Saturday, September 19, 2009

Harvesting lots of color......

This is the first of my Iowa photos that I am going to take for all you out there, in other parts of this wonderful globe. I was babysitting the neighbor's dog across the street and this field belongs to her. The land in the foreground was turned into a hayfield this year. It has had three cuttings of baled hay from it and now there will not be any more growth this year. It may be plowed and turned into a corn or bean field for next year. That is called rotating the crops. Beyond the fence row is a field of soybeans. They are a green crop most of the year and when they reach maturity they turn yellow and sometimes drop off all of their leaves before the farmer combines them.
Along the fence row with all the weeds and small trees was a historic train track that ran by electricity. It was actually a trolley, and ran all the way south to the capital of Iowa, Des Moines. People took the train to work or shipped eggs, milk, and other produce to customers in Des Moines.
You can see in the distance a high wire electric line and you are actually looking up one of our hills seeing an Iowa sky. We see cornfields, bean fields, alfalfa and sometimes oats or wheat all around our town of 1600 people.
The tomatoes are all turned and ready to be picked. I am giving away some and we are freezing some. The neighbor lady is a salsa fanatic so she will take a couple of buckets of roma tomatoes.
These peppers are the ones that I started in the window sill this year. They are called a banana pepper and I don't like them as much until they have turned color.Then they are sweet and good. They are not the same flavor of a bell pepper but they are fun to grow.
I won't tell you about the apple crop, but peeling apples and getting only one good one out of five is quite a discouraging situation.
I took this earlier in August and the rhubarb is much larger now. I will be pulling that and freezing that for a winter cobbler, to be baked once in a while. We like winter here on a good day, but we are not too excited about it right now. Thanks for reading......

4 comments:

Linda said...

Oh what bliss, farmland! And Iowa farmland! I've read about Iowa and Des Moines in Bill Bryson's autobiography, 'The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid', so I'm entranced to see it for real.

Alan Burnett said...

The interesting thing is that your first shot of the harvest field could have been taken around the corner from where I live in the UK. Perhaps the wide world isn't all that different after all.

FlowerLady Lorraine said...

How wonderful it would be to live in the country, away from traffic, noise, etc.

Your tomatoes and peppers look great.

Enjoy this wonderful time of year.

FlowerLady

The Retired One said...

It seems we were all just blogging about planting the gardens and here we are looking at the harvest and wonderful produce. Loved the picture of the veggies.