The Bull Fighter and the Boys

On Friday we applied some liquid fert to the commercial sorghum, Sergi the pilot who is from Spain did a great job. We also put some broad leaf herbicide on a small area around the trials that did not get the pre emergent pre planting.
We had to lay black plastic over our small scale trials that contain broad leaf crops.
John and Wiz enjoyed having a sit in the plane with Sergi, the boys are always saying they are going to be pilots when the grow up.

Purpose,so clear yet so cloudy

The older you get the more unsure of the things that were once so clear, it is a good exercise to strip away the "stuff" to peer behind the curtain and see what is really there, although this is easier said than done.
Quiet contemplation has a lot going for it.
 

Power Has Arrived

Something I thought may never happen has happened, we have mains power,well not just yet although as can be seen in these photos from yesterday, the poles are going in, they hand dig the 2 meter hole then using ropes and about 8 men they manhandle the poles from the ground and stand them, they were having their lunch when I came by and so I didn't get a picture of the action, I will try this week, still plenty of poles to go in yet. They can do about 20 per day with a 90 meter spacing.

Muddy Boots And My little Assistants

John, Wiz, Alex (our gardener) and I spent yesterday afternoon planting trials, spraying some different treatments on trials.
We planted some sorghum that has not been released as yet that we got from a NGO breeding program, our row width is 75 cm (30 inch) in our commercial crop so our small scale trials use the same. So to work out how many cm of a 75cm wide row gives us 1sq meter it is 100 divided by 75 equals 1.33 so according to my (sometimes wrong) calculations every 1330cm or 1.33m of row equals 1 square meter.
So the small scale trial rows are 13.3m long ( 1% of a hectare) we then planted four rows per variety.(4% of a hectare)
I then found a great planting tool, a pen, they are 14cm long so Alex (our gardener) and I used pens to space the plants at 14cm and using the blunt end make a hole, so per 1.33m or 1 square meter we planted 95 seeds if we assume a 80% establishment then that is 76 plants established or 76,000 plants per hectare. It would be about 25% more than I would aim for with Australian sorghum's in this environment although the sorghum's I have seen here don't seem to have the individual head potential.
If you click on the photo you will see some volunteer plants in clumps these were lost heads at harvest back last Nov/Dec. We sprayed pre planting with RU and Primagram which should ( I hope) give these freeloading plants a headache at least.
We have had just on 400mm over the past 25 days, a bit excessive and about double average for March/April/May combined.
 

Sleeping Babies

I only just downloaded this photo (from last week when we went on safari) of these female elephants in a circle around their babies while they sleep. I had never seen this before and thought it amazing. If you click on the photo it will expand and you will see all the sleeping juniors

James,Eye to Eye With a Big Fella

Gracie and John looking for lions

On Safari

On Safari

We have taken three days away from home to travel south just on the Kenyan/TZ border at the foot of Mt Kilimanjaro, we are staying in a National Park, we came across this ,Masai fellow. John and Wiz loved having a photos with him. It is only about 190km from home, we can see the snow/ice on top of Mt Kilimanjaro from our farm on a clear day very clearly (170km as the crow flies)

Full Dams

This is one of the dams we built, it holds about 20megelitres (20 * 1,000,000 liters) it was an old 1meter deep silted up dam, we took about 2 meters of silt out and then hit murum/Gravel. We then used this for building about 6km of road and ended up with a nice big dam in a catchment. It is about 6 to 8 meters deep.
Joseph our excavator driver only opened it back up to the inlet about 5 days earlier and it filled in two days. (it is on a small creek/waterway)
We also had built another dam near our workshop of about half the surface area and the same depth which is chocka. (that is really full in Australian)

Planting Trials (well trying)

Well the trial planting finished as it began, I had just planted a Barley trial and cleaned out the seeder and loaded up some wheat when the heavens opened, since then we have had about 125mm in the past 10 days.
I have some hand planting of small trials that I have limited seed for which I hope to plant early next week if it is dry enough. I was given some different Kenyan developed sorghum's from a NGO that I will trial, one of the varieties I only have 800 seeds of.
I will give them a go and see, also have chickpeas to plant as well in the trials.
We finished planting the commercial sorghum (400ha) only the day before the rain and had flown Primagram on about 5 days before the rain so it should work well. Primigram is a pre emergent herbicide to keep the field clean, we treat the Sorghum planting seed with a seed safener to protect the new plants. The Primagram will also hopefully suppress/control any volunteer sorghum that germinates.  The 400ha is just up and looking good.