Jam & pickle class, tilling & mowing, feeding the rodents, an old tractor comes back to life, working on the hayride wagon

This week I attended the fruit & vegetable processing course I mentioned earlier. The class was a mixture of lecture and hands-on. We dried apples, strawberries, and carrots, made mixed vegetable pickles, and made blackberry jam. While doing this we learned how to use a variety of instruments to monitor product characteristics and quality. In lecture we learned the how’s and why’s. Visiting the campus and spending time in laboratories dredged up a lot of old memories from my time in grad school.

While I was gone, the crew did a lot of tilling in the fields, mowing, and maintenance of the chip roads. The first tilling of the corn maze field was done this week. John started watermelons and cucumbers on Monday. When I got to the farm on Thursday, I discovered that rodents had gotten to the newly seeded flats of watermelons and dug up most of the seeds. I baited some traps with peanut butter and set them out. On Thursday John seeded the winter squash, the next flats on the schedule. The next morning I found the traps sprung and more seed dug up.

The apples are in bloom now.

Rob got his tractor running! There was a crack in the engine block, but he was able to get it fixed here at the farm.

Rob and his Oliver 88 tractor. You can’t tell from the photo, but the engine is running. He drove it out of the shelter under its own power. He still has a number of smaller items to finish up.

Having finished painting the P-Patch compost bins, the crew has started in painting our hayride wagon. We had the wagon built last fall and immediately put it to work. We covered it with a tarp for the winter and it came through fine, but we need to get it painted.

On Saturday the management committee met and reviewed the month’s progress. We tried the mixed vegetable pickles and blackberry jam I made at the processing course. There weren’t many of the pickles left over to bring home.

What’s playing today in the Jeep CD player?  Tempest– Shapeshifter