BQ 'In the Field'

So that does it for 2019! It was a great growing year in both MN and NY. We harvested about 800-900 bushels total so far. That's about 50,000 pounds of popping goodness. We have one more field in NY that is still drying, and hopefully the most recent snowstorm doesn't take a big toll. But sometimes waiting is the best option. At Kelder's we opted to take it a day before the storm, and we're drying it down in house now. In Minnesota we took it over a month ago and were able to bin dry it somewhat...But not completely. ...

Snapped this nice picture of a Monarch butterfly with the BQ barn in the background. This guy should be one of the "super-generation" that will make the incredible flight from here to Mexico to overwinter. Most generations of Monarchs only live for one month, but this one will live up to 8 months! He'll flutter 50 miles a day to reach Mexico, and no one knows exactly how he performs the navigational feat. Monarchs are on the decline, possibly because of the decline of the one plant they can lay their eggs on- milkweed. Milkweed produces a bitter sap that the...

As promised I will detail a bit more about cleaning popcorn. Usually when I talk to someone about this they wonder if I'm lathering and rinsing the seeds. I am not. The more appropriate name for the process would probably be classifying. Like panning for gold. I only want the gold. To do this we start with a machine called a screener / scalper. It is commonly referred to as a 'Clipper'. It takes in the shelled popcorn, scalps out the larger debris with the top screen and screens out the smaller debris with the bottom screen. This model is...

While we were in the Tucson area, we made a pilgrimage to the hippy-nerd mecca of Biosphere 2. You may remember the news sensation this experiment caused in the 90s, or maybe you only know and love it from the Pauly Shore movie Biodome. How there has not been a more serious film treatment of this story I have no idea, because it's just about the greatest story ever told.  Basically, a science-oriented theater troupe teamed up with a Texas billionaire to build a Mars colony on Earth: a totally self-contained 3 acre greenhouse. The troupe would live in it...

  We just got back from doing some solar thermal prototyping in the Arizona desert. We are testing our ground based solar concentrator with 2 dimensional curvature rather than 3d; the 'trough' rather than 'dish' geometry. The ground-based trough is still the spherical geometry that we've used in our popcorn making basins, so the reflector itself doesn't need to track the sun to stay focused.  Linear scalability is the main reason the trough is attractive; a trough can be extended in one direction without the hole getting any deeper. The lamination of reflective material is also simplified, as is the...