-green leaves left
now. All of them are some shade of yellow. The pods are not quite as green
either.
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 Here's
our second plant with just a few lower leaves still attached and you
can see that most of the pods are turning brown or tan. This plant
is at the R7 stage. The R7 stage is when you can see a pod that has
turned its mature color. This plant probably was at that stage a
couple days ago. But this plant is the only one in the row that is
at the R7 stage. If all plants were at this stage, a rain would be
of no value to them. So, we can say an R7 plant is at physiological
maturity and no more dry weight will be added to the plant.
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 Here are two pods from the same plant. The top pod is still green, while
the other pod is tan. That's not unusual to see pods of different
colors on the same plant. Let's look at the beans inside.
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 Well, that's
interesting. The beans in the green pod are still green, however
they are losing their color and the beans in the mature pod have
turned yellow and have shrunk. This is normal. The yellow beans
still have a high moisture content -- about 50 to 60 percent
moisture. I bet you are wondering what would happen if you planted
these soybean seeds in a pot right now. Would they grow? Yes, they
would. For practical purposes these seeds (beans) are mature, we're
just waiting for the rest of the pods to turn tan and the beans
inside to turn yellow and dry to a safe, harvestable moisture
content.
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 We
caught an insect in the act of chewing on a pod and the stem. You've
seen this one before ... it's the bean leaf beetle. You'll remember
we said it would eat leaves, but as you can see it also feeds on
pods.
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