This week is the lead-up to the Heritage Harvest Festival and we are busy preparing for the weekend of fun. Delightful people are arriving in Riverton to help with the setting-up; baking and making, picking fruit, digging potatoes, glueing, stitching, painting and folding. Brochures are being delivered to every letterbox in the district and we are doing all we can to attract the attention of the local newspapers with the aim of getting some memorable pre-coverage. I've sent this image through, as my attempts to capture an "awww!" photo from the pre-schoolers' visit, even though they filled their baskets with ripe red apples as directed and looked as much like elves and pixies as children could, missed the mark. I just couldn't capture the elusive magic moment.
9 comments:
Your face says it all, Rg.
Harvesting Ballarats today and a dwarf peach that excelled itself.
I've always loved harvest time……. well not perhaps the itch from acres of barley!!
The fruit harvest is generally more pleasurable than the cereal harvest, in my experience. Nibbling on wheat and oat grains doesn't quite match biting into a ripe peach or nectarine.
I didn't mind going round and round - or up and down - depending on the shape of the field, but an itch is an itch when the harvest is a good'un, and its a right pain when its a poor one!
We would chew on the wheat grain to check its quality for baking, but it was a tad less satisfying than checking the peaches for ripeness!!
I can remember a hay-making that went on well into the night under a full moon. I can also remember the percentage of thistle that was in that crop!
The advent of 'big bales' and mechanical handling meant we became less fussy about 'clean' pastures for hay.
Those wee thistle in the conventional bales seemed to find places to hide in your fingers for ages - and could be extremely painful too.
I've a few oat stooks to set up in the harvest festival hall today. Most people won't recognise what they are, I guess, but they'll look very bucolic.
That ignites further memories, Rg. We used to grow oats in grandfathers day - 250 acres. It was said later that we ploughed the ground to grow the oats to feed the horses so they could plough the ground to grow the oats………!
My father one was one of the last stackers in the district who could make a stack of oat sheaves that looked as straight at thrashing as it did when first built.
Sadly a skill I never needed.
Hope you have a fantastic harvest festival.
The land beside the railway line and road between Brydone and Edendale used to have oats stacked every year once. I think it was made into chaff be local horse people. Now it sits with just long grass.
I never had much to do with harvesting grain but spent many a day on the sled behind balers stacking hay into stacks 17 for the tractor to clamp onto the truck. Every day a new set of blisters.
Once picked up large blue stripe sacks of grain by Balfour in a truck. They we left lying on the paddock by the harvester crew and the farmer just walked along throwing the sacks up onto the deck where it took two of us to stack them. He was a tough old bugger and had skin like the outside of a walnut shell.
Philip, you and me both!
Those blue striped sacks were made for chaff, not grain.
Full of chaff they were relatively easy to lift but full of grain they weighed a "ton"!
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