The Experiment: Chapter One

Anyone who's ever read this before knows I'm a bit of a weather fanatic.  Pretty much anytime I get online I check my favorite weather site, forecast.weather.gov aka the National Weather Service.  I like their site because it's easy to use and I love their radar.  They also have links to local climatology, which I look at every now and then to see what they see trending as far as temps and precip for the coming seasons (FYI, this is another La Nina year, so expect more hot dry conditions just like last year through at least August.  Gotta love climate change!).  


But just because it's my favorite...doesn't mean it's the most accurate.  Last winter when we had our frost scares with the strawberries, I learned just how much difference one degree can make.  There's a fine line between a frost and a freeze, or a frost and nothing.  Mostly it depends on the dew point, which is the temperature at which dew/frost begins to form.  However, since a) no one predicts dew points and b) it's closely related to temperatures, I decided to take the path of least resistance.  


I decided then I needed to do some kind of experiment with a couple different TV stations and a couple websites, just to kind of see who happened to be the most accurate as far as temps go for our area, Goldsboro.  Almost a year later, I finally did it.


I chose my fav of course, the NWS, as well as weather.com, WRAL and WNCT.  I chose to do it last Mon - Fri.  I looked at the forecast high for the day at 8 am and the forecast low at 5 pm, since these sites tend to change their forecast throughout the day.  Then I recorded it in a spreadsheet (I am also the queen of spreadsheets.  I have one for everything, sometimes two for the same thing even.  Part of that is The Husbands fault, but that's another blog for another time...).  Then I recorded our actual high and actual low as measured by the thermometer in my backyard.


The results were surprising.  The overall winner for accuracy was the weather channel.  I usually don't check their site, because I hate it.  There's so much information I don't need on there and advertisements and all I want is the weather, plain and simple.  They nailed the high for Monday and low for Tuesday, and came the closest three out of the other four days.  WNCT and WRAL were the closest on Wednesday.  And my favorite, well, only came close one day when everyone was just a degree off the actual temperatures.  It's also worth noting that no one was wildly off, everyone was a couple degrees one way or another from the high or low.  We are talking about weather, no one is going to be spot on all the time.  There are just too many variables.


I plan on doing another one of these in a month or so.  I'm sure different sites are closer different times of the year.  I feel like unless I try it again and see which site consistently performs the best I don't have an accurate picture.  So check back, I'm sure I'll have a chapter two to report on soon.

Latest pics of the strawberry plants (mostly because I hate not to include a pic, but no one wants to see my thermometer)

Have a Happy New Year everyone!!!  (I don't mean it unless I put at least three exclamation points apparently.)

Two Front War

Please forgive me, I've been a slack blogger.  It's not because we've been doing nothing, it's because I've been a little stretched out fighting a two front war with strawberry planting/planning and everything happening at the same time the corn maze is going on.  And I have to say, because I always mistype (not to be confused with mispell because I do in fact know how to spell the word because.  It's chunkin' that apparently I have a problem with) the word because, that I love Google Chrome because they underline the mistypes like Word does and I don't have to do all that copy & paste stuff.  

On the corn maze front.  Obviously we shut her down Nov. 5 with a few remaining groups left until Nov. 12.  We had a great year this year.  I want to thank all of our staff, you are all awesome and we love hanging out with you.  Huge thanks to everyone who came out to support us and have fun on our farm.  I loved having you out and seeing some returning families.  It's fun to watch the kids grow every year (as long as it's not The Boy, who has to remain 3 forever).  That's kinda my end goal with this thing is to be a place people come every year to play around in the corn and chunk a few pumpkins (or gourds, because those little suckers will FLY).  I would love to have my farm be a part of someone's family tradition. We'll be back at it next year, hopefully with a few new things to do.  I want to add another pumpkin chunker, I'm thinking about having a trebuchet as well as the slingshot.  We also want to have a different pumpkin patch where people can cut their own pumpkin from the vine.

On the strawberry front:  We got them planted the first weekend of October and they are growing fast.  The lack of cold weather is causing them to grow like crazy, and causing them not to go into dormancy.  Last week we noticed some blooms even.  We are hoping for some cooler weather to come on in and slow them down and it looks like after today we'll get it.

First Blooms - notice how the center is dark, that is due to frost damage

One more new (exciting!) thing we are planning on bringing to you this spring is more vegetables on the farm. We want to start offering more produce throughout the spring and early summer.  We want you to be able to come here and get all the delicious vegetables you need, for you to be able to walk on the farm and see where it comes from and meet the guy who grew it and know exactly where it comes from.  

