Cranberry Harvest

We wake up in the morning as the fields are being flooded for the cranberry harvest. The flooding has been going on for 2 days now and has reached the level where the beaters will go in and knock off the berries from their vines.








Here is one of the beaters moving back and forth over the field and you can see many many cranberries floating on the surface.






The breeze has moved the floating cranberries to one corner of the field. It is this breeze which decides where we will move the equipment to extract the berries from the field into the trucks to transport them to the receiving site in Richmond.

The men then lay out booms and begin to move the berries toward the receiving auger that pumps them into the trucks.


The cranberries are building up to several inches deep now and a bit difficult to pull.



Here we have 2 foremen keeping a keen watch on the workings making sure no mistakes occur.


As the berries get loaded into the trucks they are washed with jets of water to eliminate junk that was floating in with them such as sticks, chaff, grass clippings etc. This junk gets pumped into this truck for removal.


In the background of this photo you can see the lift that pulls the berries up to the truck and in the foreground is a tractor running a pump for the water jets.


The cranberries going into the delivery truck.


A close up photo of the cranberries


This series of photos on the cranberry harvest concludes my "Life on an Organic Farm" web blog attached to my web page for 2008. Watch for our next series on our travels to Mainland Mexico when we depart Yuma Arizona around November 3rd.

Larry and Betty

Last day for our fifth wheel trailer

I just had to add one more item before the cranberry harvest.....

Good bye 5th wheel. Today was our last day in the 5trh wheel trailer and now it is off to winter storage. We are now living in our camper and adjusting to the smaller size.



You have heard of "blue boys"? That term used to describe the blue septic tote tanks used for dumping your black water that come in sizes up to 30 gal. Well this is a "white girl" and can contain up to 200 gal. Here is a photo of Betty is going to dump this tote tank! What a farm girl.
Check this out Mairo, Val, Julie, Sue, Lynette, Marilyn and Sherry.


There is our camper in the back ground, with Betty doing the last white boy trip. We only need to dump it twice a year....not bad eh?

Roberts Dance

Well, the video was not my problem but the website problem. Anyways, it is now back working.

Let me introduce you to Robert, our shop manager. Robert loves to fix broken equipment and is happiest when he is working in the shop rather than in the fields where he works when there is nothing to fix. Today I am bringing in a broken piece of equipment for repair and Robert gets very excited and likes to do the "Broken Equipment Dance". This is a bit like a little strip dance where he removes his "pink mechanics apron", gets in a frenzy and starts the repair job.

This is the first step.


You can see the smile on his face for the second step


Now he is getting really serious for the third step.


To watch his disgusting little dance, press the play button on the photo below.




And now a note on this blog site. I am near the end of my contract for this year and things are winding down. It is now time to start preparing for the Mainland Mexico 2008 winter trip.

We are almost ready to move our 5th wheel into storage. Today is move day and after a few last minutes jobs we complete the move this afternoon. We are already living in the camper where space is much less (but we are getting back into the groove) and finding things we forgot to pack.

The last farm crop to come off are the cranberries and it is a pretty sight. The next and last item on this blog will be the cranberry harvest.

Betty and I will start up the Mexico trip section on our Web Site around November 1st when we are in Yuma. It will be actual web pages, not like this blog which I find restrictive on what I can do.

Stay tuned......

Potatoes: washing, sorting and packing

Potatoes can be taken directly from the fields or from our storage sheds to our washer/sorter/packing facility located at one of our partner farms. It is this facility that does all our potato work for the 3 partner farms under the Fraserland Farms group. They are washed coming off the truck, go through sorting processes and then packed either in boxes or bags for the market. After being packed they are trucked to our farm for distribution to the market. Our farm does all the shipping and receiving and pressure cooling of the products.

This video shows the potatoes coming off a truck into the washing line.




This photo below, shows the 50 pound boxes being readied for shipping.





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Potato harvest is under way....storing potatoes

Once the potatoes are harvested in the fields, there are 2 locations they can go.
Some potatoes will go into cold storage where they will stay over winter and which we will remove a little at a time for market.
When they are taken out of the storage, they will go to the washing and grading line. From there they will be packed either in boxes or bags for the market.

The video below shows the storage of the potatoes. They are piled into special sheds that have fans which blow cool air through the potatoes as they store through the winter.

It was quite dim in the storage shed when I took this video so please excuse the dark at the beginning but it will lighten up as it goes on.









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More on this .....story.

Here is shot of our dedicated pickers. These young fellas have been especially chosen for their honesty and have promised never to reveal the secret location of the source of these organic pet rocks.

Short movie below showing the pickers.




This bucket contains an example of some of the gems located in the bucket along with some trash that seems to make its way into the hoard.








The following movie will show how we gently load the little gems onto our transport which will take them away to be washed and sorted, wrapped and boxed. A certified organic rock statement will be included and then its off to the wholesalers.

Sorry we cannot sell these sought after pets on line. We have a very strict contract with our distributors that we can only sell to them.

Let me tell you a story about this harvest.

One of the best kept secrets on the organic market is that we are one of the world's largest supplier of "Organic Pet Rocks". It is during this time in the early fall, after Labour Day, we send some equipment and our selective, trustworthy workers out to our secret location to harvest them. I would really get into trouble if any of the upper management found out I was secretly taking photos of this process. However, I have decided that this is a story that needs to be told and taking the chance that I may not have a job next year, I am going ahead and letting you in on this secret.
In the distance you can see the 3 tractors and their implements that are used is locating the organic pet rocks, softening the soil around them, pulling out the ones that are too large and sifting the ones that may be the correct size.

Off to the right is the dump truck that we load the rough gems into for sorting and washing. I am driving the front end loader used to collect them.





This implement has large steel fingers that can dig into the soil and pull up any pet rocks deep in the soil. It will also pull up the large ones that re too large for our sifter.










This movie shows a bit about digging up big organic pet rocks.



Next the disker goes over the soil a couple of times chewing up the dirt lumps into smaller clumps so they don't get caught up in the soil
sifter.










Here we have the soil sifter working the top 4 inches of soil or so. It filters out the rocks and lays them on top of the soil behind it for easy pickings by our crew.








To be continued.....



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