New Cousin Oliver & Pumpkin Patch

We have had some exciting news in our family!! My brother and sister in law had their first little baby! Welcome to the party little Oliver (Ollie as Hoot calls him) Lester Kirsch!!   He decided to come a few weeks early on October 5th. Weighing in at a whopping 7 lbs 5oz and stretching to a full 21 inches! He’s doing great and his new mom and dad are awesome too!  

In other news…I haven’t had a lot of time lately to sit down and write all the posts rolling around in my head. So just to tide all you faithful followers over I thought I’d post a double post…new cousin and few photos of our fun pumpkin patch trip yesterday to EZ Orchards!   

 It was Hoot’s first time with this whole pumpkin experience and while the most exciting thing to him was the slide and the wagon I think he’s sort of getting that fall spirit.    

   
If you get a chance to head over to EZ Orchards I would highly recommend it! They had live bluegrass music, great food, face painting, petting zoo…basically something for literally kids of all ages! 

I’ll be trying to find time to get some of the words in my head down onto paper or into a blog post soon! Until then hope you enjoyed some new baby Oliver & Hoot photos!! Happy Monday!

Photo Friday, Cultivating Cabbage

I got some good tractor time this week, driving as straight as I possibly could and enjoying some nice fresh fall air here in Oregon.


 We cultivate 1-2 times a year when the plants are small. It helps us knock down weeds, conserve moisture in the soil and the plants seem to enjoy the looser dirt around them.  

 As you can see in the photo above, a few weeds slip through. Those will have to be taken care of down the road.

Happy Friday everyone!!

Hazelnut Harvest Videos, 2015

I did fairly good this year taking some videos while harvesting.  I still haven’t gotten any photos of the whole sweeping process yet, I think the biggest reason is that I’m driving the harvester whenever he’s sweeping so it’s a bit difficult to run over there.  I’ll try during our second picking though in the next week or so.  Until then here are a few videos from this year.

Video 1: Video taken while I was harvesting.  You can see the rows of nuts that have been swept up into windrows between the trees.  I’m driving over those with the tractor, while the harvester behind me is picking the nuts off the ground, putting them over some chains to let the dirt drop back to the ground and then through a large fan that blows out all the lighter material.  You can see the nuts bouncing back on the furthest chain where they will be dropped into a cart for unloading.

Video 2: This video was taken from the back of the harvester.  You can see the nuts coming over the last chain and landing in the cart.  Once this cart is full we unload the nuts into totes to remove them from the orchard.

Video 3: Once the totes are out of the orchard they are stacked in line to be dumped into a truck.  Some farmers haul the tote to the processor, but we haul in bulk.  Because of that we use a forklift with a rotater to dump the nuts from the tote into the truck.  Our truck can haul about 18 totes at a time to the processor.