So, that's what's up with us.  I wish everyone a good holiday season and a happy new year!  My resolution: being more attentive blogger.

Jeepers Creepers

I don't like to be scared.  I've never liked horror movies, although I did used to read ghost stories.  I was a little obsessed with aliens there for a bit.  But seriously, Unsolved Mysteries would keep me up at night (yes, I just admitted it).  So needless to say I never went to haunted houses, trails, mazes, insert correct noun here.  Never.  Until I started running one.


Last year, we had no idea if it would take off or even be something people would come and do.  So we went out there with our shoestring staff and family and tried to rock it best we could (after night one I was relegated to The Stand.  I would run out at people and scream and halfway through I'd burst into laughter.  I just can't commit to purposefully looking like a complete idiot.  On a regular day I do it all the time but that doesn't count apparently).  I think we did a good job with what we had to work with.  People went away scared and they had fun so I think it was a success.  


Now, this year, we knew we wanted to expand.  We put up more elaborate props (I heart fog), played around with sound (last night I heard a deer in the woods blowing and snorting and I almost came unhinged, we have to get that somewhere in there), got some more players (the crazy guys from SJAFB, the creepy girls from CBA, and some of our family + staff including Red Robin who's scared me to death at least three times, even after I reminded him that I signed his check and cut off Dr. Peppers) tried to organize a little better (huge thanks to Cousin Alvin, without whom this haunted maze would have never existed).  The result is pretty good I think.  It's creepy and scary and a lot of fun.  This is my favorite thing that we do here at the maze because it is just as much fun to scare you as it is for you to be scared.  So come check us out.  We'll be open all next weekend, including Halloween night starting at 7 pm.

The Players

Punkin' Chunkin'!

Over the past winter The Husband and I were having one of our usual nightly arguments about what to watch on TV, (see, he likes to be constantly changing the channel and it drives me insane, because just as soon as I get into something he turns it.  He also likes to watch bad reality TV, you know those shows where they argue, gripe, and complain more than anything, which drives me insane.  Nine times out of ten I give up, hand him the remote, and pick up a book or a computer.) when he decided to watch the pumpkin chunking tournament on TV.  It was in the middle of this show the light bulb went on.  What if we did punkin' chunkin' at the corn maze?

Every year we want to kinda do some different things, add things, improve things, keep it interesting.  What is more interesting that hurtling a pumpkin through a field at 75 miles an hour in the hopes of watching it smash into pumpkin goo against a target?  That would be totally awesome.  No one else around was doing it.  It seemed like a no-brainer to me.  (Plus, and I don't know what this says about me, but hearing the sound of pumpkins smashing against the targets is akin to popping those sheets of air bubbles used in shipping on the soul satisfying level).

So all spring and summer I nagged The Husband about this (because apparently to him it was not a no-brainer) because I was determined we would be doing punkin' chunkin' at the farm this fall.  Persistence paid off (I WON!).  The last weekend of September he built the chunker (essentially a slingshot on a frame) and last weekend we had our first guinea pigs, a birthday party of twenty nine-year old girls (yikes!).  This weekend Cousin Alvin brought targets which is great because before they had to be cracked or in a state of decay to bust on the soft ground.  Now they whack against the target and bust which always results in cheers and claps.  

Yes, The Husband did build this all on his own

I'm really wanting to have a tournament Nov. 5, where everyone can come help us get rid of the old pumpkins and see who is the mightiest chunker out there.  Eventually I'd love to have a sort of tournament where maybe people brought machines, catapults and trebuchets and all (nothing as big as what they do in Maryland, but maybe a smaller scaled Goldsboro version).  It's funny to me (I'm sure no one else cares) that these machines that people used to hurtle rotting corpses over town walls in the middle ages to infect the townspeople with diseases during sieges are now being used to hurtle pumpkins across fields for mindless entertainment.  Welcome to the twenty-first century!

P.S. It is totally awesome!  Check out our you-tube channel for video:

http://www.youtube.com/user/odomfarmingcoinc

Oh yeah and P.S.S.  For those of you who saw the sign I painted, I can in fact correctly spell chunkin'...but chunin' got you lookin', didn't it?

