An Early Fall Day on the Farm

It's been a while since I posted anything here.   We've been very busy with house guests and chores, and Harold has been working with the sugar beet harvest, helping with the pre-lift.  The regular beet harvest season starts on October 1st and he will be putting in 12 hour shifts out in the beet fields then, driving a truck between the field and the piler.   I took some photos today of things around here.  The trees are starting to get very pretty now.  I am finishing up canning today with a batch of applesauce.  The other day I canned up 20 lbs of tomatoes.  Next week I plan to work on taking the gardens apart and cleaning things up and planting garlic in the greenhouse.   Winter will be here sooner than we like!
     Last week my son Kelly came out with a couple of his sons to get the hops harvest.  This is our second year growing hops and we had a pretty good amount for a harvest.  Kelly does artisan/craft beer making for a hobby, and asked if we would grow some organic hops for him.

Harold set up a sort of blower system to air dry the hops.  He made a frame around an old Peterbilt truck grill, and we put a fan underneath.   It worked very well to dry the hops. 

A closer view of the hops harvest.   This is about 3 lbs  of hops.  I kept some to try making a hops sleep pillow, which is supposed to help with sleep problems. 

The hops grow on vines about 20 ft high supported on special fiber ropes. 

A close up of the hops

Harold has been cutting wood for winter.   He has a couple cords so far, but we need about 8 more cords!

Harold unloads another truck load before lunch.

Harold is working hard to get the winter wood in.  As you can see, the side of the house is finished with siding now, too. 

A few weeks ago, the side of the house was not finished, and Harold and brother in law Tom worked to finish that.

The guys used Harold's tractor loader as scaffolding to finish the siding on the house.  Harold built a safety rail for good measure.   We will paint the house next spring.  Even the dirt work is almost complete.

I found a nice bunch of green beans in the garden to fix for lunch!  Yes, we still have a few things growing in the garden - lima beans, green beans, peppers and greenhouse tomatoes.

The rest of the garden is a complete weedy mess!  We will take out the tomato rebar stakes, and just mow everything down with the brush hog attachment on the Lo-Boy tractor.   You can see the popcorn crop is still drying at the far end of the garden.

I like to decorate for fall.  Here are a couple of fall decorations I put up.

Two of my favorite fall wreaths that I made.  The one on the left is made from corn husks and bittersweet last year.  The one on the right is a 40 yr old wreath that I keep re-doing from time to time with fresh things.   These wreaths are on my front porch wall.

Before Harold mowed down the cornstalks of the sweet corn, I made this yard decoration.  Unfortunately my farm cats love to climb this so I wonder how long it will look pretty!

Speaking of farm cats, here's a couple pictures of a few of them:

These are the spring kittens all grown now.  Can you tell it was just about feeding time???

I told my kitty Thunder to "smile" - this is his version of smiling!

This year I tried to grow a flower called statice.  It is used a lot for dry floral arrangements.  I just fell in love with this plant!  It is easy to grow and makes lovely vases of dried flowers with lasting color.   Next year I want to plant a LOT of it, and make wreaths and decorative bouquets and dried floral swags for my farmer's market booth.  The seeds are hard to get started because they are almost microscopic in size, but once the plant gets growing it is easy to maintain and is a cut-and-come-again type of flower.

A bunch of statice drying on my back porch.

I put a nice sized bunch of it in a decorative pitcher and bowl in my bathroom.  I think it looks so cute, don't you think?

We may not do exciting things here on Honey B Farm, but we certainly enjoy the simple life and all the things that we do.   It is very satisfying to grow our own food and decorations, and cut our own wood (free heat for the house this winter!).  Next on our agenda is the popcorn harvest!  We bought a brand new corn sheller for that purpose.  Stay tuned for a blog article on that one!

Picking The Rest Of The Apples

Today was a nice sunny day and we decided we had better pick the rest of the apples off the tree.   The birds were eating into the apples right off the tree, and the wasps were  digging into some of them, too.  I don't mind feeding wildlife, but I draw the line on them eating MY apples! (Especially when I sell them at my farm market booth! Now we are talking money!)  I think most folks in the country pick apples in late September or October, but up here in northern Minnesota, "fall" is just about now.  And so is the apple picking season.  In about 3 weeks the fall colors on the trees will be at peak color or beyond, and by October 1st we are looking at bare trees again for six months.  So it made good sense to get the rest of the apples today.   Oh, what a crop we had this year!  When our two other apple trees put out this many apples, we will have to have a U-Pick operation I think!

Most of the remaining apples were up high, so between a ladder, the pickup truck and our apple picking pole we had our work cut out for us this morning!

Harold uses the apple picker he made on a long pole to get some of the good ones from the top of the tree.

Harold made this apple picker years ago from 1/8 inch rods that he welded and bent, and we put this on an old paintstick pole that extends.   It does a great job reaching those high up apples with little or no effort.

Here are 3 more tubs of apples!  Our Prairie Magic apple tree is 9 years old and gave us hundreds of apples this year.  We also have for future growing a Zestar tree and a Cortland tree.