Crops – Page 35 – NuttyGrass

Wheat & Green Beans…More Harvesting!

We have still been busy here at the farm. Although the small amount of dust settling rain we got this weekend really gave us all a moment to take a deep breath and relax for a bit. We have been harvesting since the middle of June, so 5 weeks into the process it’s nice to be able to tell everyone to take a day or two off.

Last week we were busy harvesting wheat. We grow spring wheat for seed, seed that will be planted to make even more wheat and sold to make breads, cereals, noodles, all sorts of products!

We also had our first planting of green beans picked. The company that we grow for has their own harvest crew. It allows them to work closely with the cannery as far as timing of product coming in, and allows us the savings of not having to purchase or rent special equipment just for one crop on our farm.

They work 24 hours a day, and showed up around 2am in our field to get going. By the time we took a look at the field they already had a large chunk harvested and before we knew it they were packed up and heading down the road to the next field.

I’m not going to talk yields today, let’s just say this farm has had much better years. This will be one that I will be glad once it’s over and we can close the books on a rough season. The good news is that we will be doing it all again next year, hopefully with better news…every year is truly so different! Still to come this year, the last two crops, radish & hazelnuts!

Combining Cabbage Seed

This year we grew our first crop of cabbage for seed. It is always fun to add a new crop to the farm, although learning curves can be steep, we had a lot of help to get the crop to harvest. But then came harvest, and using a brand of combine that no one had used before, we hit the ground running and patiently tweaked on our yellow gal for about 3 hours to get her all set right. There was lots of climbing inside the combine to double check what was going on.

I got to drive the harvester, my pregnant belly still fits so far! And I got a few helpful riders to keep me company.

We dumped it into our truck to took it down the road to Triangle Farms. It was then unloaded into boxes and taken to be stored until it is cleaned.

It’s really pretty seed! So even though it took awhile to get it all set right, it was a fun process of trial and error to get the crop to look like what we wanted!