Hauling Sugar Beets

Yesterday the sugar beet harvest started.  It will run (weather permitting) until all the beets are harvested.  For many years now Harold has driven a beet truck in the field, and then to the beet piler with a load of sugar beets.   It is grueling work - he works from 2 a.m. to 2 p.m. every day with no breaks except the wait at the piler (if there is one).  He eats sandwiches on the run, and has even gotten pretty good at eating apple pie with one hand and steering the truck with one finger of the other hand!  Even though the work is hard and the hours are long, Harold enjoys this, and every year he is ready to go again - that is, IF he can always have his red Mack truck!  He works for a great farm family that treats the employees right, pays them well, and provides plenty of food and snacks.

The only bad thing about sugar beets is that our anniversary falls right in the middle of the beet harvest!  October 16.  We will be married 10 years this year.  I usually bake up some cinnamon rolls, and ride along with Harold for a good portion of the day, and that is how we have spent our anniversaries for the past 10 years!   Romantic, huh?  Riding a bumpy, dirty old truck eating cinnamon rolls and peering through a muddy windshield........

For those of you who have never seen a sugar beet, it looks sort of like a big turnip, and is sweet.  The American Crystal Sugar Co around here uses these beets to make bags of sugar.   It is quite a process!   Here are some photos from several years ago, as I don't have any from last year, and as sick as I am feeling with the flu lately, I may not even get to spend that "romantic ride on the beet truck" this year!   But it'll give you an idea about sugar beets.

This Harold's trusty old red truck. Harold's brother in law was riding along this day.  The truck is loaded with about 80,000 pounds of beets. Harold rides this truck right in the field, and the beets are lifted out of the ground with a special piece of machinery and piled into the truck via conveyor.   That truck ride in the field can be a bumpy, muddy ride, for sure!  Yee Haw!! They even drive in the rain, as long as the pulling trucks can still pull everyone out of the mud!

Harold has to back up the truck into the beet conveyor, which then shoots the beets into a big pile. This picture gives you no idea of how huge this piece of machinery is.    There are many beet pilers in the area and every one of them is full to capacity by the season's end. 

A big pile of beets started.  They pile the beets on cement, hundreds of feet wide, and about a 1/2 mile long.  It almost looks like piles of coal.   Sometimes there are several of these long piles of beets at the piler station.  These piles freeze down, and the Crystal Sugar Co uses them all winter long.  By March, the piles are usually gone. 

The sugar beet harvest is a whole other world that most folks don't see.  If I do get to ride with Harold this year, maybe I can take some better photos.

Two Signs That Fall Is Here

There isn't much Fall season left in Minnesota, so we need to enjoy the outdoors as much as possible - before that 30 below zero stuff starts!  The leaves were so pretty last week, but now they are almost gone.   The high winds of the last couple days pretty much stripped off all the leaves.  There are two signs that Fall is here:  big woodpiles and pumpkin/winter squash harvest! 

Harold has about 6 or 7 cords of wood cut so far.  Almost enough for the winter, as we usually go through about 10 cords.  You can see in the background that most of the trees are bare already. 

This year's harvest of pumpkins and squash.  One of the new kittens is checking out this wagon load!  I always grow Winter Luxury pumpkins.  They aren't pretty looking, but they make very tasty pies, and are an heirloom seed that can be saved.   The solid deep orange flesh is great for cooking, not like the  stringy, watery carving pumpkins. 

Crab apple Applesauce

For many years I have made applesauce with larger pie-type apples and it is always good.   But this year apples were in very short supply due to bad weather this spring.   A good friend from my church told me that there were some apples on his tree and that they were 'good for jelly and apple butter'.   But, he said, they are crab apples.  Tiny little things.  About an inch to 2 inches max.  He said his mother and sister always made good jelly from them.   So I went and picked  3 big pails full of them.   I did make an excellent jelly from them, but I had way more than I needed for jelly (what was I thinking picking 3 big pails full?) 
     So I decided to try making applesauce from them.   They were tart, but a little on the mealy side, and I know from experience that mealy apples make really good sauce.  I even looked up on Google to see if anyone else makes crab apple sauce.  They do.  And so I did also.   Yes, it was very time consuming putzy work, but...........
    Wow!  It is the best ever!   I like it so much better than regular apples for sauce!  It has some body to it, a really fruity taste, a lovely pink color, and has a great sweet/tart flavor that makes the applesauce a real gourmet treat.  I had to use some sugar to sweeten the sauce (about an 1/8 to 1/4 cup per pint), but that's not bad.   I am so glad I decided to try crab apple sauce.   Sometimes the Lord puts wonderful surprises in small, seemingly insignificant, things.   What a great blessing to have such a tasty applesauce for my winter pantry from those tiny apples that most folks just let drop on the ground.   The way I see it, God provided those apples for us, and it's up to us to figure out a way to use them.   So if you like to make applesauce, don't pass up those little crab apple varieties - you might be just as pleasantly surprised as I was!  And you know what?  I'm going to see if there's more apples on that tree - I'll make another batch of that sauce because I know when it's 30 below zero this winter and I'm buried in snow, a jar of that summery goodness is going to taste really good!

