We drove onto I-75 again and it was a very pleasant road, wide, smooth and easy driving. Mostly traffic was not heavy and we left Florida and crossed into Georgia. We began to encounter more hills and fewer palm trees but beautiful countryside. We saw fields and forests, pastures and small towns. We stopped at the Georgia Visitor's Center, after we passed the border and got a new map and information about the state. Georgia is known as the "Peach State" and a major source of pecan nuts. We stopped at a souvenir shop and considered buying an alligator head to keep in the office, but decided against it. I am sure the grandsons would use it to scare and intimidate the granddaughters. Probably not the best idea.
We did stop to scope out the pecan groves, fields of cotton and learn more about peanuts.
We saw a number of fields of cotton as well as soybeans. The cotton is coming close to harvest and a lot of the bolls have opened and the soft cotton, still with the seeds in it, makes white puff balls in the fields.
We could see the fields extending off in the distance and some still green and some brown and many with the white cotton showing.
We also saw fields of low growing plants and had to ask what they were. We should have known but they are peanuts. I have never seen them before and it was a fun thing to learn something new.
This is a field of the peanuts, low growing rows of green
Here we have a closeup of the plants, thick green leaves in bunches.
I found one plant growing as a volunteer outside the rows and decided to do a little pulling to see what the growing peanuts looked like. The soil was extremely sandy and loose, which makes a lot of sense when you remember that the shell of the peanut is thin and if the soil hard and compact, they cannot form. The same thing with potatoes. You can see the peanuts forming on roots of the plant. We pulled them off and opened one. The peanuts inside were soft and white and, amazingly, tasted like fresh peas. Perhaps this is where the name originated.
We also saw beautiful pecan orchards and pecans are a major product in Georgia. We tried to learn a bit more about how they are harvested. You can see from this picture how manicured the orchards are. The trees in orderly rows and mowed grass under the trees. There is a logical reason for this. Harvesting pecans is a unique process. As you can see from the next picture, the nuts grow on the branches enclosed in a green husk. When the nuts are ripe they use a "shaker".
The "shaker" is a machine that grasps the trunk of the tree and literally shakes the nuts loose. They fall to the ground and then the farmers use a "sweeper" to clean them up off the ground. That is the reason for the well kept lawns under the trees. It makes it so much easier to use both the "shaker" and the "sweeper".
We stopped at the Ellis Bros. Nut Store. They had all sorts of pecans and peanuts prepared in a multitude of ways. You could buy bags of pecans in the shell, shelled, in bits or pieces, with chocolate covering or yogurt covering, fixed praline style, etc. We bought some shelled pecans to share with others. It was fun and amazing to see and we delighted in tasting a lot of the chocolate covered nuts.
You can see that they are proud of being "nuts", sort of like the Keddington family is proud of being somewhat "different" or "special".
Further on we stopped at the Lane Orchard Store and had some wonderful peach cobbler, a peach fritter and tasted some delicious peach salsa. We saw fields of peach trees and you can get almost anything made with peaches. A very "delicious" store. You can see that the peach is very prominent here.
We had a good stop and continued on to Macon, GA and we will stay there tonight. Tomorrow we go across the rest of Georgia and into Tennessee.
No comments:
Post a Comment