The Common-Tater
Is this a recap of 2023 or a preview of what we’ll be doing in 2024? I leave it up to you to decide. (And whatever you decide you will be right, since both options are actually true!) Enjoy this montage of some of the work we do here around the farm from early spring to late fall. You can visit “The Compelling Combine” and “The Hypnotic Harvester” to see more videos of our farm equipment in action.
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Brilliant sunshine and vivid colours seem to be a distant memory for those of us living in dreary, gloomy, gray Southern Ontario. I can’t remember the last time we had some sunshine. These photos of the beautiful, sunny days we had last summer should cheer you up. Here’s hoping the sun will come out again one day soon! You can visit “Buds & Blossoms” to see some colourful spring flowers I found when I was out and about here at the farm.
Fall chores here at the farm don’t exactly mean raking the leaves and cutting back the gardens. We work at preparing our land for next year in many different ways. One of the essential jobs that needs to be accomplished is spreading manure to replenish our soil nutrients. This key job needs to be done in the fall so we can meet food safety guidelines.
It’s a stinky job, but someone has to do it. And this means Curtis! He works at spreading the manure in between delivering potatoes to restaurants and running our corn to the grain elevators. It’ll all be worth it next year when the potato yield is high due to the fertile seed bed the seed potatoes were planted in. You can visit “Racing Old Man Winter” and “Fall Field Chores” to learn more about different fall chores we work at here at the farm. This aerial video offers a glimpse of the grain corn harvest at one of our fields. Any way you look at it, a combine is a massive piece of equipment. Even though ours is a rather small combine, we haven’t had any problems cutting through the super tall corn stalks this year. John runs the combine, and RJ & Curtis run the grain trucks back and forth to the grain elevators.
As a side note, there are a few things I learned shooting this video with my new drone. First of all, the combine speed was hard to follow. Secondly, drones don’t like landing in a corn field so I had my first crash landing. And lastly, Christina knows a whole lot more about video editing that I do. Thanks for showing me some cool tricks! You can visit “A Combine In Action” to watch a video of the soft red winter wheat being harvested. As we approach the very end of our potato harvest, I wanted to share an aerial video of our bin filler that I took earlier this season. This gives you a great overview of how our potatoes travel from the bulk truck to the potato storage. You can easily see the field debris dropping into the garbage box, the teeny tiny potatoes being sorted out as well as our crew pulling out all weeds, clumps of grass and small stones that we don’t want taking up valuable space in our potato storage. The building is now so full that I doubt we could cram one more potato in!
Our son Curtis operates the bin filler here at our farm. It means keeping the machine operational when there are breakdowns, moving it to different bins and buildings as we harvest different varieties and running empty trucks to the fields to be filled up with more potatoes. You can visit “The Wonderful Windrower” and “The Hypnotic Harvester” to see more aerial videos of our potato harvesting equipment in action. |
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