Planting White, Yellow, Blue, and Black Corn

At the end of May, we planted the corn in Ilene's fields. The planter on the tractor was broken so we followed behind it and dropped three to five corn seeds every foot.

On the tractor is my host mother's brother and standing beside him is her clan cousin

We planted about 12 acres...it took all morning and day

Their homestead is beautiful farmland; unfortunately it's infested with praire dogs and crows. Immediately after we planted through the next few weeks, the praire dogs went out and dug up all of our corn. Only a few acres nearest to Grandma's was untampered with. It's growing well and needs to be thinned. The praire dogs aren't only a pest for growing corn but their homes also can be troublesome when horseback riding because the horse will fall into their holes. I've never seen so many of one animal living in one place ever in my life. One day as I waited for Rachael outside a high school during her schoolboard meeting in Fort Defiance, I watched the praire dogs run around in this small one area (maybe a couple of acres in size) beside the parking lot and I counted nearly twenty praire dogs.

After we finished planting they set up the irrigation pipes. We irrigate the cornfields at least once a week depending upon the weather. It came a downpour last night and soaked the soil. That's the first hard male rain I've seen since being here, the rest have been soft gentle female rains which only cool down the earth but don't get into the ground and the plants' roots.

In addition to helping Uncle David plant the white, yellow, blue, and black corn, we planted all sorts of types of squash in the field closest to the house, zuchinni, yellow squash, watermellon, and more. We used seeds but those didn't come up either.