Another garlic job: cutting small bulbs

At this time, we have to cut small bulbs which are produced by garlic. Nowadays, their are not usesful because picking up them to be sold isn't worth. Few years ago, we sold them but nowadays they don't have good sale. You can find them in supermarket easily. They are frozen, cut pieces of 3cm and mixed with other vegetables like asparagus. They have a strong taste and they are used to cook omelettes in Spain, for example.

These stems are cut before haversting garlic (when they are sold we have to cut and harvest them manually and they are stored in bags of 20kg). In this case, we have to cut them again after garlic harvesting, because these bulbs continue growing as they are fed from garlic, so this can affect to size of garlic negatively because they reduce the garlic thickness.

As you can see in our pictures, we use two type of mower: a central mower and lateral mower. The central mower is more confortable to use it before garlic harvesting (specially if we have a fix system water in our field). When garlic are located in scores after harvesting, we use a lateral mower which allow us to cut these stems without problems (we have to work in two sides of scores).

You can see a video in our YouTube channel.

Joaquín y Herminio Tribaldos (Twins' Farm)

Bread wheat. Other harvesting day

We finished harvesting our wheat and triticale a few days ago. It is always after harvesting barley. This season was not great for wheat or triticale, because May and June were very dry and wheat and triticale need to be watered before its dry for harvesting. In spite of this, we had an average of bread wheat about 3,000kg/ha and an average of triticale about 2,500kg/ha.

We show you a few pictures of Claas Lexion 540 (you can see me too :), of course) and a video I took with my cell phone.

Joaquín y Herminio Tribaldos (Twins' Farm)

Summer and harvesting purple garlic

We are in harvesting purple and white garlic season. During these days, farmers work against time to harvest garlic in optimal conditions. For that, there are few types of harvesters: harvester binder (one or two rows) and harvester cutter (one, two or five rows). We use harvester binder of one o two rows because we think they can adapt better to awful conditions of soil and garlic.

The garlic harvester binder ,as you can see in our pictures and video, works with a row only. This machinery is made for Erme or JJ Broch...These two brands have bigger performance than the other machinery. The working speed is high (about 8km/h) and if you don't have a lot of problems with automatic bundle binding system you can harvest about 2ha with one row harvester binder. We prefer to use two row harvester binder because you can save diesel and time with the same work.

This garlic campaign is going to achieve a high quality, but I think the size of garlic is a bit smaller than years before. May was warm and it is good for garlic, though it had a few cold days and this condition stopped the garlic growth. Despite these problems, I think we will have really great results with our purple garlic.

I would like to comment we traditionally used to sow garlic in the best fields, but in lasts years we have gotten very good results sowing in worse fiels than before because of the large yield. I guess it is thanks to fertilizer we use nowadays and the effect of the climate change.

You can see a video from our YouTube channel.

Joaquín y Herminio Tribaldos (Twins' Farm)

Picking up stones

A few days ago, we went to visit our friend Julián when he was in one of his fields who was picking up stones to sow cereals the next winter.

It was the first time we saw a rock picker machinery working (a Tasias Rock Picker M3) and we have to say that it really performs a good work. This machinery can be setted with several iron grills to pick up different size of stones. The iron fingers, which push stones into the tank, can sometimes be broken if they are hit with a big stone, so the farmer should have spares of them to repair the machinery quickly. I think it is the only common trouble this machinery can have.

The working speed is very low, but it depents of amount of stones there are in our field. The John Deere 6100 has to carry out an important effort because stones are too much heavy and the P.T.O. needs a lot of power.

You can see a video from our YouTube channel.

Joaquín y Herminio Tribaldos (Twins' Farm)