Brown/Bender Farm

While we were working in our Southernmost field(Bender South) this season I noticed the park pouring thousands of dollars into the restoration of the barn across Akron-Peninsula. It is a large 3 story barn that was built by the son of legendary counterfeiter Jim Brown. Jim Brown owned a tavern in Boston Twp.(still standing across from Boston Mills) and was arrested multiple times for his scams and counterfeiting. There is a legend that he robbed the San Fransisco Mint and buried the gold somewhere in the Valley and died before telling anyone the location(he died from a fall on a canal boat).
I wanted to get a good photo from the other side of the barn to show its large size but I would have needed my wide angle lens to fit it.

Barn Dust

This evening Dave, Johnny and I were organizing and cleaning up the old Red Barn. We were sweeping the floor when I realized the cool way the light was shinning between the barn's siding. Johnny said I should go grab my camera - I did. I took this with a 3.2 second exposure at f/22. I wanted to try out more settings but I was working......so I just snapped a few shots and got back to the sweeping......

Fall Sunrise

With our later "Fall Hours" starting today at the farm instead of sleeping in(a bit) I went out and shot some photos. I rarely get good fall color pictures because of work and I decided to change that. I shot these at what we call "The Big Field" this morning. Its a field near the Everett Road Covered Bridge(below) in the Summit County Metro Parks.

In the Fall we plant oats the fields where we harvested our sweet corn. Below are the oats I spread sprouting.

Sunrise Pumpkins

This is Dave putting out pumpkins this morning - even though we are done with sweet corn at the farm there is still plenty of Fall work to do until we close on Halloween.

I had my camera with me hoping to catch a certain photo with the early morning light, but unfortunately it didn't work out. I'm going to try again tomorrow.

Last Load 2010

Today we picked the last load of sweet corn for the season at Szalay's Farm. The 'last load' day is always a big one - long , hard hours go into corn season and its always a proud moment and a relief to be done. The above photo is of Johnny Szalay, me, and Dave Gottas - the full time 7 day a week corn crew. Below is the whole Saturday crew.

Allis-Chalmers WD

I snapped this photo of a early 50's Allis-Chalmers WD at a produce auction near Lodi. Antique tractors are pretty popular photographic material - and I see why - they look sweet.

In the Beacon a while back there was an article on a man who carved old tractors. He was putting down modern tractors for their air conditioning, radios and the like. A few weeks ago John Szalay was telling me about some of the old Olivers they used to use on the farm. He said, "Man, most of the time you felt like you where working harder than the tractor." Fifties tractors look great - I'll take the cab and the air on our John Deere 7830 any day though.