Tomorrow will be the first of a two part Food Preservation Safety Program. Pat Jones, Extension Educator in the BKR counties will conduct series. The workshop will be from 6 – 8 PM in the Cherry County Court House Meeting Room. Pat will give the latest in food preservation recommendations.
I would strongly encourage and 4-H members and leaders interested in food preservation to attend. The program isn’t just for people involved in 4-H though, anyone is invited to attend. There’s $10 registration fee that includes both next Tuesday’s workshop and a follow up workshop on July 18. Call the extension office by April 27 to register.
I don’t know about you, but I’m not ready to start mowing my lawn yet, but ready or not, lawn care season is upon us. In fact, this is the time to take care of several important yearly lawn care tasks. If you have more than ½ inch of thatch, now is a good time to power rake your lawn, you can aerate now if your lawn needs it.
Now is also the time to apply pre-emergence herbicides for control of annual grasses like crabgrass, goosegrass and foxtail. Applying pre-emergence herbicides now may catch some of the earliest germinating sandburs, but if you have a sandbur problem, you will need to plan on making a follow up application about 6 weeks after your first application.
Now is also a good time to fertilize with 1.0 lb of actual nitrogen per 1,000 sq. ft. Slow release fertilizer carriers are preferred.
Don’t wait too long to start mowing, never remove more than one-third of the height of the grass at a time. Our lawn care calendar says that it’s ok to mow bluegrass lawns as short as 2 inches until the middle of June, when you need to raise the blade to at least 2 ½ inches. I would really recommend that you keep a 2 ½ or even 3 ½ mowing height season long. The higher mowing height will promote better rooting and greater stress tolerance. It will also help keep out the weeds.
Lastly for today, since it is branding time across cattle country, I thought I’d highlight a branding time vaccination study that was reported in last July’s issue of the Journal of American Veterinary Medical Association. For many years people recommended that modified-live vaccines be given after maternal passive immunity antibodies had disappeared from the blood of the calf. Many thought that maternal antibodies the calf received in the colostrum would interfere with the effectiveness of the vaccine. Therefore most viral vaccines were not given until the calves were 4 to 5 months or older.
However, more recently veterinarians have been recommending branding time vaccination. This research done by Oklahoma State University and Noble Foundation scientists confirms the effectiveness of those branding time vaccinations. They vaccinated calves at branding, about 2 months of age, and re-vaccinated them at weaning and compared that with vaccinating at a month before weaning and boostered at weaning. There was no difference in the percentage of calves protected by the vaccine due to the timing of the first vaccination. The vaccinated calves from both treatments had lower treatment costs and less mortality in the feedlot than the non-vaccinated control calves. It is important that the cows nursing these newly vaccinated calves should have already been protected with a modified live vaccine against these same respiratory diseases.
Contact the extension office at 376-1850 for more information on any of the things I’ve covered.
