Alright blogosphere, I'm behind... WAY behind on our trips and travels lately. So to resume where we left off.
Jim and I went for a bit of a ride up to Little Bennett Regional Park, Montgomery county Marylands largest park, with 3700 acres and 20 miles of trails. It has some historic things on here, like an old road, an area where a mill once stood, an old farm and a mill house.
Jim and the creek where the water used to flow into the mill for wood cutting. The mill ultimately failed due to the unpredictability of steady flow to keep the mill running. Other mills has better constant water access.
Crocus blooms in March. I think the bee is dead inside, it was chilly
The creek further north of the mill house
So we hiked up a big hill to the top and came up around the back of the farm house (which had few markings, so we were worried it was a murderers house!). At the furthest point we dare venture there was at least 3 remains of deer, mostly their bones... I was really intrigued and took a mandible.
sweet deer mandible
Back of the Mill house, they had sculpture garden that looked kind of creepy, a bit overgrown and just left to rot in a way. But not bad, it was cute. We'll be coming back here as its not far away and not crowded!
Toward the end of March we were able to have a nice Friday afternoon with Josh and Baby Delia up in Great Seneca Creek State Park. We go here often to play disc golf and it coincidentally is where most of the "Blair Witch Project" was filmed. I had the pleasure of pushing this cutie around while the boys threw the discs. She is quite the happy one!
Delia Marie and Papa Josh. Its nice to have him back after being gone a year with the USAID in Afghanistan. After this we stopped by Dogfish head pub for dinner... delish and perfect end to a lovely day!
Saturday, our friend Travis was in town from Minnesota. I went to graduate school with Travis and worked with him for a few months before he left to get his PhD. This is us bar hopping around DC with Travis, Jessica, Justin, Duncan, and David. Good times!
Getting Whooped at Pool
Guz!!!!
AW! I'm going to miss her when she heads to Wisconsin for her PhD! I best be invited to the wedding!!! (HINT!) :) Nothing better than good friends and good times.
After I got back from Florida, I had Friday off and well I believe I didn't leave the house, I was so tired. So saturday Jim and I packed up the car and took the 15 minute drive over to Great Falls, Maryland. Its on the other side of the Potomac and with all the rain we got that week, the river was flooding. This limited some of the hiking options but it was a nice crowded walk.
This side is called the Cheasapeake & Ohio Canal National Park. It was declared a national park by Eisenhower in 1961, to prevent further decay of the canal. The C&O runs from Georgetown to Cumberland, MD, 184 miles. It used to be called "The Grand Old Ditch" and started in 1828 and was not complete until 1850! It operated from 1850 until 1924, when a series of severe floods damaged the canal beyond feasible repair, especially with the use of railroads. Its main purpose while operational was the transportation of coal from the Alleghany mountains to DC.
It was purchased by the government in 1938 and handed over to the national park service to restore. They restored the bottom parts of the canal (this section) and rewatered it. I believe in the summer one can take a boat ride up the canal, actually by a two-mule powered boat. (we have ventured further up and the canal is not in good shape, it does look like a ditch). When WWII came, they abondoned the canal to put resources elsewhere and I don't think any more restoration has occurred since then in substantial amounts.
In the 50's there was talk of making the canal a parkway! But thanks to some people, including Associate Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who hiked the entire length of the canal with 9 others, drew publicity to the cause and had the entire canal turned over to a towpath. In 1971 it was designated a national park.
This is the Park Visitor Center for Great Falls Tavern. This building has stood here since 1831, it has a few additions but is very similar. The town supported I believe 100 people.
One of the locks w/o water. Continued flood damaged and decreased the functionality of some of the locks and canal itself.
Flooded Potomac
I told you it was crowded! Over 3 million visitors annually
Close to the pedestrian bridge to go over to Bear Island, it was closed off.
raging river, no kaykers there
I'm looking forward to going this summer, hiking it and seeing the difference.
C&O canal rewatered.
Parts look like this and in a post soon, I will show what it looks like further up where no restoration of the canal has occurred.
So we got up EARLY and left Tampa Wednesday morning and headed down to some tomato packers. These guys don't grow the tomatoes, they purchase them and pack them to specific client standards and ship them to retailers/wholesalers. This is a large industry in Florida. In fact, we went to 3 of these I think, at least.