A sink full of those tiny crab apples ready to be washed.

All those little bitzy things had to be quartered and stems and blossom ends removed, and seeds, too. (At least I didn't have to peel them!)

The lovely, tasty finished product!

From those 3 pails of apples, I ended up with 13 small jars of jelly, and 11 pints of sauce.

A Little Dose of "Cute" and Plenty of Work

Today Harold and I spent the better part of the day outside working on the now-dead garden - after two nights of frost the garden is done.  We also got a start on getting things cleaned up.  AND I  spent some time playing with the new kittens from this summer!   I haven't posted any 'cute' photos for a while, so humor me a little and let me show you some of our new kittens here on the farm:

Here's a few of the Mamas and their little ones.

A couple more cuties, about 6 weeks old.

Older kitten, Cassie, playing peek-a-boo.  She was born around early June.

FlufferDuff and her little one who looks just like her!

A new tomcat kitten.  He is only 7 inches long but looks bigger in this photo.  He has big feet and a big head, so he will be a big tomcat someday!

Of course there are more kittens, but they wouldn't pose for me.

Harold took the Lo-Boy tractor and used the brush mower attachment to cut some brush, and also one of the gardens, which was done.

Cutting through a patch of thistle, cleaning up the yard. 

He also mowed through one of the gardens that was finished.  Later, he will put the tilling attachment on the tractor, and dig up the garden area for winter. 

We also took down fencing, harvested veggies and herbs that survived the last two nights of freezing, and I collected more petunia seeds from my late season petunias that were purple and blue in color.  I harvested a big pile of parsley (second cutting) and plenty of oregano.   I discovered that oregano can take a little frost.  In fact I think it has a better aroma after frost.  I like to sprinkle dry oregano on pizza on top of the sauce before I put the toppings on.  It gives the pizza a real "Italian zing", I think!  When I was growing up in South Bend, there was a wonderful pizzeria called Starlight Pizza on the west end.   They also used to put quite a bit of dry oregano on their pizza sauce, and it was the best pizza ever.  I miss that place!

A big batch of oregano that I will dry tomorrow with the microwave method.

I also harvested the rest of my dry beans.  This year I planted Kenearly Yellow (a type of Maine bean good for baked beans), Yin-Yang beans, Swedish Brown beans, and Hidalgo beans (a type of brown and white speckled Mexican bean).  I grow many kinds of dry beans and usually grow several varieties each year.  They all have different tastes and different uses - some are good to eat as is, some are for soups, some for burritos, and some are good for pasta and salads.

This coming week, I will dig up my carrots and  rutabagas and put them in the freezer, dig up the onions on a sunny day and let them dry in the sun for a couple days for winter storage, and harvest about 3 or 4 winter cabbages to make sauerkraut.  Then I will make my jellies.  I've been saving juices from grapes, plums, chokecherries, and highbush cranberries for jelly making.  There's nothing better than home canned jelly!  Much better than the store variety!  Now the apples are ready, so I'll be making plenty of apple jelly.
The frost may have finished the garden, but there's still plenty of work to be done!

Busy Gal

I think I'll be very busy for a few days!  Because the weather guys are predicting frost for the next couple nights, we had no choice but to harvest veggies that might freeze.  Today I'll be putting about 100 ears of corn in the freezer, and canning some tomatoes.  Tomorrow is market day, and Friday I'll be making pepper relish (my favorite thing to stir into a bowl of cooked beans, like pintos or navy beans), and Saturday I'll be making a couple batches of spaghetti sauce to can up.   These veggies are besides the stuff we will sell at market!  Do you think there's enough produce to work with?  Ha!  We are truly blessed.  We certainly won't go hungry this winter!

Two and a half 5 gallon buckets of peppers, more than 3 flats of tomatoes and 80 ears of corn.

More Honey pictures

A friend was over today and took more photos.   She put them into a comic format, so I'm not sure you can see them as well, but here goes............

Gives you an idea anyway!

