Gravensteins are all gone for the year.
Honeycrisp and Gala are next to ripen but not ready yet. My guess would be around the beginning of September but check here before you come because I will post when they are ready!
Gravenstein Update:
Gravensteins are getting close to coming to an end. There are still some on the trees though. If you must have, I would come very soon! There is also a random tree on the south end of the orchard in the old, bigger trees. You will recognize it by finding many apples on the ground underneath!
The Gala and Honeycrisp are next, but still not ripe yet. I am excited about the Honeycrisp this year. They are looking beautiful and are a really nice size.
We have added a picnic area this year so we hope you all take advantage of that!
We have also changed the parking area a bit. Hopefully it is more straight forward and also safer for all those kiddos running around!
In other farm happenings, we are picking our third picking of Bluecrop blueberries! Once we hit the 3rd picking, we have to pick with a blueberry harvester rather than hand harvesting. Bluecrop, while they are our favorite kind of eating blueberry, become soft too quickly to be shipped and sold at grocery stores once we get to the 3rd picking. So instead they are marketed for other purposes, like frozen or put into blueberry muffin mixes, etc.
When we pick with a machine, they are put into much bigger crates than when we hand harvest. When we hand harvest, we do not want the berries squished at all. Machine harvest does not matter so much. Each of these individual crates hold about 32 lbs of blueberries! That is a lot!
This is one of our blueberry fields covered with a net. Makes it a bit more difficult to run a blueberry picker through but it works. We put up the net when the berries are still green and "roll up" the net after the berries are finished being harvested. It takes us about two weeks to put it up and one week to roll it up. We use one of those platform lifts which is much faster than using a ladder. We are so thankful for that net once it gets later in the season because we see TONS of birds just sitting on top of the net looking longingly down at the berries they can't get to. HAHAHAHA!!!! :) We still have a few fields that are not covered by net and they definitely can get hammered by the birds. Today when I was leaving the field, I saw flocks of hundreds....sometimes you just have to look away and not think about it when there is just nothing you can do about them.
This field of Coreopsis is just now in its prime blooming! We raise the flowers for seed. It is funny how many people stop to take pictures of the fields in full bloom. I don't really blame them. I was out there myself! Now we just wait until the blooms all die down and dry up, and we swath it (cut it and lay it into rows) and combine it (separate the seed from the stock). This usually happens in September. I wasn't around for the end last year since I just had a baby so I am looking forward to it this year.
This is our field of Mixed Poppies. It is just under peak bloom. It is sad to see the field starting to fade away a bit but also a relief because it just means it will be closer to harvesting! Flowers can be very labor intensive. We drive a cultivator through the field a few times to stir up the weeds between the rows, then if there are still certain weeds in the flower row, we have to pull all those by hand. This field had quite a bit of pigweed but we conquered it and it is all gone! (If the weed seed is the same size as the flower seed, then they cannot be separated in the seed cleaning process and the flower seed can be contaminated with weed seed. No one likes weeds!!)
More blueberry harvest pictures. Working hard picking out the green ones!
These white tines rotate slowly and shake rapidly to knock the blueberries off the bush into the catchers below. It somehow does it without ruining the blueberry bush too. Pretty impressive.
Then the catchers bring the blueberries up above onto a belt. The belt dumps the berries into a crate. You still can lose a lot of berries on the ground which is painful to see, but it is still more economical to use a machine picker on this 3rd picking than do it by hand.
Well I feel like I have written a novel, so thanks for reading this far if you are still with me!
Getting excited for apple harvest. Can't wait to see all your faces.
Gravensteins Ready!
Red Gravenstein will be ready next week!!
They make GREAT pies, or for anything else you bake!
We have half of a row available so if they are a must have to you, don't wait too long! I will post on the blog when they are all gone.
The rest of the apples look great so far but they are not ready yet.
Summer harvest for the rest of our crops is in full swing. We have had several pickings off our blueberry fields already and are just about done with our grass seed harvest.
Corn is growing. It is a few feet high by now.
Wheat harvest is coming up real soon!
Above is Radish for seed. It still needs to dry out before we can harvest it.
Putting up a fence along our blueberries so we don't have to worry about plummeting over the edge into the road.
Silas and Erin in the wheat. It is crazy to think almost this time last year, he was only just being born!
Keeping it real: Spending an hour unplugging the combine. Sometimes if the swather leaves a big pile of grass, then the middle does not dry out and it doesn't go through the combine well. And this is what happens! No fear though, it is all ready to go now!
One of the earlier posts, I showed how we grafted a different variety of apple on the base of a tree. Here is the result several months later. It is growing well! Next year this tree will hold Honeycrisp.
The Honeycrisp are still ripening but they are loaded this year! Below shows a picture of how many apples we pulled off earlier this spring (called Thinning). We really put some effort into thinning this year so the apples should be bigger than years before!
Watering away!
See you all soon!