Some pictures of post harvest activities........

Just because digging is over does not mean that all the work is done. We still have about two weeks of outside work to do before we can sit back and relax a little bit. I took a few pictures of that for you.
The first picture showes a field that was covered with hay mulch. We cover the fields to help prevent soil erosion. Marten has been at this for the last couple of days. He was working to far away to get a picture of him doing it. But here is the result anyway. Looks like the field is nicely covered.
In this picture, Tineke is ripping up the headland. The heavy truck tracks left in the field from harvesting get loosened up again.And then we get to the plowing. Klaas and I are at it with two plows. A lot of times we are going behind one another. It gets a little complicated at the ends sometimes. But we have got that down to a science. I drive in the back, and never have to stop. Klaas seems to be able to get in the furrow again before I complete my loop on the headland.
Later in the day we had some sea gulls over for a snack. They took off an hour or so later and left lots of tips, mostly on the windows.........

Busy times on the farm...........

Hi there all you faithfull readers. Glad you are still checking up on me. We finished digging on November the 6 th. And now it is time to clean up around everywhere before the snow falls. There is plowing to do, balebusting, manure spreading trying to figure out how to ventilate all the different piles of potatoes. All the buildings are full to the door. So today we started grading some today. And slowly we will get more room again.
We finished harvesting the greenhouse yesterday. Nice stuff for planting.
I will try to take some pictures of the yard out back. All the machinery that is normally in the shed, is parked outside. Machinery everywhere. You can hardly turn around. I hope you all have a great weekend............

Still digging potatoes...........

Sorry, no pictures. We are still digging. This is like the fall that never ends. It will be another week for sure, before we are done. Big crop. All the storages will be full. The Lord willing , we should be done by the end of next week. This is starting to remind me of digging carrots. It is heavy going, and we had a few breakdowns this morning. Slipclutch malfunction, the bolts fell out, and half hour later I blew a tire on the digger. So by lunch time, I was still doing my first round. And then it rained. But all in all, we still dug 25 loads by 10 o'clock. Anyway, I hope you all have a great weekend..............

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.....