Honey Harvest 2014

Whew!  We finally finished our honey harvest for 2014.  We started on Saturday and just finished today (Monday).  It was a good honey year.  We got close to 400 pounds of excellent and  tasty honey.  This year the honey is somewhat lighter in color than last year, and maybe a little sweeter.   We had some help on Saturday with the extraction, and for the last couple days we have had visitors come to watch how things went.   Here are some photos of this year's process:
     We started out by taking a selfie of ourselves dressed up in our bee suits.

The Ballard Beekeepers

The 2014 bee yard at our place.  We had one other small bee yard at another farm, of swarmed hives.

The 2014 Honey Kitchen!

We start off by cutting off the wax cappings on each frame.

The frames are placed into the extractor to spin out. 

A couple of our helpers turning the crank on the extractor, Bill Cloose and Steve Amberg

The fresh honey runs out of the spigot and into a strainer over a honey bucket.

We end up with a tub full of wax cappings and honey.  This will be strained later on, and the wax purified for selling or for making candles or soap.  The honey is just fine and will be bottled up. 

More of our helping crew!

Later in the day, Joe Miller came to help.  We replaced the crank handle with a drill to use as a motor for the extractor.  (Much easier on the arm muscles!)   These guys are just having too much fun!  Using a drill as the power source is truly a "guy thing"!

A better picture of our drill crank.

A pint of this year's honey!  It takes a bee an entire lifetime of 3 weeks to make one teaspoon of honey.   A pint has many teaspoons!  For 400 pounds of honey, how many bees were working???

Sometimes bees do strange things!  If proper bee space is not maintained in the hive, the bees try to fill in the spaces with burr comb.   This is a good example of the burr comb and the bees' engineering skills!

We should end up with about 275 jars of honey to sell from the 400 pounds.  This year's honey has a lot of sweet clover in it, and also basswood blossoms, white and red clover, birdsfoot trefoil, purple aster, various kinds of thistle flowers, wild plum blossoms, goldenrod, daisies, alfalfa, as well as garden plant flowers and decorative flowers.   There are probably other natural plantings, too, that I haven't listed.   The bees know what's best for the honey.   The Lord has designed the bees to produce honey and they do it well!  We have been truly blessed this year with a wonderful crop of honey - thanks be to God!

Saving Petunias

Petunias are one of my favorite flowers because not only do hummingbirds love them, and the bees love them, but they are so pretty and there are so many lovely varieties!  In past years I have always gone to a garden nursery and purchased plants and spent lots of money.  About 4 or 5 years ago I decided to do things cheaper, and bought seed packets of petunias and started my own plants.  Well, NOW I am getting even cheaper yet!  I recently learned that a person could save seeds on your own and plant them!  Duh......(sometimes I feel a little slow minded....too obvious, ya know?)  Regular petunia seed can be saved just fine.  Hybrids and wave petunias will grow also, but they will not be the same as what they were originally.   It might be a slightly different color or size, but it will still be a lovely petunia.   So today I went around to all my gone-by plants and collected seeds.  I'll give this a try next spring and let you know what happened!  I have successfully saved seeds from pansies and pumpkins and herbs, so why wouldn't petunias grow?   So - next year's hanging baskets of lovely petunias should be free!  And THAT is my goal - to spend as little as possible growing my flowers, fruits and veggies.
     Seed saving is kind of a lost art anyway.  Early settlers to this country saved seeds from the homeland, Indians saved seeds and taught the first settlers how to do this, and greenhouses save seeds for selling.   Harold and I took a class on seed saving for vegetables last year.   We got some seeds from that class (dry bean seeds) and I planted them and they grew just fine.  I prefer to grow heirloom varieties of veggies and open-pollinated types.  You can save the seeds from those plants.   Hybrids, no.  It seems like everything folks grow these days is hybrid.  We always like to plant Golden Bantam corn, an heirloom open-pollinated variety that is naturally sweet.  But most folks like that super sweet sugar enhanced variety of hybrid sweet corn.   We will be saving corn seeds this year for next year's garden. 
     Anyway, back to the petunias...........
Here is a photo of the petunia seed pods, ready to be picked:

Lots of dry seed pods from my pink petunias.

Another view of petunia seed pods.

A tub full of pods

When you squeeze the pods, the seeds fall out.

I discovered that there are many sites on the internet for downloading seed packet templates that you can print out.  Some are really pretty and some are just plain.   Just type in "printable seed packets" and you'll get a whole bunch of sites.  Here's a couple that I printed out:

Seed packets to cut out.

 And here is one I filled up with seeds:

Now I can't wait until next February or March when I try to grow these seeds I saved!