Digging potatoes at Blue Bay Farms........

A little update on the digging process. It is going fairly slow. But overall, the crop looks good. Definitely something to be thankful for. Specially today, on Thanksgiving. I hope that everyone was able to spend some quality time with family and friends.
Matt and Amanda were home for the weekend. We really enjoyed their company. But the time goes by so quickly. Specially when we are digging during the day. At least we had a good dinner together on Saturday with everyone. And Salsa and nachos last night.
And as I had promised, here are a few digging pictures.
Here, Klaas is wind rowing 4 rows of potatoes together in between the two that I pick up with the digger.
This is a truckload of
Red Norland potatoes leaving the field. In front of the tractor, you can see the two rows that the digger picks up. By this time, 8 rows have been deposited in between, so the digger picks up ten rows at a time.Above you can see the unloading line at the farm. Here the dirt, rocks and other undesirables get picked out. It takes about 18 people to make all this equipment work efficiently.
This last picture shows the binpiler. As the name suggests, it piles the potatoes in the bin. Beats doing it by hand.........

Notice................

We are busy digging the Red Norland potatoes. It is a big crop. Minimal losses due to rot. Thanks to God, it could have been a lot worse.
And by the way......... Caleb has posted a new blog. Just in case you want a new chapter story to read.
Greatings all, until next time, when i hope to have some pictures too.............

Open Farm Day results...........

Hi all,
Open Farm Day went very well. We had over a hundred people visit. It is a good way to meet the neighbors from across the road. And their new neighbors as well. They moved in about two months ago. I never knew. We had a model tractor for a doorprize.
There were 73 ballots left over, after we took all the doubles out first. Klaas phoned the happy winner shortly after six, and he came down right away to claim his new John Deere 8330.
There were lots of comments about our digger collection of steel.
Most people figured that the round object seated on the yellow pedestal was indeed a cannonball.
We will wait for some official say in this matter from our family expert.
Digging came to a halt today. All was going well until we started the Red Norlands this afternoon. The first load was fine, but when we topped the hill, the potatoes were skinning too much yet. And with a little bit of rot and blight in the field, we decided to wait until next Monday before we start again. So there is your update in that department. I hope you guys have a great week...........

Open Farm Day tomorrow.............

When you read this, it will likely be all over. We were asked this summer if we would consider hosting open farmday again. Since it was the year of the potato and they did not have a potato farm yet. So after some thinking, we decided to host this event for the second time. We did it two years ago as well. It is really enjoyable, but it takes a lot of work to get ready for it. I'll post some pictures on the next blog, maybe even tomorrow, so be warned, two blogs in a row.
We started digging a few headlands yesterday, the potatoes were still skinning a bit. The crew is coming in on Monday and hopefully we will be able to start digging the seedplots. I could put some archived pictures in for that, but I'll wait for the real ones. We had one interesting find however. Diggin right clos to the shop, we noticed a round iron object in between all the Gold nuggets. Yukon Gold that is. If you look at the pictures I would like you to tell me what you think it is.....

Roguing Seed Potatoes......

These days on Blue Bay Farms are mostly spend in the fields. Roguing seed potatoes is a very important job. The job consists of finding virus infected potato plants, and then remove them from the field.
The top picture shows the roguing crew. From left to right: Rebecca, Tineke, Pete, Marten and Klaas. The empty seat is mine.
These pictures were taken in the field in front of our house. The variety is Prospect. A processing variety.
And this is a picture that shows a Mosaic plant. A potato plant infected with PVY (potato virus Y). You can see how much smaller the plant is. It is going to have a small yield. Therefore it is not desirable to have these in a potato field. That is why we rogue them out.
The last picture shows Prospect on the left and Yukon Gold on the right. In the background you can see all the mussel buoys in the bay.

Hi to you all..

Or the few ones that are left. Summer has arrived on PEI. It is really warm, at least for us. It was around 30 degrees , and high humidity. You folks in Ontario and below that have our sympathies. Hope you stay cool.
The potatoes are growing fast. they could use a shower now. But the dry weather is keeping blight in check.
As most of you probably know, Sarah Terpstra is biking across the U.S. in the Sea To Sea Bike Tour. If you want to follow her progress, here is her blog address.
http://sarahterpstra.blogspot.com
They are at day ten.
All the best for now and have a great week........

Yippey......

We are done planting. Sorry, no pictures. But it is a great feeling to be done. We finished late yesterday afternoon. And today is dedicated to paperwork, cleaning, grading and putting equipment away. More later, we have to eat now........