long time no blog

I haven't posted all summer. But I do have some photos, so I broke them up into a bunch of photo-heavy, text-light posts.

threshing beans (November 1)

It's time to plant garlic, but we're killing time while waiting for the snow to melt off of the fields (even though you can't see snow in this picture). In the meantime, we're threshing beans.



When we harvested the dry beans, we pulled up the whole plants by their roots, and packed them into bags. Now, Eliza pulls out fist-fulls of bean plants and passes them to Mark to feed into the thresher:





The thresher is a fascinating piece of equipment that chomps up the bean plants and spits beans out of a spout on the side:



It spits mixtures of bean pods, stalks, and stray beans out of three other orifices:





After being threshed, the beans will go through a winnower, which blows the dust off of them, and the picker, which is a foot-powered conveyor belt allowing a person to sort through a steady stream of beans, pulling out the rocks and bad ones.

late fall on the farm (October 20)

Mark grows some crops on land belonging to his neighbors. In one of those fields, we're growing all brassicas (cabbage, brussels sprouts, broccoli, kale, turnips, rutabagas, and daikon radishes). Whenever we go over there to harvest, we always stop and say hi to the neighbor's cow (who we have named Bessie):



She likes to eat kale or whatever we bring her.

carrots (October 20)

Carrots are one of our biggest crops. We grew and harvested them all through the summer with successive plantings, culminating in one huge harvest (Eliza calculated 10,000 pounds) in October. Earlier carrots would get bunched for sale at market, but these carrots need to be stored for the rest of the winter, so the tops get snipped off as we harvest. After they're washed, We dump them out on the table in the washroom and everyone helps to bag them. Most get sorted by size and put into 25 pound bags. Throughout the winter, we will open up these bags and re-bag the carrots in 3 and 5 pound bags to sell at market. The carrots are generally sold for a dollar per pound. We set aside "seconds" carrots (ones that are deformed, or snapped in half), and these are sold in 10 pound bags for five dollars.

feeding the chickens (September 14)

Usually Eliza feeds the chickens and collects the eggs by herself, but we got done with work early and decided to tag along.



One of the escapee chickens, being tossed back in:



Anne cuddling a chicken and trying to feed it:



Feeding broccoli to the chickens:

winter squash (September 14)

Over the course of a couple of days, we harvested all of the winter squash and pumpkins, and brought them into the greenhouse to cure. I love the variety of shapes, colors, and patterns. I never liked squash, growing up, but I'm learning to enjoy it. My favorites are Sweet Dumpling and Delicata. They're small and sweet.











Long Pie pumpkins. I used one of these to make a pie and two loaves of pumpkin bread:



My favorites, Delicata:



and Sweet Dumpling:

the market setup (August 27)

I don't work at any of the markets, but sometimes I go anyway, to do my shopping. Even though I'm surrounded by vegetables all week long, I still enjoy seeing them all displayed in one place.