Bought some wood during the week

I bought some offcuts from these guys from the industrial area in Nairobi during the week.
The wood was for John and Wiz to do some woodwork, they are following in their big brother's footsteps who is a carpenter/builder.

Kabuli Chickpeas growing well

The above photo is Wiz in a crop of chickpeas.(note JD T shirt and Stara hat) Chickpeas planted on the 22nd of Feb.

Ice skating for Wiz's 9th Birthday, happy birthday big boy

Duma GL wheat

 This variety has only about 300 tiller/heads per square meter but reasonable head (ear) size, this photo is 68 days after planting, it has full grain and is only probably 30 days or so from harvest.
This crop was pushed by 30 degree C days and 25 to 30km per hour winds during March, even though it was on a very full profile of moisture the crop bolted and so we have low tiller numbers as the crop just raced into ear.

Bleached leaf margins in our Chickpeas

Does anyone know what may be causing the above? It looks like Simazine damage although they had no pre emergent herbicide, plus nothing residual in the fallow period.
I suspect it is some nutrient issue, probably not a drama for the crop although I would still like to know. (Click on photo to enlarge )

Forage Sorghum Growing fast (51 days from planting)

Moisture readings from our AquaCheck probe

The above charts show the water use of a crop of Mung Beans planted around 50 days ago. The bottom chart shows the 100 to 200mm (10 to 20 cm) water use.
You can see that at about 11% of soil water the green line flattens out (crop could not extract any more water) before we had 34mm of rain. Then there was a rapid increase followed by a few days then another 18mm of rain. Then a few days flat and now as the crop is bulking up and using a lot more water you see the "steps" (daily use) using much more water than earlier in the crops life.
The top graph is for the 700 to 800mm (70 to 80cm) zone, as you can see the crop is also drawing on this water slowly There is obviously water left in between the above zones although I did not want to make it too complicated by adding them (click to show a bigger image)

Soil Moisture/Temperature probe data

We installed a AquaCheck soil probe a while ago, the above screenshot shows the 10cm deep soil temperature (red line), as you can see the soil temp rises and falls each day, the highest daytime 10cm deep soil temp was 32 deg C, this surprised me as it was about the same as the ambient temperature (air temp).
Then we had 34 mm of rain around the 2nd of April, as the graph shows, the temperature plummeted by 8 to 10 deg C.
 I suspect that the radical drop is also related to the Mungbean crop getting canopy cover (shading the ground).
Lots for us to learn from all this type information, the hope would be that we make better management choices based on what we learn. 

Forage Sorghum planted on the 22nd of Feb (approx 49 days ago)

The above photo is of Kabuli Chickpeas planted beside our forage Sorghum trial, we will cut the forage in about 35/45 days and see what type of feed quality we get. 

A small number of Grubs installing some window's in our Mung Beans