Our
field is doing well now, relatively speaking. The wheat is rather
thin and there are gaps or spaces between plants. Personally, I
don’t think our field is going to produce very many bushels of
seed. But we’ll have to wait and see. Let’s see how our field
looked last
year at this time.
The plants are
tillering well now, but I think our wheat’s growth is behind normal.
I don’t mean compared to last year, because the wheat never went
dormant during the winter last year and matured quite early. Last
year at this time the wheat had started to joint (Feekes stage 6).
Jointing is when the growing point or wheat head moves above the
soil surface. We’ll see this in our wheat in a few weeks.
I pulled
up a plant to take a peek at its root system. This plant hardly
has any roots at all. I don’t know how to explain that. That’s
probably the reason our plants haven’t been tillering very well
up until now. Do you notice anything wrong with the leaves? Do you
see those blotches on the leaves? That’s a foliar or leaf
disease of wheat called tan spot. Tan spot is common in continuous
wheat fields and if you will remember wheat was in this field last
year. So, I’m not surprised that we have tan spot.
Our
single plant must be feeling good, because it is producing tillers
like crazy. There must be six or seven tillers now. The stems are
beginning to grow upright now. This plant would be in Feekes stage
4 now.
