Day 67

Howdy! I had a really long day today, our schedule this week has been roughly 7-7. I started out by gathering potatoes in Newborn...lots. Then we trellised the peppers with bamboo; Erica and Daniel hammered in the bamboo and I taped the peppers loosely around them. We had some high schoolers from Atl come in and help, so we knocked out the field in no time. After that we headed to Gus' where we said so long to the strawberries and ripped up the plastic row covers.

For lunch we headed across the street to meet up with Ricky to see the new house he's been working on for Sandy/Burge. He said he started with the ceiling caving in and rumble up to his neck, in two months he's turned the place around completely. This will be another "cabin" for Burge members to stay in, and will be more secluded from the others because it's by itself on a large piece of property. Ricky also gave us some peppers and pepper relish he canned last year, amazing! I think if a guy ever proposed with pickled peppers I was say yes on the spot. He told me to try some on my pbj, I did, and it turned out surprisingly super good!

After lunch we finished up with the strawberries and moved on to removing seeds on sunflowers. After we removed the seeds and put them in a bucket, we used a winnowing process. It's a technique used back in ancient times to separate grain from chaff, only here we're separating the seeds from the rest of the sunflower junk (don't be intimidated by my terminology). When you blow the fan the shells with seeds inside are heavier and fall back in the bucket, whereas the lighter debris blows out. We mixed the seeds with peas and are using them as cover crop in the Main House field.

Winnowing

Off to Main House we installed floating row covers, replaced dying cucumbers with new, and journeyed to Jeff Cook for more row covers. I practiced more stick shift driving and then Erica and I watered both greenhouses. Whew!  

PS, okra is coming up and tastes fantastic right off the stem! Who knew?