First things first, the weekend weather looks lovely and it's Mother's Day. What better way to spend it than by taking a walk around Drumlin Farm and seeing the spring sights? We'll even sweeten the pot a bit. On Mother's Day, Moms and Grandmoms get in for free!
I sound like a broken record, but it's been a busy week around the farm. Now that the weather is warmer things are really, really, busy for the crops team. This week they installed and tested a new piece of equipment for the tractor, a water wheel transplanter.
As you can see below it attaches to the back of the tractor and has two seats behind two wheels that have metal spikes in them. There's also a yellow water tank.
Once the water is turned on, and the wheels are turning, the metal spikes create evenly spaced holes. The open sides of the spikes allow water to seep into the holes. Since seedlings need to be watered in, this tractor attachment turns what is normally a multi-step process into just one step!
In order to make it easy to dislodge each individual seedling (scallions in this case) from its container as they plant them, they are "pre-loosened." Though you can't see it, there's a hole in the container underneath each seeding. This wood board has pegs evenly spaced that lineup with those holes. Once the planting container is pushed down on the board with pegs, all the seedlings are popped out- or at least loosened.
Here's Greg manning the transplanting seat on the inaugural run. Matt's driving the tractor. First Greg pulls the lever to open up the valve controlling the water.
Then as the tractor starts to run and the holes are created (and watered) he drops seedlings into the holes.
In this first run the tractor was going a bit too quickly to keep up with, so they decided to make a whole row of holes and follow along behind and transplant by hand.
It's a pretty nifty tool!
Also this week I had the opportunity to meet a fairly new Drumlin Farm resident, a raven. The raven's been spending time at Wildlife Care acclimating but is in the process of being transferred to bird hill. We get a lot of questions about how to identify a raven vs. a crow, but I think once you see the raven up close and can compare it to the crow a few cages down you'll see the difference pretty quickly!
And finally, just because they are just so, so, so, cute, a photo of a few of the piglets! Just look at those eyelashes.