The plastic bins are what the tomatoes are loaded into on the field, bucket by bucket. Green tomatoes are the only ones picked and it takes a decent eye to know when they are about to turn red. Growers want these green so they can chemically ripen them uniformly prior to shipment to wholesalers... NO tomato bought at the grocery store (except maybe vine ripe and cherries) are picked red. The crop in Florida this year is getting better but the earlier freezes really took a toll on production of high quality tomatoes. The field below I think is in Immokolee, Florida.
So while the tomatoes grow, someone must tie more string to support them. This guy is going up and down the row's tying string up and securing the tomatoes. After the season is over, they pull out all the wooden poles and burn the twine and ground.
Tomato blooms in different stages of maturation
This field was HUGE! literally half way to the end. I have never seen so many tomatoes in my life!
The harvesters. Apparently these people are return workers by 80 percent, come back annually and work for this particular farmer. Since the tomatoes aren't that great right now, they are being paid minimum wage and 10 cents per bucket as extra incentive. When the season is more in swing they will get paid per bucket and can pack around 100 an hour.
At another packing house. Katie is demonstrating food safety to the max!
these are considered ugly and a poor crop. But this is what they look like when the first get to the packer.
In the chlorine wash, prior to being sorted and packed
the sorter! I forget the technical term but this is basically sorting the tomatoes by size. Underneath is a tomato trampoline! Clewiston Inn">
This is me at the coolest bar ever... well coolest paint job anyway. With my favorite, Bird of Prey! It closed at 9 pm so I had little trouble to get into. The hotel is the Clewiston Inn, and used to be quite the happening place 80 or so years ago. It is in the middle of sugar cane country and sugar producers in America, make money. So it was interesting to stay here, although it had "The Shining" feel to it. It is on Lake Okeechobee where the Muck soils reside.
In the morning we went to see some lettuce and radish production and was suppose to see Small leafy greens but weather did not permit us to see that as a huge dust/rain storm plowed in. The photo above is sugar cane growing in the muck soil, which was established by the yearly flooding of the lake south and west. These soils are black, like my camera couldn't pick up how black they were. And super light, so erosion is a major factor as well as sinking. Every year these are flooded to maintain the soils quality as best as possible. Sugar cane is touted as a helper but... those are from the producers mouths who gain a lot of support from tax payers to keep that industry alive in the U.S.
Here is the muck soil, with iceburg lettuce being harvested. This harvester is interesting, it moves slowly along the field while workers cut the lettuce and put it on a belt, its rinsed and bagged on site. Its usually shipped the same day.
Field of iceburg with some romaine.
Radish in muck soil.
Radish crop. The machine on the right pulls them out of the loose soil and puts them in a bin, to be brought to the packing house for rinsing, cleaning, cooling, cutting and packing. I have a bag and they were delish!
After this we drove to the airport after a huge dust storm rolled in. And got home 5 hours early and had the worst turbulence ever! Sounded like we almost hit another plane mid-flight.... but alas I lived to endure traffic home.
For those of you who are interested (not many I am sure) but the second week of March, I was included on a Produce Food Safety Tour with the FDA to tour South Florida farms and learn more about the food chain/supply from the farm up to packaging and distribution. It was hosted by the University of Florida's Institute of Food and Agricultural Science and the Center for Produce Safety. We visited farms in Plant City Florida and area's in central Florida, down to Clewiston and over to West Palm back to DC.
We visited mostly berry farms on the first day. Below are a photo of harvest. Strawberries are an winter/early spring crop. Florida starts harvesting in January through March and then California finishes out the season. For those who do not know, there is a HUGE rivalry between California and Florida agriculture. So during this trip, people always had to bring up Cali and say how Florida was better. These strawberries are grown in Plant City, FL, where most of the strawberries grown in Florida come from.
The pickers put the strawberries directly into the store packaging. So really only one set of hands touch your berries before you get them (gloved hands). So be sure to rinse them off, although when the berries are this close to harvest no pesticide/herbicide contact should be made to the actual fruit. This is another reason strawberries are grown/harvested so early in the season, as there is less pest pressure.
The pickers are considered "skilled" as they have to know what ones are ripe enough to pick and do minimal damage to the unripe berries. They are packed into clamshells and brought to this mobile packing shed (pulled by a tractor), placed into cardboard cartons and stacked until large enough to put into a cooled truck and shipped. They can pick I believe (if I remember) up to 10 acres of berries a day! It is one of the hardest fruits to pick and is known as "the devils fruit" as one day of rain and all these berries can be ruined, also its back breaking, people who work the fields for too long in a lifetime can have deformities occur.
