... On the Farm

It is hot.  It is humid.  There is some rain.  The farmer is now allowed to blog for a few moments.

Smiles on the Farm
Tammy and I like our iris in the Spring and our day lily flowers in the Summer.  We have a wide variety of day lilies and they are really putting on a show this season.  The farmers need to get out there and take more pictures so we can share them with you.  Or, better yet, you should arrange to come weed for an hour and then take a tour of the flowers yourself.  Much more satisfying for everyone, we think!

Flowers don't always pose, but these did on this day.

The upside of day lilies is the fact that they tend to grow in clumps through which other weeds cannot grow (with only a few exceptions).  So, if we can keep the area around them somewhat weeded, they'll look good.  Iris are not quite so easy to get along with (sadly).

I wish I could remember the name of this particular variety of day lily off the top of my head.  I took a minute and did a quick search and I think it is Donald T Eaves.   The blooms are larger than average and the height of the plant is impressive.  If we don't get heavy winds or heavy rain, they look great.

Curiosity on the Farm
The turkles are very nearly ready to start heading out to pasture during the daytime.  They've just about got the size on them that we feel they need.  And, of course, they are every bit as curious as every other turkey flock we have raised.  They also have the short memory span - which means they are eternally curious.

Hey!  What's that?!?

It only makes sense.  If you forget the answer almost immediately, but you are curious....  You just keep asking the same question.  Ok, they aren't quite that bad.  But, don't expect any of these birds to memorize the Gettysburg Address.  For those who might like to learn a bit more about turkeys on the farm, this blog post from a couple years back is a good one!

The Color Red on the Farm
It seems like we get some red paint slapped on the granary every few years.  What do we expect?  It's an outbuilding that wasn't necessarily maintained for many years prior to our arrival.  This year, we have Kaleb painting the North side and putting another coat on the South side. 

Will Kaleb finish?  (the answer is yes!)

Painting the area on the West and East ends that leads to the peak never seems to reach the top of our priority lists.  I wish that wasn't the case, but when your lists are long, something has to give.  This would be an example of an item on our VAPs that has a very high VAPCON number.  What?  You haven't read the VAP post?  Look, if you want to fit in around here, you should catch up on your VAP statistics.

The Lack of Vampires on the Farm
I have noticed that many vegetables farms take the time to get pictures of the garlic harvest.  In fact, the garlic harvest may be the most common social media post for farms like ours during the Summer months. This actually makes perfect sense to me since it is one of the most dramatic harvests during the month of July. 

Chelsea and Emma are pleased with the harvest this year.

One day, you've got rows of tallish green plants and the next day, they're all on carts or hanging up (or whatever the farm does with them at that point).  In our case, we have three 200 foot beds that have three rows of garlic in each.  Once they are pulled, we typically have over three thousand garlic harvested.  That number may sound large to some people and small to others depending on your frame of reference (or maybe farm of reference).

The great thing about garlic on our farm is the fact that the improved quality of our soil allows us to simply pull the garlic out of the ground.  We do not have to dig them.  Once dug, we put them on different hayracks/trailers to make sure we don't mix varieties (Music and Northern White).  We prefer to leave them on the carts to dry in the sun for a couple of days, which works great unless the forecast is wrong and it rains (which happened this year).  After two to five days we hang them in bunches of 25 from the beams in the truck barn.

Later in the year, we cut them down, trim off the stems and clean them for distribution and sales.  We select the heads we need for seed for next year and we break those apart and plant them in November - even though we tell ourselves we'll get them in by the end of October THIS year.

Yes, yes.  We say that EVERY year.  And, we still plant in November.  This is one task that makes our VAPCarOvRat look bad.  What?  We had a lot of fun with that VAP post, did you expect us to not reference it later?