Category: Green Beans

Green Beans, Squash and Natural Shade

I had a conversation a few days ago with another farmer where he mentioned that some of his bean plants tipped over causing them to get sun burnt.  Usually under normal circumstances this is not an issue.  This was a rare case of the plants getting too tall and not being able to hold themselves up.  Therefore exposing the beans to the sun when they would normally have shade.  So there I am just a day or so later walking our green bean and squash fields and looking around, I realized that the crops that we have growing, under some of the hottest times of our summer, actually have natural shade built in.  How smart of them!

So I walked around and took some photos of our squash and green beans, these plants by design give shade to the crop as it grows!  Here is a photo of our green bean field that is due to be harvested in the next week or so.  Under all those leaves, millions of green beans maturing everyday.

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Same with our squash field.  While you  might look out and see just a sea of green, under all those beautiful, huge, green leaves, lays thousands of pumpkins slowly growing, getting ready to be harvested for seed.

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I just love when plants take care of themselves in these sneaky little ways that I never even thought of.  Happy Friday!

Crop Farm Tour 

Here in Oregon, we grow over 250 different crops. So it’s no wonder that in our soil this year we have 10 different crops growing.  And while in the next three months they will all get harvested, currently everything is at all different stages. Some crops are just getting planted, some starting to flower, some are pollinating, and others are already ready to be harvested! 

So here is your photo tour of our farm and the 10 crops we are raising. 

First stop the grasses, both perennial and tall fescue are grown on our farm. 


Next, vegetables seeds. We are raising red cabbage seed…

Swiss chard seed…

And radish seed. 

Then finally, all the crops you can eat!!! Wheat…

Peas…

Hazelnuts…

Squash…

And Green beans…



So there you have it! And yes, to answer the question I most often get asked, we are really busy!  And most of the time, we are loving it!

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!

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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.

FullSizeRender(10) FullSizeRenderFullSizeRender(13)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!