Cucumbers and Mink

On Tuesday, we changed living locations from Jakobstad-Larsmo to about 2 hours south to Korsnas where my grandmother and grandfather's mother are from. We will stay with Mats's sister, Lena, and her husband, Bo, and children, Ida, 20, a college student, and Viktor, 16.

Yesterday, we were invited for the afternoon to Susanne and Harry's house in Edsvik which is like Dothan-Headland, Lynn Haven-Panama City--when does it change? Susanne is a cousin through my grandmother and in 1976 her father rented a car to us when we came for several months. And in 1976 Harry's girlfriend was another cousin of mine, Ulla, and he drove his car to Helsinki to help pick us up. About 2 1\2 years ago, Susanne and Harry, and my cousin Lars Erik and his wife, son, and nephew were to my sister's in Marietta, our house, and to my parents in Panama City for a visit. So now you know who's who in this blog!

Susanne and Harry grow cucumbers for a living year round. The cucumbers are the long 12 inch kind and are grown in huge (180 meter) long greenhouses and they have 2 of them. They are picked often and then picked up by a packaging company. Each plant lasts about 3 to 4 months. The long plastic tube carries carbon dioxide to the plants and they are also automatically watered. When they reach a certain length, the plants are trained over a string and usually double over the string in length (in other words if the plant grew straight up it would be about 12 ft tall!}.

After a nice visit and a good lunch, I walked the kids down the road to my grandmother's old home place. Her childhood house is still standing but has deteriorated and will fall down soon (a sad part of my trip). Of course the large rocks that have many stories associated with them are still there!

Lena's dad, Egil, who is my grandmother's brother, had a mink farm on the old home place for many years and now Bo has taken it over and has expanded it. In 1976, Egil had 3 or 4 mink houses and over the years, he and Bo have expanded it to 10 or 12. He has about 4000 mink. While we were walking around yesterday, Bo came to feed the mink and he showed us around a little bit. He has a large metal building where he processes the mink for their skins. He processes about 3000 per year and it takes about 100 to 150 mink to make a fur coat. The mink houses are exposed outside cages with a long walkway in between the two rows of cages where he can care and feed for them. He adds hay and saw chips-dust to the cages for them to keep warm in the winter. They eat horrible smelling minced fish which is delivered to a hopper once a day and then he hand delivers the food to the cages down the long walkway in each house. (This would be a great episode of *Dirty Jobs* on Discovery Channel)

Pic #1 Bo shows mink pelts Pic #2 Bo with a baby mink
Pic #3 & #4 the mink houses Pic #5 the cucumber greenhouse
Pic #6 Yummy cucumbers ready for shipping Pic#7 (sideways) carbon dioxide carried to plants Pic #8 Harry showing the cucumbers Pic #9 a long row of cucumber plant