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Harvest season rolls on here at the farm... this past week I harvested most of the dry shelling beans. They're a variety called Etna, which I purchased from Territorial Seed Company. I would call the bean project a qualified success; success in the sense that I got back many more beans than I planted, qualified by the fact that it could have been an even greater yield were it not for the rabbits' predation.
Kurt on 09.24.09 @ 03:08 PM PST [more...]
While harvesting the beans last week I heard some screeching, and I looked up to see a pair of hawks gliding and circling above. The picture above makes them look quite close, though they were in actuality pretty high up - the wonders of telephoto lenses. I watched them circle and drift southward, in search of easy prey. How were the chickens doing, I wondered?
Kurt on 09.23.09 @ 03:08 PM PST [more...]
Blackberries. Love 'em or hate 'em. Or more accurately, love 'em and hate 'em. The sweetness of the fruit, the prickle of the thorns. They bear the fragrant blossom for the honeybee, but they also take over land, and even pull down buildings. I once watched a blackberry patch cover and seemingly demolish a small shed along my walking route to work. It was a slow, inexorable process; I'm sure that the canes themselves didn't actually pull it down, but they may have clogged gutters and directed water into places that eventually destroyed the structure.
Kurt on 09.08.09 @ 10:11 PM PST [more...]
A couple of weeks ago when I was down at the farm I happened to notice that the fava beans were looking ready to harvest; the pods had turned dark, and many of the leaves had dropped. Although I had planned to work on threshing the wheat that day, I switched gears and started stacking fava bean plants in a pile on a tarp; this was necessary because fava beans, like many legumes, are biologically programmed to explode when the pod is ripe. At a certain point you can't disturb the plant at all without having the pods explode in little mini-showers of dried beans! So, getting the plants onto the tarp at least meant that they could continue drying until I had time to deal with them, and any pods that opened would have the tarp under them to catch the beans.
Kurt on 09.02.09 @ 01:00 PM PST [more...]