August, 2018
Giant marshmallows? Yes! I swear! Look at the picture! Hey, did anyone bring some graham crackers and chocolate bars? 🙂
Ok, this time I am pulling your legs. Unlike those giant octopuses (which are real), the “giant marshmallows” in the photo above are actually bales of hay … huge bales of hay. Late summer is baling time here in the Skagit River valley. It’s interesting to see the different ways they bale hay these days. When I was a kid, the bales were always simple box shapes, but these days there are different techniques and different equipment.
There’s a video online HERE of how one farmer bales hay with that plastic wrap. I understand the plastic helps keep the hay at a specific moisture content for a more successful harvest.
Today I just took my time and drove around this small portion of the Skagit valley and looked at farms and homes and such. Photos here are from that comfortable country drive.
I came across these two old gasoline-powered tillers. Not big enough to till huge fields of hay, but they sure would have been used to till a nice home garden.
This horse with its hood struck me as kind of funny at first … and then I noticed the summer flies hanging around her/his head. Because of the movement of its head, it was obvious to me that the horse could see through the hood, so that was good. That hood kept the flies out of the horse’s eyes and ears. As I traveled more back roads in the area, I noticed more horses with the same sorts of hoods. The horses all seemed to do just fine with those hoods on.
On one back road, these immense fields appeared … acres and acres and acres, many fields with the same crop, along several roads in this one huge area. Each huge field had one person on one small tractor chugging slowly up and down hundreds of rows (and along many miles!) in between rows of the crop.
Blueberries, miles and miles and miles of blueberries.
I found someone in one of the fields who was working near the road on part of the irrigation system and who was willing to talk with me for a moment. He explained that the job of the tractor drivers was to clean out the weeds that grow around the base of each plant. Compare the photo above with the photo below.
I don’t understand how the weeds could be removed by machinery without damaging the blueberry plants, but it certainly seemed to work.
Yum. There were no fences. It was mighty tempting to pick just a few, but I resisted.
In addition to a number of large commercial operations, there were many small farms like the one above, each having a different crop, with the ground in various stages of preparation, some crops not yet harvested, some crops in the process of being harvested. It’s a busy time of year here with long daylight hours and plenty of work to be accomplished.
I loved that almost all homes out here are older, yet very well kept. Folks don’t seem to cotton much to building new homes when simply maintaining and fixing up an old home will do just as well or even better.
I came upon this brand new fire department building. It served quite a sizable area including Rasar State Park and environs. The building is in the “town” of Birdsview. Many years ago (I think I was 13 or 14), our family drove out to this area so that my brother and I could see where our Mom was born and raised. I remember seeing one small, old, tired building that was the Birdsview store … back then that was the entire “town” of Birdsview. On today’s drive, I couldn’t find that store. But Birdsview still exists with this fire station, and I liked that.
Just an old barn. What would country photos be without an old barn?