Cranberry Harvest Day 6

Today we'll be talkin' trash!

American Gothic our way.
This is almost all of the trash crew

So after the beds are harvested the trash crew goes around raking up the floating leaf debris.  It's not a glamorous job, but a necessary one because after the water is drained any floating leaf debris becomes laying on the vines debris which mats down the vines and suffocates next year's buds.

On calm days they go wading in the bed to get the trash, but on windy days it blows toward the dike as in the picture above.

There's another side to trash.  As the cranberries are elevated into the truck they pass over the cleaning belt.  Any leaves get pressure washed off and fall onto a trailer.  Can you believe you can buy this as garden mulch?

Cranberry Harvest Day 5

Today I have a few random pictures to share.  Here's a newly raked bed.  The cranberries floating freely...until tomorrow.

Sam hitches a ride to pick up the trash trailer.  On front of the 4-wheeler is the blower, used to blow every last cranberry from the ditch edge before booming the cleanup round.











Cranberries like any plant rely on pollination to flourish.  Cranberry growers either rent honeybee hives or buy bumblebee hives. On the trailer are bumblebee quads.  They arrive in June to begin pollinating.  Many growers will get both types of bees.  Honeybees work best in pleasant weather, not unlike me.  Whereas bumblebees are willing to work during inclement weather, too.

It's interesting that when the bumblebees show up the hives are closed up and there's a mesh covering over the exit hole.  Within the first 24 hours they actually chew through the mesh.

Cranberry Harvest Day 4

Since something different happens everyday and we continue to homeschool throughout harvest, I can't always get pictures in order of how things are really done.  That's why I'm posting pictures according to task.  Today a bit about what happens to all those cranberries once boomed.  Booming was explained here.

The boom is continually tightened so the fruit is as close to the berry cleaner as possible.  Those mini lochness monsters sticking out of the cranberries are really homemade water jets.  A pump is used to push water through them.  The force of the moving water pushes berries into the green elevating machine.

The green paddles are chain driven, moving cycling around continuously grabbing fruit and pulling it up towards the pressure cleaner where leaves and other debris are power washed off the fruit.

Homemade Crib Sheet

I couldn't wait for lunch to be done so I could make another crib sheet.  This is such a fun project.  And it's practical.  Today's flannel worked much better than yesterday's.  I found that if the fabric is wider than 45" you have to cut off the selvage in order to start with the right size rectangle.  Once the selvage is cut off that raw edge has to be finished in one way or another which adds to the sewing time.  Leaving the selvage on makes for a nicer looking finished product and saves time.

Sewing Projects

 

Back in August my quilting buddy and I embarked on this adventure to make a purely scrap happy wall hanging.  This bear paw pattern was found in an older issue of Quilt.  The original pattern was for a bed size quilt, however, after all the piecing we're both glad we did this as a wall hanging.  We made one block and added a border, the original called for 16 blocks.  Simple, but time consuming.

I tried a new free motion quilting pattern; it's called pebbles.  I really like how it turned out, but it was time consuming and used a miles of thread.

Here's a closeup of the quilting.  I'm not sure if you can see it but each pebble has 2-3 rounds of stitching.  In order to achieve the look of continuous pebbles you have to quilt the pebble and then stitch around it again to the starting spot of the next pebble.  I would definitely do this again in small areas, never an entire quilt.  I suppose the pebbles could be made much larger on a bed size quilt.

Ironically, I sewed a flannel crib sheet for Little J today even though we're having an Indian summer.  His last flannels were from my sister-in-law.  I don't know how many of her children they warmed, but they warmed our first four and were basically thread bare.  Anyway, I used this tutorial at Everything Your Mama Made & More.  It was easy to follow and the project was done in no time.  I will however, make the next one an inch shorter in length and I will do a zigzag stitch all the way around the rectangle before cutting the corners and adding the elastic.

This post wouldn't be complete without a bit about Down syndrome.  See that little space between Little J's big toe and 2nd toe?  That's called sandal gap.  It's a physical trait of Down syndrome, but nothing to fret over.  It's just a variation of normal.  He'll never have to worry about flip flop blisters.