Thursday, July 30, 2009

Additional "What we've been up to" pictures.

A picture taken today of how the mums are growing. They've grown a lot huh?


Above is Juan and Jonathon working hard after a day of running the crew of blueberry pickers. They look like they are working hard, right?! Washing the picking buckets is a daily chore we have to do at the end of the day...food safety!

Below is the combine I was talking about yesterday.


Wednesday, July 29, 2009

What we have been up to around here...

Our blueberries! Ready to pick. This was a few weeks ago. This field is all picked now. It's kind of sad feeling walking through a field that has been picked clean. You work all year for the berries and they are gone so fast. But that is the goal and it's also a relief to have them all picked safe and sound.

Some of the hard work.



We are also selling our own berries at a stand along 99E in Brooks. We are still open if anyone is interested. Wed thru Sat's 10-6pm. We are just north of Brooks on 99E about a 1/4 mile. We sell the berries in flats like this and in smaller clamshells. We also sell Sweetheart cherries...the dark red kind that taste amazing. And we do u-pick blueberries.



This is a picture of our 2 year old field...a variety that is very new to the blueberry industry called Liberty. We will pick it for the first time this year. You can't really tell from the picture but these things are huge.

We have a lady that buys our berries to sell them at her fruit stand and this is part of a load that she ordered. Do you see why I get burnt out on blueberries :)

Picture of our corn that we were irrigating. This was taken from the combine window.

My view from the combine. Harvesting grass seed. We just finished for the summer so I now have a life again. It is a fun couple of weeks though...sitting all day in the A/C listening to 1190 KEX :)

Controls inside the combine. I need to post some pictures of the outside of this machine just in case someone doesn't know what a combine is! I took some on my dad's camera so I will have to hunt those down tomorrow.

And this is from today.... Had to take a picture of the temperature and how much I am sweating! :)

And my mums are doing well. Compared to the last posted picture they have grown a lot. I will have to post some pictures of them also. No more bird damage since we put a net over the whole area. Thank goodness.

Thursday, July 9, 2009

The chrysanthemum project in full swing.

The mum cuttings arrived. Thought it was interesting how they were packed. There are 50 rooted cuttings in each of the plastic bags.

Here are all the variety tags.

Mum rooted cutting.


Right after the cuttings were potted up....waiting to get watered and fertilized in. Mums need lots of fertilizer. They are very heavy feeders. Have to fertilize every watering with water soluble fertilizer.

Getting laid out all nice.

So all the pots are planted and sitting pretty out there waiting to grow. The next morning though I find a whole bunch of the baby plants pulled out entirely, and some had all the leaves eaten off. So frustrating. So I put up a small fence not sure what type of animal it was. The next morning I come out again and more pots are ruined. So on the 4th of July James and I are out there putting a net over the top. We discovered that it was birds that were causing the damage. Did I mention that I hate birds!? Losing 50 pots out of 300 was hard to take. So the net has helped a lot but a bird or two seems to still find their way in sometimes. Plus it's hard to get to the pots now with a short net over the top....will have to raise it later.

Cutting with the leaves eaten off.

Here is the whole section that I lost.

Always seems like I learn something every day around here....always experimenting. Lots of trial and error.
Will keep you posted!