Field Trip with Justin

Stop #1: Justin's favorite coffee place in Marysville.

We arrived a bit early and discovered a cow being butchered in the back.

The hide is almost off. The slice mark in the side of the carcass splits one half into quarters.

The saw goes down the center of the backbone.

One more to be butchered.

George and Polly Harriger.

Beef age for 14-21 days before being cut according to the customers instructions.

Justin picked up 1 1/2 (of 3) pigs,

and left instructions for how to cut one beef.

A tour of Yuba City's old downtown and where the new shopping areas are, then on to a

tour of local cropland, with a focus on orchards and this nursery:

Top quality fruit and nut trees, 55 years in business, Certified Nursery Stock,
and say their trees are "handmade in Sutter County."

http://www.sierragoldtrees.com/home.html

Almond budwood: These saplings are planted inches apart.
They'll be pulled from the ground and bundled into groups of 10,


laid horizontally onto racks like this,

and put into cold-storage warehouses to be picked up by customers in the spring for planting.

All walnut varieties are grafted onto Black Walnut rootstock.

The almonds have been shaken from these trees and swept into rows.

Many of the nursery properties are lined with fruitless plum trees.

Crop rotation: after a crop of trees has been harvested,
the field is fallowed for two years by growing grains.

The bulge is where the graft is located.

These short squat trees can produce 300 branches which are harvested for propagation.

Olive trees are grown in hedgerows and are harvested by a machine
that travels down the rows and over the tops of the plants.

Loaded with olives!

Sierra Gold is located on the Garden Highway next to a memorial to Sutter's Hock Farm, established in 1841, and constructed with iron from the original building.

Feather River: we're up on a levee at Boyd's Pump Boat Ramp.

Looking the other direction.

Sacramento Ave off Hwy 99 will take you the shortest path to Woodland, but not in winter.

It crosses the Sutter Bypass and floods.

Gravel part of the way, it becomes Kirkville Rd and runs into Road 113.

There was a heavy early winter storm a week or so ago.

This rice wasn't harvested in time and has "lodged."
20-30% of the crop can be lost when this happens.

The End:
the teacher and her tour guide are leaving the building.

Walking the Plank

I decided to walk in the field instead of on the road today. Mistake. This was my first choice to get across the ditch. Turn back? Go on? I knew there was a driveway up ahead. Justin later told me that, last year, the man who lives across the road from this plank fell off and broke his ankle.


Darn. The ditch turned across my path and there's another plank crossing. It wobbled, I stepped carefully.

Success! Justin's driveway is across the road.

Dear Dick,

These are some new dishes for the boat. Note the extra coffee ups, just in case one decides to bounce from the helm station into the water.

I finished the gingham curtain project.
Yup, Starbuck's Mocha Powder is great in my morning coffee. We need this on the boat.

Su esposa, ~A

Not a cute rabbit

As I walked down Justin's driveway this afternoon, this jackrabbit and I both stopped and watched each other, he posed, I snapped several pictures. Later I showed the cutest of the pictures to Justin and got this response, "Damn rodents. They eat through my irrigation lines to the walnut trees and I have to make some kind of repair every 10 days or so."

A phone call from an old & dear friend

When I first started sending out email updates for our bicycle tours, one of my oldest and dearest friends had the most trouble accessing them and really didn't like having her email address listed with 49 others in the "To:" box. I began sending to her as a BCC to make her feel more comfortable. I also emailed her daughter the updates in case she couldn't open them up and later, I sent them to her email address at work.

I first met Paula in the 7th grade when she asked me to sign her petition to run for class office. This was at Rio Linda Junior High School. We became fast friends and, through our high school years, had some typical teenage misadventures. She and her husband Tom, and daughters Shelby and Leslie, now live in Foley AL and Starkville MS.

We had a long and wonderful conversation today. Paula said she loves reading a couple of other family blogs and I have been remiss to update this blog since the end of August. So here goes some gap-plugging in this blog. Thanks, good friend.

Sweet Sophia

Six months old today and eating cereal and fruit while sitting in her Bumbo.

Back to Mexico

Today Dick left for Mexico. Back to work on the boat.