I Volunteer! I Volunteer as Tribute!

In the spirit of The Hunger Games (which if you haven't read, go read them! They're amazing!) I thought I'd do a little educational blog on what "volunteer"means in the farming world.

Volunteer corn, that is.




Katniss looked a lot better than this piddly little corn stalk

If you're out driving around rural Indiana and going by a bean field, you may notice a bunch of random corn stalks growing and think, "what's up with that?" Well, its not some new hybrid, or some really efficient way of growing beans and corn at the same time. Its what we call volunteer corn.  Since most farmers rotate the crops on their fields (example: the field next to our house was beans last year, and this year its corn, it has to do with nitrogen and mineral take up etc etc boring science stuff) sometimes a few kernels miss out on the trip into the combine and end up back in the field where they grew. So then, the next spring, they grow up along with the beans.  Most the time when you spray for weeds, this is taken care of, but not everybody goes down. 

In fact, Bristol's favorite summertime activity is running through a bean field and then attacking the volunteer corn stalks and wrestling them to the ground. She should get paid for what she does!

...and because I shamelessly use my blog as a way to post pictures of my adorable family, here's the little Bristol pistol herself! Sitting in the road, where she knows she isn't supposed to be!