March 1 2024. Packing the camelina with Ginger and Duke.
March 1 2024 Here I am spreading camelina seeds with Jim and Duke. I would normally want to spread the camelina seed on the snow but it has been far too warm. This year I used the horse drawn seed spreader and it worked well. The ground was frozen in the morning.
Feb 25 2024 I did a lot of tine weeding to discourage any weeds
Feb 27 2024
Been wanting for a good time to plant the camelina and oats. Thursday the 29th looks very good. The hope is that the seeds will germinate and then there will not be a hard frost to mill it.
Dec 5 2023.
Wanted to redo the camelina experiment again so I plowed and disc'd the field ready for the jan 24 seeding of the camelina.
I did get some new seeds.
Sept 22 2023
The camelina this year was a bust which was unfortunate. The wonderful seeds I got from last year unfortunately went mouldy and that reduced the germination so we had not camelina this year.
April 16 2023 The camelina is coming up but much slower than last year. Look very closely and you can see it coming through. I did look at the flax but no sign of it germinating yet.
March 15, 2023 This is field that I frost seeded with a little snow and no sign of any germination. It was just too cold.
Feb 25 2023. This is the weather I was looking for. It was quite cold last night feb 24 and the rest of the week is about freezing. What I want is temperatures about freezing but no days that are quite warm followed by extreme cold which could kill the germinating camelina.
Hopefully I got it right.
Feb 25 2023. I spread camelina seed about this time last year and according to my weather it was time to spread it again.
August 9 2022.
My joy of getting such nice camelina has taken a turn. For some reason which I have yet to figure is that the camelina seeds do not press very well. It seems that there is too much oil and too little substance which is very confusing for me. I used the Komet press and could only get about 15% oil. I then used the Chinese press and did better at 22% oil but still not good enough. I should at least be getting about 35% oil. I tried various things to try squeeze out more oil so I will tray again with adding some of the meal to the seeds to see if that helps.
Sept 18 2022. I have found out why my Camelina would not press very well. I had swathed the camelina when I thought about half of the seeds where ready but I did not leave the camelina long enough in the field to dry so the camelina seeds had too much moisture content. This resulted in poor pressing and a month later some of the seeds developed a mould so I can't use it for human consumption but I can press it for fuel in my diesels.
This is very disappointing for me. I will use some of the seeds for planting this coming February 2023.
July 14 2022. Did the final Cleaning and its the best camelina I have ever had! The problem has always been the mustard weed seeds that are about the same size as the camelina. The mustard seeds hardly had any time to flower or ripen the seeds. The January seeding worked well.
July 11 2022, The cleaned camelina looking very good with very few mustard seeds in it.
July 11 2022, First Cleaning the camelina
July 9 2022 The combining is done.
July 9 2022. Combining the camelina. The row in front has gone through the combine, the row in front of the combine is just being done.
July 9 2022. The dried camelina and weeds.
Yes it is July 5 2022 and it is time to swath the camelina. I use the swather since there are a few weeds and a few days of hot sun and the weeds dry up and go through the combine easily . Note the windrows of camelina done by the swather on the right side. The seeds are almost mature and swathing does not dislodge many seeds. A few days of drying the seeds will mature ready for the pickup head on the combine.
May 30 2022 the Camelina has blossomed! Very few weeds too!
May 30 2022 the Camelina has flowered and I expect to harvest it in Mid July. The red clover to the left has also done very well this year.
May 17 2022 and the camelina has really grown!
April 29 2022 and the camelina is really showing with little evidence of weeds.
March 25 2022 and there is camelina appearing.
So here I am on Feb 26 2022 spreading the Camelina seeds.
Feb 26 2022 Yes there are some very tiny camelina seeds there.
Late January 2022. So I decided to frost seed my camelina here in the field I had plowed with the horses back in November 2022. A few years before I had tried planting camelina in late November and it looked very good until the very cold days of minus 15degress C killed it. So that is why I seeded it in late January. In looking up the germination properties of camelina the seed will germinate at zero Celsius much before the many weeds.
