Many of you may have thought that we have gone away on vacation…not true! (Well maybe a mini overnight to Montreal) The farm is always closed in August, that is, at least for a few more years until we have our blueberries in production! Anyway, we have been keeping busy renovating the strawberries, combining wheat, baling straw, weeding, cutting grass, cleaning up, fixing, painting and generally changing things around to prepare for the fall season!
Straw cut and laying in wind rows after combining the wheat. Ready to be baled.
Big square bales being produced for later use on the strawberry patch.
A field of finished bales waiting to be picked up and stacked, ready to be chopped onto the strawberries for the winter.
It feels like August is busier than June and July in a way as there is a whole new set of things to be tackled. The main one being the corn maze! We have been very luck to have one of our students (now graduated and a certified teacher!) design the maze for us for the past several years. Chris has been with us since the first year that we opened. It has been fun not only watching him grow and evolve but to have him try his hand each year at a new and more challenging design for the maze. It is especially tricky for him as we usually change the location, size and shape of the maze each year on him! (crop rotation purposes). There have also been a few years that cutting the maze was truly challenging as we didn’t get to cutting it before the corn was taller than us! This year though, with his help the maze has been cut, luckily while it was an appropriate height.
Discussing the next move while cutting the maze. (Ok..this is a picture from a couple of years ago because I keep forgetting to take a better one!)
Things really start to look a little more like fall around here (yes, I know it’s still summer!) with the changing of the pumpkins from tiny green globes to signs of orange and other colours and patterns.
Pumpkin starting to show signs of orange.
One of our new varieties this year..."knuckle head". Notice all the cool warts forming!
An unusual looking mini pumpkin.
Our apple trees are also starting to show signs of promise.
Some red starting to appear on the apples.
We will be offering pre-picked apples only this year due to the limited number of trees and varieties. We do hope to offer pick-your-own in the future….everything just takes time to grow!