Plugging Along

So, I promised a blog on plugging strawberries. I thought it deserved its own little post, since it is a bit of a process, and no one has thirty minutes to sit there and read a blog (okay so I promise it won't take that long, but when you combined it with everything else I was talking about last post it was a little lengthy).  I did a video blog about this, but I have to learn to hold the microphone on my camera a little further away because you can hear me breathing.  It's really bad. 



We got back from the mountains Tuesday night and first thing Wednesday we had the help here ready to plug. We got 20,000 tips from Darnell Farms in three varieties. You know when you're out there picking strawberries and it's been real hot, and the plants have started running? Well that's what a tip is, those runners that have been cut off the plant. Thursday we got 29,000 tips from Fresh Pik and they come from Nova Scotia. So we had 49,000 tips to plug asap.

First things first though, we had to get the trays ready. This is an extremely dirty process (not to mention the trays are a thin plastic so it's really easy to cut your hands like a paper cut, then they get filled with dirt, it's not pretty). Last year The Husband, Luke N (I say that since I have 2 Lukes now), my father-in-law and I filled all the trays with dirt on what felt like the hottest day of the year. This time since we were in so much hurry we had part of the help filling them. Basically it's the easiest thing in the world to do. We get these trays that put 50 plants in them and fill them with the equivalent of potting soil. The problem is that you can't pack them too tightly or you won't be able to stick the tips in them.

Getting an early start

After you have trays, it's time to stick the tips, or plug them.  The tips are usually shaped like a hook and you just put them in the dirt end of the hook in first.  Once you get the hang of it, and get in a groove you can plug a tray in no time.

Tips looking for a home

Then we put them in the ark beside our house.  We mist them with water every minute and a half for 12 seconds all day long.  It will take them a little over three weeks to be ready to plant, and over that time we slowly back off on the water a little.  Ours have been stuck three weeks now and they are looking good, growing new leaves and roots and some are even running just a little.  Next week they'll be ready to set out and provide me with another blog topic.  It's great how that works out sometimes :)  

(Almost) Finished product

Catching Up

I have tried to write this blog about five times. I just cannot get my thoughts organized.

Now that that is off my chest, maybe I can get it written. Whew, it has been a crazy couple weeks here on the farm. Between Irene and strawberries and the corn maze (opening in 1 1/2 weeks OMG!!!) it has been one thing after another. So, I wanted to sit down and kinda fill you in on the happenings around here, hopefully it won't be too long of a post :)

Irene. Well, being the weather nerd I am I was tracking this one like a duck on a junebug. I figured it was just our luck, we have a promising maze that The Husband and his trusty assistant cousin Alvin (I'm not sure who was the trusty assistant, but I am really glad Alvin was there to stop The Husband from overcomplicating the process, which is he is absolutely certain to do. Thanks Alvin!) and here comes a storm to just flatten the whole thing. Of course in the grand scheme of things that is a bit of a trivial concern when there are people without homes and who lost every bit of tobacco they had and all, but still, it's our livelihood. All in all we got out really lucky so maybe our lucks improving. We had limbs down in the yard, only lost power for about five hours (we didn't have cable all day and The Husband has no concept of entertaining himself, so those five hours where we couldn't watch a movie just about drove me over the edge), and the corn wasn't completely flattened. It was blown down quite a bit, but we're slackers and didn't plant it until July (and let me tell you, I have been agonizing over it getting tall enough for two months) so it's still very green and has no ears. I know this sounds ridiculous to those who haven't seen it, but when the sun came back out it kind of 'pulled' the corn back up, so it is standing relatively straight now, just a little bend at the bottom.

Could have been a lot worse

Strawberries. So, it's time to plug our strawberry plants for next spring. the day after Irene, we left to go to the mountains and get half of our strawberry tips. It was a really nice trip. We hadn't been to the mountains in about 4 years so it was time. It was also The Boy's first time so that was exciting (he looks at them and says, wow mama, those are really big hills!) The weather was absolutely gorgeous, it made me wish for fall that much harder. We got to see some family and friends and have a mini-holiday. Then we went to Bryson City to Darnell Farms to get the tips. The farm is beautiful. If I had to work there i would never get anything done. You cross a bridge across one of those pretty rivers with the boulders in it and you are there. The river runs along the whole edge of the farm and there are mountains anywhere from 4,000-6,000 feet high on either side and 60 acres of strawberries down in this little valley. Amazing. If you have the opportunity to be up that way stop in, they sell vegetables and have a corn maze and Jeff, the owner, is a real character. He is so funny and even though I'd only met him a couple times we were welcomed in like family. (Stay tuned for a post about plugging these tips.  It's definitely worth it's own post.)

