theboondork's RV blog

I'm enough of a country boy to know How to use a hoe.

1/23/2019

Driving down highway 95 to Yuma I passed a bunch of farms and decided to take a few pictures. Since I was going shopping I didn't bring my Canon camera, all I had was my Sony pocket camera that I keep in the console of the truck. And it takes okay pictures but it doesn't do very well zooming in and everything I was taking pictures of was far away .

I went to Yuma yesterday and did a little shopping, and I was really surprised at how busy the town was. I went to a Home Depot and the parking lot was more than half full and there was a lot of people in the store. Then I tried to go to a Walmart and my GPS took me to a giant empty lot. Maybe there was a Walmart there at one time but not anymore. While looking for the Walmart that didn't exist I accidentally bumped into the Chinese restaurant I wanted to eat at so I had lunch there. It was packed with people even though it was about 2 o'clock when I got there.

At Home Depot I bought an air filter like the kind you would put on your heating furnace at home because I've been thinking about a project to make my own air filter for the Arctic Fox.

Some of you may remember that a year or two ago I bought a home air filter at Walmart and used it in the Arctic Fox for several months and after those several months were up I could tell no difference in the amount of dust floating around in the Arctic Fox, and the air filters pristine white filter material still looked too white to have been taking much stuff out of the air so I gave the thing away.

But I got to thinking that there never was much air moving through that filter and maybe it would work better if it moved a lot more air around. Now I already have a 12 volt Fantastic Fan, Endless Breeze, floor fan that I use in the summer and it moves a lot of air, a whole lot more than my Walmart air filter ever did.

So I got to thinking why not just tape a home type air filter to the back of the Endless Breeze Fan and maybe it would work better than the Walmart air filter.

My biggest concern was that a decent air filter, one that takes out pollen and all kinds of teensy weensy stuff would restrict the airflow too much and the fan wouldn't operate properly but I needed to test it to find out if my concept would work.

So I bought a moderately good air filter for about 10 bucks that's supposed to remove things that I hope I don't even have floating around in here, cut it with a pair of scissors to the right size and taped it to the back of the Endless Breeze fan.

I've only run it for a few hours so I can't tell if it's removing much of anything from the air, but I can say that I feel no difference in the amount of air coming out the front of the fan with or without the filter on the back. So it looks like it will move plenty of air and if the filter does its job maybe it will help alleviate some of the dust that mysteriously finds its way into the Arctic Fox.

theboondork

Whatever these folks are picking, and I think it's lettuce but I'm not sure, certainly looks like hard backbreaking work. I did a little, very little, farm stoop labor work when I was a teenager and it definitely reinforced the validity of what my dad was telling me about getting a good education.

This was kind of odd. I took this picture from far away and I thought it was some farm laborers waiting to go to work. But when I put it on the computer and zoomed in it turned out to be a group of old folks watching the people in the picture above, work. Maybe they were on some kind of farm tour or something but they looked kind of strange standing out there in the middle of nowhere like that.

This is a close-up of what there picking. And I'm not at all sure what it is. Maybe someone could enlighten me.

Laborers working in the field Yuma Arizona

these folks are hoeing, so I guess you could call them hoers. For you city folks that have never been on a farm in your entire life, bear in mind that hoeing has a completely different meaning on a farm than it does in the city.

6 Comments

JWFitz

1/24/2019 04:18:09 pm

Looks to me like they are picking romaine lettuce. That's a lot of Caesar salad. The pic of what you said they were picking appears to be chard. There is a difference in the color of the leaves.

Tom

1/24/2019 04:23:50 pm

Thank you for clearing that up, I don't think I could tell a Chard from a Romaine unless it was laying in a Walmart with a label and a price tag on it. But I did know that Yuma was big on growing lettuce.

Tom

Tim link

1/24/2019 09:53:22 pm

It does look like they are picking chard. However, the close up photo you have looks different - that looks like broccoli to me. I did a Google search and it said that a lot of broccoli is grow in Yuma, so it's a possiblity.

1/24/2019 10:05:13 pm

I think I've figured out that I drove down the side of the road for about 50 feet from where the people were working and took the picture of what I thought they were picking, but apparently that was a different crop.

They had things in every stage of growth. I watched them planting things and I watched them harvesting things, I guess they keep things growing all the time.

I also saw some gleaners there going through the fields that had already been picked and salvaging what had been missed. It briefly crossed my mind to get some free food but I was too lazy. And now that I've found out it was Chard and Broccoli I'm glad I passed it up. If they had been growing bacon I woulda been all in.

Tom

1/25/2019 09:28:22 am

Hmmm, bacon . . . I used to think I didn't like brussel sprouts until I sauteed them with bacon; now they are one of my favorites and a staple of my diet. Throw some bacon in there and I can eat any vegetable. I've always like broccoli, but it goes to new heights with bacon. Love me some bacon.

1/25/2019 10:31:37 am

When I was raised in the South, cooking with bacon fat and lard was what everybody did, and I remember in my teens when my mom switched to Crisco nothing tasted as good anymore, she said it was more healthy. The odd thing is I don't remember seeing many fat people when I was growing up, being fat was an oddity. But now we have all these "healthy foods" and being overweight is normal.

Now I know all that didn't happen during my generation because I've seen adult clothes in museums that would barely fit a 12-year-old today, but I don't see any evidence that today's "healthy foods" are making a difference for the better.

I know there's a lot more reasons for that than just cooking with Crisco, such as people don't have to work as hard, some people drink way too many sodas, and snack foods are large part of our diet. But it's always a shock to me when I go back to the South and see how many overweight people there are. For some reason Colorado doesn't seem to have as many overweight people, maybe it's the altitude. Or maybe it's because I left.

Tom

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I'm enough of a country boy to know How to use a hoe.

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