Spice peppers

 

Photos of the week

The sweet potato field

The new growth leaves of one variety are purple

Do you know what these are?  Peanut flowers.  Once they flower, they will push into the ground and start forming into a peanut.

The white bag on the pepper plant is one of our first efforts to isolate pepper flowers to save seed in our production field.  Normally, to save seed, we grow one variety in a distant field to isolate it.  With bags, we're hoping we can isolate many varieties in the same place.  The goal is to exclude insects that might pollinate the pepper flowers.  Once we see a pepper has formed, we take the bag off and mark the pepper then let it completely mature.

 

Corno di toro

 

Pimento pepper

 

Jimmy Nordello frying pepper

 

Nick's peas

We call these Nick's since the seed came to us from Eric's great-uncle Nick.  They are small but shell pretty easily.

Wheat harvest

We grow two varieties of wheat.  One is an heirloom soft wheat called Red May.  We use this softwheat for biscuits and pancakes.  We also grow a modern hard wheat called NuEast.  It was developed by NC State as a hard wheat adapted to the SE.  We use it for yeast breads.

We use an International 82 combine that we pull behind our tractor.

The combine cuts the wheat and threshes it.  The next step is to run it through our hand crank fanning mill to get the rest of the chaff out.  We then store it in sealing buckets that we've frozen.