Baby berry!
Strawberry blossom, the center will be a strawberry and the yellow will become the seeds
Drip irrigation is used to deliver water directly to the plant, overhead is used for freeze protection. Can you spot the plant that isn't a berry?
That is right, they plant Cantaloupe in the middle so when the strawberry season is over, there is a crop starting to produce later in the year! Farmers= Brilliant! (well most of the time)
After these lovely fields we headed over to "the Boneyard" sounds much worse than actually is. This is basically a wholesale farmers market... or what we would call a farmers market. This is where all food safety traceability is lost (at this particular one, not all farmers markets). What happens is people pack strawberries in cantaloupe cardboard boxes. Cantaloupe is known to have salmonella on the outside, now put strawberries in after... and boom, 10 people get salmonella poisoning. You also see strawberries in a companies box, that is definitely not aware of the selling of those strawberries. People break into fields at night and pick tomatoes off the ground and then pack them and sell them at these places.
I would still shop here though, when you see the produce yourself, its rather nice. But this is what big producers fear, as one person gets sick and they can loose millions of dollars on a vendor that has little to no investment in the industry. Boneyard">
Those look like Cabbage! Not banana's! This is a prime example of the problems with food safety regulations, you cannot account for all these individuals. While there we saw someone load up a horse trailer with produce, most likely bound for a restaurant. Boneyard">
Up next was a citrus packer. It was winter citrus season which I believe is Valencia oranges out of Florida. Most of Florida's citrus is meant for processing, while most fresh market citrus is from California. Florida has seen major loss in crop land due to disease and development. The boom of the 2000's led to many farmers selling to developers... now the groves sit, unattended and harboring disease that can be a major downfall to the Florida Citrus community.
This packing house is outside of Lakeland, Florida. Above is after the oranges are washed and now are being sorted.
The video above is the first half of the washing/sorting. you can see in the far back the bucket dumping the oranges into a chlorine bath, then it is dried and moves along the conveyor...
The video is of the oranges moving through and being sorted, by weight I believe. The woman then slices them in half to check for proper color and make sure they are good through.
Love all the oranges! green oranges aren't bad, they can regreen but the insides are still orange.
This company packs it's oranges in other boxes per customer requests. Above it is packing for Ocean Spray.
Watch how fast these are bagged and put in a box.
the packing line
I have even more orange packing house photos, but I shall spare you the boredom!
After the orange house, we headed over to Sunny Ridge Farms, Mixon Family Farm to check out my personal favorite (wonder why?) BLUEBERRIES. I was a little less interested in them talking but more excited to see a fellow bulldog! One of my committee members was visiting this farm the next day... so it really is a small world.
Southern Highbush blueberry, in blossom and berry stage. There are four distinct types of blueberries: Northern Highbush, Southern Highbush, Rabbiteye, and lowbush. The highbush varitities are the best and most sought after, they have great acid and sugar levels but have a lesser shelf life than rabbiteyes. Rabbiteyes are hardier and do well in warmer climates, and have a great shelf life, but are a bit more on the tart side. Lowbush are mechanically harvested and almost 99 percent of production goes to processing, i.e. blueberry muffin mix. This was a relatively brief stop as we continued down to some grapefruit and orange groves.
We saw several hundred acres of grapefruit and valencia oranges. Above is a grapefruit in bloom, and the smell is heavenly. Light and sweet, it is almost as good as tea olives.
Rows of winter oranges planted east-west. This causes some inefficiency in production as one side of the canopy does not get as much sun and thus doesn't bear as much fruit. So the preferred planting method is north-south, in which most of the sun light is used. These rows stand around 24 feet at the peak.
Blooming winter oranges and the green at the end of the pistil is a future fruit. the end will be considered the blossom end of the fruit, the other end is attached to the stem.
oranges can hold fruit and still flower preparing for the next season's crop.
To end our day we ate dinner at Columbia restaurant in Ybor City, Tampa, Florida. Its like bourbon street in Tampa, bars and restaurants. A bit disappointing as I was there on business and I'm not huge on the whole traveling and boozing.... especially on work time. But Dinner was phenomenal. In fact I wished i took a photo of the plate. Spent the night hanging at the hotel patio with some FDA cohorts, all to begin again Wednesday..... yes... I have more stuff for you... but the next day is less intense.
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