Another apple is ripe!

The Smoothies are ready!

They are a type of Golden Delicious but have a pink huey.  I always look forward to these each year too.  They have a super crunch to them.  Mild but sweet.  They are a great all-purpose apple.

I have also heard them called Supreme Gold.

You will find these a little less than halfway down on the south half of the orchard.  Walk down the row until you see a white sign that says Smoothie.  

Also, we are sold out of pears, but have lots of Gala and Honeycrisp still.

 

This last weekend we started harvesting our first flower seed crop.  Below is a picture of the Coreopsis head containing the seeds.

 

And here is the seed out of the head.

And here is looking under the swathed rows looking to see how much has shattered off when we cut it. 

 

We ended up having to harvest differently than I talked about in a earlier blog post.  Instead of cutting and sending it straight into the back of the combine, we had to swath it, then later go through with the combine.  Even though the seed heads were dry enough, the stems from the plants were still wet enough that they would have wrapped around the "wheat" header and we would have gotten nowhere.   

 

 It took three days to harvest the Coreopsis.  Longer than we thought but thankfully we got it done before the rain Monday morning.  We had problems with the combine plugging many times so it slowed us down a little.

We also filled the combine bin full of seed and it would not come out the shoot to dump it into a truck!  So we started shoveling it out!  That was a little daunting but it wasn't so bad.  After that we would just harvest 2 rows and then unload the seed.  My dad always says if you don't fail every once in awhile then you aren't trying hard enough!!  We will claim that saying on this experience.  Ha!

A family out and about picking.  The little girls were so cute with their little buckets for apples!

 

Also want to introduce Laura, one of our newest apple employees!  And her sweet daughter Ruby!  She can help you with anything you need.

We are also getting ready to plant 2.5 acres of blueberries.  Finally finishing the field out.  Right now we are making the beds and adding the sawdust.  Next we put in the overheard sprinklers and then finally plant the plants.   

Well, off to get some more work done!