Take care!
Tag: farm
An old ranch
Throwback Thursday: Tulip fields
Fife years ago, I was at a tulip farm for the first time. They grow the flowers but cut the blossoms right after they went up. The goal is to get the onions to sell them. In the image you can see rows of still blooming tulips as well as row with tulips where the blossom is already cut.
Take care!
Living a separate live
Tulips are sawn by putting onions in the ground. That’s different from i.e. weeds, grass or many flowers. Here you only have tiny seeds, often not much
bigger than pinhead. Thus, you won’t expect to find plants i.e in the unploughed strip or in the boundary ridge. So, you won’t imagine that such a big seed would get lost. But, it happens, as you can see.
Living in the row means shelter for each single flower. So, i.e. they can stand hard wind easier or cold nights. Although, some of them seemed to have decided to live their own live, separate from the others, more than a meter (more than 3 feet) away from their siblings in the rows. And they are also still standing.
It seems to be similar to us. Some people also decide to live their own live, independent from others and different in style.
Respect each individual. Regardless of their origin and their (cultural) background.
Take care!
Living in the wrong neighborhood
When I was in the tulip fields last week, I was surprised by a few flowers in the rows. The tulips grow in long rows of tulips of the same color and the same shape – all flowers of the same kind. This is necessary, because, as I also wrote in my last post, the onions are meant to be sold correctly sorted in homogenous collies. But, every now and then, there was a single different flower. The aliens were usually only different in color and / or shape, but I also found hyacinths between the tulips. A funny surprise.
Enjoy!
Maybe you also like some of the other posts. Have a look.
Do you know, you can subscribe to this blog for free and you’ll get a short notice via email for every new post or get notice in you WordPress reader. I won’t use your email for any other purpose. So, give it a try!
Tulips everywhere
or weekday wanderings or afterwork photo walk. 🙂
Last year I was introduced to tulip patches here in our region and wrote about here and here. I knew about the tulip farms in the Nederlands, but wasn’t aware, that there are also tulip farms here in Germany. Friends of mine are living in that area, so I asked them to drop me a note, when the tulips are out.
I hope, you’ll enjoy them as much as I do. So, don’t miss the gallery at the end of this post.
As I mentioned last year, Continue reading “Tulips everywhere”
growing tobacco
Growing tobacco is hard work. It’s harder than growing i.e. corn, potatoes or grain. That’s because the farmer has to prepare his patch first with the plough and saw the seeds. But, he also has to go in his patch every day to cut the blossoms and pick unwanted leaves. It reminded me to the wine growers work.
Everything is done by manual work. Ploughs and carriages are pulled by oxen. We didn’t see any machine in the fields.
Take care.
making cigars
Last week I wrote about how I met two tobacco farmers and showed a few photos. I also told about the process how to prepare the tobacco leaves for making cigars. Today I continue on this.
In the photo above, you can see a tobacco patch to the left and a drying house in the back, where the leaves are hung up for drying. The process for creating a cigar from the dry leaves is quite simple as you can see from the gallery at the bottom of this post. Young and soft leaves are in the core, wrapped by older and bigger leaves. The cover leave is wrapped outside and glued with a fluid.
Each leave is cut along the finning (leaf vein). The vein is never used for cigars. The vein is the part of the leaf with the highest level of nicotine and other chemicals that make smoking so dangerous. On the other hand, for cigarettes the whole leaves are shredded, so that a cigarette is more dangerous for one’s health than smoking a cigar.
At last the ready cigars were put into the wooden form for a few weeks to make them resistant against self dissolving. But, you could also start to smoke one at once, if you want to.
Take care.
visiting a tobacco farmer
As I mentioned in my last post, we also visited tobacco farmers. One got the patches from his father 5 years ago, when his father was 80 years old and too old to do that work anymore. He told us much about producing cigars, while the other one showed us, how to assemble a cigar. The farmers get the seeds from the government. They grow the plants and when they get a certain hight, the start to harvest the first leaves, those at the bottom. They become the outer cover sheet. Later the plants start blooming and the blooms have to be cut and given back to the government. Also, the government get’s 80% of the dried leaves, while the farmers are allowed to keep the remaining 20% for their own use. This is the source for the cigar sellers in the cities I mentioned earlier.
The government operated fabrics assemble their cigars by using leaves from different growing places (full sun, part shadow or shadow), different tobacco species and different farms. The leave ware not only hung up for drying, they also voted by certain marinade for the fermentation process. Each farmer has his own secret receipt for this marinade. On the other hand, the leaves of farmers cigars are all from their own patches. That’s why cigars from different brands have different tastes.
On the table in the above photo you can see the tools needed for assembling a cigar, 3 ready cigars and a few roles / bundles of farmer’s cigars covered by a thin layer of wood as a very basic variant of humidor. In the background you can see many bunches of drying tobacco leaves, as we are in the drying house at the moment. Here in the drying house you have a very distinct smell of fall, autumn foliage and cigar boxes (as I remember from my grandfathers cigar boxes) or tobacco shops. The smell of cigars is already there, but it also smells like fall, when the trees lost their leaves, that are laying on the ground and start drying and fouling. Although, the tobacco leaves won’t start fouling, but drying.
Next week, I’ll focus on the patches and the work outside.
Take care!
Tulips
My last post was on a tulip field, I got introduced to by a friend. Now, I want to show you a few of the different tulips. I was very surprised of the huge variety. Even I know tulips differing in color and size. but, here were tulips of shapes I’ve never seen before.
Originally, Continue reading “Tulips”
Flowers everywhere
It’s spring again – finally. The winter lasted long this year, but finally spring came. Spring means, trees and bushes start blooming and flowers coming out of the soil.
The Netherlands are well-known as a flower growing country and the flower everyone connects with the Netherlands first is the tulip, even tulips originating from Persia. I heard about big fields with tulips and was eager to visit one for taking photographs. But going on a trip Continue reading “Flowers everywhere”
MyBlog - solaner 