|
Picture of the day -
September 10, 2006
A Bumper Crop Of Pumpkins In Shady Valley, TN
Click photo to enlarge
Since it was a beautiful day here in the Mountain Empire, Cheria
and I decided to take an afternoon drive through the scenic rural
community of Shady Valley, Tennessee. Shady Valley is a true valley
in every sense of the word - it is almost completely surrounded by
mountains. In fact, the only way to exit the valley without
crossing a high mountain ridge is by taking Highway 133 through the
tunnel at
Backbone Rock and on to
Damascus, Virginia.
Shady Valley is one of the most beautiful places on the planet.
Virtually the entire area between the three mountain ridges consists
of level farmland with numerous barns, pasture fields and vegetable
patches sprawling out in every direction from the "4-way
intersection" located in the middle of the valley. If the Great
Plains region is the "breadbasket of America", then Shady Valley
must surely be the "breadbasket" of the Mountain Empire because the local farmers raise farm animals and
crops of all types, and lots of them!
As we were driving through "Shady" this afternoon, Cheria and I saw
several fields that were full of ripe pumpkins, ready and waiting to be harvested
and sent on their way to the stores in time for Halloween. There
were so many pumpkins lying in the patches that all you could see
was a sea of orange unless you slowed down to take a closer look. It
was quite a sight to see.
Well, apparently some of this year's bumper pumpkin crop had already
been harvested because we soon came upon a barn holding a wagon load
of the orange, beach-ball sized gourds. I stopped the car and peeked
inside the barn, and what I saw amazed me! In addition to the
wagon load of pumpkins that we had spotted from the road, there
was also a long "Semi" trailer stacked high with hundreds more ripe
pumpkins. There must have been at least a thousand of them in total!
I had always wondered where all those Halloween pumpkins we see in
the stores every October come from, and now it's quite apparent that a
large portion of them come from the beautiful fields of Shady
Valley, Tennessee!
Picture Of The Day Homepage |
Submit
a photo
More Interesting Articles
|
|
|