The Living Green Farm Journal

"Sweet fields arrayed in living green, and rivers of delight"

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Tuesday, July 28th

The Wheat Harvest



3808_FarmThreshingWheat (40k image)

Finally, time for harvesting the wheat! Lou and I knocked the few remaining panels off the carton enclosing the thresher, and got it mounted on the tractor. Lubed it up with the grease gun; only broke one Zerk fitting, so that was par for the course. I needed to make a trip to Wilco anyway to get a short shaft PTO anyway.

Once back from the store we tried it out with some bags of wheat tillers that Lou's family had cut. The photo above shows the bits of chaff flying out of the discharge chute of the awner, which is covered with the green plastic cloth. Lou is feeding tillers into the entrance to the awner on the other side of the thresher. It worked!
Kurt on 07.28.09 @ 07:58 AM PST [more...]


The Giant Egg!


3816_FarmGiantEgg (29k image)

Lou's daughter brought this egg out to show us while we were working in the wheat field last weekend - it's a whopper of a chicken egg! I put the quarter dollar next to it to give some sense of scale; it's the biggest chicken egg I've ever seen. Can't be a duck egg - they don't have ducks. She said that she thought it was laid by their Auracana chicken named Big Red.
Kurt on 07.28.09 @ 06:29 AM PST [more...]

Tuesday, July 14th

The Green Menace



3757_FarmWheat (33k image)

Well, the wheat is approaching harvest, but the last few weeks have seen the emergence of what I call "The Green Menace." It's the same old weed I have been fighting in the vegetable patch, only here I am more or less powerless to do anything about it: bindweed, which is a form of vine that I think is in the morning glory family. It certainly has the runners and the vines and the cute little pink-ish flowers. You can see The Green Menace in the picture mostly clearly by noticing that there is a golden periphery to the wheat patch (the good, unspoiled wheat), and a large green center where the bindweed has climbed up the wheat stalks to spread out across the top of the wheat plants. Apparently my seeding was not sufficiently dense to choke out the bindweed as I had hoped it would. Live and learn; another 30 bucks in seed probably would have made the difference.
Kurt on 07.14.09 @ 01:19 PM PST [more...]