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Updated 95 Days ago
Make Memories at Eckert's
When I think back to my childhood, several things stand out. One of those things is standing on the deck of my house, backpack in hand, while my mom took our first-day-of-school picture. This tradition continued well past grade school, but that's another story.
The other annual event that takes me back to that seasonal transition into Fall is apple-picking at Eckert's. When I think of biting into a sun-warm, crunchy Jonathon apple while gazing down the picturesque rows of apple trees, my mouth starts to water.
Although I remember the orchard for the fun that I had picking apples, I've recently discovered that there is more to Eckert's than meets the eye.
Click here for a full list of all the events that you can participate in with friends and family, and here are a few upcoming ones at various locations to get you started.
August 28
Cooking Class – Express Dinners (Belleville)
This time of year time is on the essence with kids going back to school and schedule changes...who has time to think about complex meals? We have you covered with express dinners that you can throw together in no time that are quick, delicious and nutritious all at the same time. Class will take place at Eckert’s Country Store in Belleville, Illinois from 6 p.m. – 8 p.m. $25 per person. To make reservations, please call (618)233-0513.
August 30 & 31
Honey Crisp Weekend (Belleville, Millstadt & Grafton)
Ride the wagon out to the orchard to pick-your-own apples. For more information call Eckert’s Harvest hotline at (618)233-0513 x 1 or (800)745-0513 x 1.
August 30 & 31 and September 1
Barnyard Olympics (Belleville)
Load up the kids and head out to Eckert's to place in our second annual Barnyard Olympics! There will be several events including: kid's tractor pull, chicken plop bingo, goat scramble, pig races, greased pig contest and more. Other activities include, live music, carnival rides, face painting, animals for petting and pony rides. Event will take place from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m.
September 1-14
Bloomin' Bucks Days (Belleville)
Time to harvest some great savings when you redeem your Bloomin’ Bucks at Eckert’s Garden Center. Beautiful shrubs, trees and bulbs are ideal for fall planting. Great landscaping ideas, decorative gardening accessories and much more will have your lawn and garden looking great! For more information, contact Eckert’s Garden Center at (618) 233-0513 x 120.
I think I might be up for the goat scramble. Eh?
About The Author:
I just moved back to The Lou from CoMo and I'd love to hear from you. Shoot me an idea/comment/bored rambling at audrey@toastedrav.com.I am also an expert at the Chicken Dance, and I am willing to give lessons for a small fee.
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What is reCAPTCHA?
reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books.A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them Ñ colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.
About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.