Our field appears to be in about the same shape that it was last week,
but there are some subtle differences. There aren't as many leaves on
the plants as there were last week. The birds continue to visit the
field and feast on the seeds.

There are only 3 to 5 leaves left on these plants and they are
yellowing. The stalks are still very green and wet.
The heads continue to dry down, but at this pace it's going to be a
couple more weeks before we can harvest. We were hoping to get this
field harvested by October 1 so we could plant no-till wheat. A
killing frost would speed things up, but I'd rather have a nice, long
fall.
This head is the one on the left of the previous picture. At first
glance you might think this head is just fine, but on closer inspection you
can see there are not very many seeds in the center. Let's take a closer
look.
Sure enough, there aren't many seeds in the center. You can see
some head moth damage on the outside edges. Nothing new here.
Looking a little closer at the center of the head, you can see an area
about the size of a silver dollar that virtually has no seeds.
In order to see how wet the head is, I broke the head into pieces.
As you can see some seeds popped right out, but others remained attached to
the head parts. This indicates the head is still very wet and if this
field were harvested right now the seeds would not be threshed from the
heads and a considerable amount of seeds would be lost. So, we are
just going to wait until it's ready to be harvested.
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