Adoration

Cotton adores Nathan. She loves me, but she loves him.

Maybe it's the deer feet he lets her chew.

Urp.

Maybe it's the dog house he built her.

Or maybe it's the tumbleweeds he brings her to play with.

Regardless, she is never ever ever far behind him.

Deer

Now that harvest is over we've got a whole litany of projects to accomplish--preparing the fields for winter, maintenance on all the equipment, building roads, finishing the house site. We won't be bored for sure.

In the meantime, another fun challenge has arisen. The problem: hungry deer who like to feast on our unsuspecting grapevines.

Now I used to think deer were cute and cuddly and fun to look at. But it's a whole different story when your livelihood is diminished by their appetites. What the deer eat off now directly impacts next year's yield. The solution (we hope)? Meet our new electric fence.

Our vineyard overseers encircled all 51,000 vines in electricity in hopes of discouraging the foragers. Tasty cover crops were then planted nearby to keep them satiated.

Deer hunting season can't come soon enough.

Peanut harvest part 2

As the threat of rain increased, the harvesters decided to pick up the drying peanuts a day or two sooner than anticipated.

This guy did the picking up.

And this guy held the peanuts for the transport trucks. 

Apparently the fabulous harvest team finished minutes before the heavy rain started. Reminds me of turning in a college paper with only seconds to spare before the deadline. Not that I ever did that.

After the harvester came through Nathan and I gleaned a bit of what was left behind in the field. 

I would not recommend these shoes for gleaning peanuts out of a sandy field.

We thought it might be fun to make our own peanut butter with these beauties. 

This is either a really good idea or a really bad one.

House progress

Bit by bit the house is coming to fruition.

Next up: roof shingles.

Cotton harvest

The BSV cotton was harvested this week. It was quite an operation. There were three strippers (the toothy machine below) that strip the cotton off the stalks, three chaser buggies (the big bins that receive the stripped cotton) and two module builders (the thing that compresses the cotton into rectangular modules for transport).

Nick, we're really proud of that cotton. Thank you for your many efforts this year.

Peanut harvest

Peanut harvest started last week. The digger, shown below, digs the field of peanuts and allows them to dry out for a few days.

The digger mechanism up close.

Drying peanuts in the sun.

This week the peanut harvester will gather the nuts together, and trucks will transport them to the plant. The key here is timing. Freezing temperatures can wreak havoc to the drying peanuts so harvest is carefully timed to avoid cold spells.

Wouldn't you like to be a pepper too?

These peppers have an unbelievable scent to them. It's pure freshness. I wish I could bottle it.