I think I'd just stare at this all day

Corn Maze. This past weekend we had a work day on the farm (okay, The Husband had a work day on the farm, Berry Girl had to clean her house since she'd running around like a banshee for the past week and a half and hadn't had time). We decided to change the flow a little, try and make it clearer where we want people to go, safer for kids, easier for us, etc. He put up a fence (or at least the posts) and constructed the two swing sets we bought for the kids to play on. He planted grass so hopefully it won't look like a moonscape. We're having another big work day this weekend this time assisted by Red Robin and our new hayride operator Luke. He doesn't have a handle yet. I'm sure by the end of the weekend we'll have a good one for him.

So, mark your calendars and get out your walking shoes. We're opening NEXT SATURDAY! Please come out and see what we've done. It's a bigger better maze than last year, with 10 acres of slightly bent corn for you to wander around in, punkin' chunkin' (my pet project), and other activities for the family to do. Sick of sitting around looking at one another? Had too much family togetherness due to the hurricane and the rain? Come run it off on my farm!

Waste Not, Want Not

So, back in May my friend Shanna told me about a Christmas in July show she was doing at the Micro VFD to help raise money for the ladies auxiliary. At first I thought it really wasn't something I could participate in. We wouldn't have anything in season then and what was I going to do, stand around and hand out corn maze stuff? Who was going to be thinking about October in July (other than myself)? But then I got to thinking...why not sell some jam?

Many of you ask what we do with the strawberries/blueberries we don't sell. Well, I'll tell you. About 99% of them go to our favorite dairy in the whole world Maple View Farm so they can make ice cream. If you've never had any of their ice cream you are missing a treat. Any time you are on 40 going west and come across exit 263 (New Hope Road exit) take it (turn left, go straight through the 4 way stop, then straight until you come to Rocky Ridge Rd and turn left, the shops at the end of the road). It's totally worth it, trust me, anyone who knows me knows I know good food. I can't even eat normal ice cream anymore I'm so spoiled. They have umpteen flavors but I always get the Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough (creature of habit) much to Chris's chagrin 'cause he's always got these great new flavors but I never try them. But this blog isn't about ice cream perfection, it's about jam.

Moving on. The other 1% or so I freeze and make jam out of to sell at The Stand. So I thought, hey, I have plenty of frozen berries, why not make some jam and sell it. I can give out flyers and coupons and promote the farm and maybe, just maybe someone will remember us and come out this fall to the maze. Can't hurt right?

Saturday I decided was Jam Day. Now, I've never made jam before. Last spring my mama made it, but this year I decided to tackle it myself. I got a late start (not a morning person remember) due to lack of motivation and the Wal-mart trip. I bought jars upon jars, like 10 boxes of Sure Jell and a 25 lb bag of sugar. I decided since the strawberries were still rock hard to start with the blueberries. I opened the package of pectin and skimmed the directions. Then I mashed up my berries and put them in a pot. Well, the pot wasn't big enough for berries and sugar so I poured the sugar in a larger pot and poured the mashed berries on top. Then I read the directions more thoroughly. Yeah, I was supposed to cook the fruit and pectin, and then add sugar. Luckily the fruit was so thick, it never mixed with the sugar so I was able to scrape it off and put it back in the smaller pot to cook. As mentioned before the fruit was thick and the pot was small. When it started cooking it didn't boil like liquid, it was like when you make cooked grits. the bubbles came up through the thick mixture and popped, sending blueberry places I never had blueberry before. I have a burn on my hand from molten blueberry lava and there is a spot on my ceiling. Yes. My ceiling. Oh yeah, and did I mention that I don't even like blueberries or strawberries or jam/jelly of any kind.

See, I'm not kidding

Anyway, so I cooked it and put it in the jars and got them canned, four jars at a time (it took forever). Luckily, they all set and sealed. So all in all, other than the burn it wasn't so bad. The next batches were a lot easier too, since I knew better what I was doing. I'm one of those people who try to find the most efficient way to do something. I try to eliminate as many steps as possible. So once I had my process down pat it was really a piece of cake.

So come by Micro VFD this Saturday for the Christmas in July show. There are a lot of vendors going to be there as well as food. I'll be there with my jams and the honey left from this spring and coupons and flyers. Come support a good cause and have a good time with us!

Jam Deliciousness