Harvest of commodity crops is just starting in this neck of the woods.
In the field adjacent to our farm, our neighbor starts on soybean harvest.
Soybeans have a shorter growing season than corn, and are usually harvested first. This scene will be repeated countless time the next month or so.
Mother hen found a new cavity in the hay – yesterday I picked up 50 bales of hay and haphazardly piled a few misshapen bales near the door and came back to properly stack them and found the mother hen and her seven chicks had adopted it as their home for the time being.
In this photo, you can just see two of the chicks – one on top and one peeking out underneath her – the other five are huddled under the hen out of view.
It’s time to send garlic to market. This is our first time selling to an organic grocery store. After saving back 20 pounds or so for seed, a few pounds for ourselves, we’ll add a 30 pounds to the central Iowa local garlic supply.
We’ll do this again and maybe have a bit more next summer.
We started on tomatoes about 2:30 and with GJ and Martin cutting up tomatoes for about 3 hours, we managed to put up 28 quarts of tomatoes today! Tomatoes take a while as they need to process for 50 minutes, but there is nothing like the home-canned tomatoes.
Martin had a long time to think while he was cutting up tomatoes and made a step-by-step analogy between the previous day’s chicken butchering and the tomatoes.
Step One – Pick tomatoes/bleed chickens
Step Two – Blanch Tomatoes in Boiling Water/Scald chickens in 150 degree water
Step Three – Slip skins off tomatoes/put chickens in plucker to remove feathers
Step Four – Cut stem out of tomatoes/take out guts of chicken
Step Five – Cut up tomatoes/cut up chickens for freezing
Step Six – Put chicken parts in bags and freeze to preserve/put tomatoes in jars to preserve.
It’s about time for a turkey update. After the skunk in the brooder house, we were left with 12 turkeys. One them had a badly damaged leg from the skunk and wasn’t moving around too well, so now that they are about big chicken size, we threw it in with the chicken butchering.
The rest of them are happily about, foraging and being turkeys, starting to gobble and puff up at any hint of danger. Back from my days at the county conservation board, I learned that turkeys don’t like owls, so if you make an owl hoot, the turkeys send out an alarm that spreads through the flock.