Harvest time in Iowa......

Across my street is a row of single lots of houses and then there is the view of these farm fields. At the bottom is my neighbor lady's farm field which this year was sown with alfalfa hay. It was cut three different times yielding bales of hay. I believe she said they had 11 large bales of hay off the last cutting. Probably the farmer will plow this green alfalfa under in a few weeks as green fertilizer and it will be planted in beans or corn next year. Above the hay field is a bean field that is ready to be combined. They will come in with their self-propelled combines and harvest it in an hour or two. The field goes back over the hill quite a way.



In this photo taken to the south of the above photo, you can see the large bales of hay. You may have to click on the picture and enlarge it to see it. It takes a special lift on the front of a tractor to pick each on up off the ground and to be put on a trailer. Usually they can load two of these on one trailer.
When you look beyond the bales you can see the corn field. It really is very green yet as most of the corn in the area has fired, turn yellow and is dead, but this field must have been planted later. This weekend we are forecasted to have a hard freeze. Below zero degrees, C. or below 32 degrees, F. It will be a couple of weeks after that before it will fire.
For all you non-farmers, corn is picked and shelled out in kernel form. When my dad farmed it was sold on the cob, and the buyer would shell it out and store it as kernels.
Anyway, what I wanted to say is that the farmer shells a couple of ears of corn and takes it into a grain co-op and they have it tested to see how dried out that it is, or check it's moisture content. Last week it was testing 23 percent of moisture content so they couldn't pick it yet. The freeze will dry it out and help them get dryer corn. If they pick it too wet, the grain buyers have to put it in storage, where they run a large fan system through it to dry it out. They charge the farmer for that by how high the moisture the content. So a farmer really has to wait to pick when it is dry. Wet corn is a great loss of profit. Wet corn can mold and mildew. That is very bad for our corn flakes.






This is my last batch of rhubarb. The leaves were starting to die and some of the stalks were really getting porous. I cut it all and this is my last harvest. I froze two more, four cup bags of cut up rhubarb, ready for cobbler. My wife and I together made an interesting cobbler also with it. We added two finely cut up apples to the rhubarb. It was a great taste and really cut down on the tartness of the rhubarb. Try it sometime!





The camera picked up strange colors off of this. I think the light reflected off of the oak table and it really read the wrong colors. This is the last of my banana peppers and the few tomatoes that were left. It was a good season for us, and we didn't have to work too hard to get it. Thanks for reading.....