Beans and Harvesting

Fall weather here today for sure! The sun was coming out during my late-morning filbert-picking, but Phil cleaned out the furnace and wood is being burned in the farmhouse today.

I'm enjoying the feeling of not-eating tomatoes, although there are lots of delectable split sungold cherry tomatoes that I'm sorry not to be able to help with.

This tricolor was particularly fun, I thought:

Thanks for your thoughts about natural or non-natural foods. I agree that mostly, we each just have to find what works for our bodies, and then to make that work within the constraints of time, seasonal availability, money, etc.

In addition to the garden, Phil's nephew and his girlfriend were experimenting with growing organic beans for market this year - they put in four acres on the farm and this weekend was their first attempt at combine harvesting! Phil (a lot) and I (a little bit) helped out.

The beans have been swathed (cut down from the vines) and raked up into windrows -

We were harvesting 'orca' beans - a beautiful bean that's lower in the two indigestible (gas-provoking) starches that beans have (raffinose and stacchyose, if you collect names).

A combine harvester is an amazing machine

It's supposed to pick up the harvested plants, shuck the seeds out of the pods, shoot the chaff out the back -

- separate the seeds from dirt and drop them into the hopper -

And then it can shoot the harvest out into a pickup truck, or barn, or whatever -

Considering that it has so many functions, and that it works on such a variety of seeds of very different sizes, from tiny alfalfa and clover through grains to big beans, it's not surprising that it is plenty glitchy and requires _lots_ of adjusting! We all got very dusty. There was lots of trying to shovel the vines into the conveyor belt to make it pick up more effectively -

We picked up lots of beans from behind the combine after it had passed -

- and generally got all tangled up in the machinery -

- and the first lot of beans harvested were mixed in with a great deal of dirt!

There was a lot of clunkiness and trial-and-error - but can you imagine hand-harvesting four acres of beans??? And in terms of the world food market, four acres is pretty small beans. Can you imagine how the big corporations do it?

Really, it's more amazing that stuff gets to market as clean as it does. I'm off to eat some dirt! Seriously, I think that the more we go into mass-production, the more freaked-out people get about dirt, when that's totally unnecessary (although it's also true that the more mass-produced something is, the more likely it is for contamination actually to be a problem.

Allergies are also far more common nowadays, since people have become more obsessed with sterilization. You have an immune system for a reason! Don't leave it with nothing to fight...

Do you eat a bit of dirt?

with love...