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Harvested the first of the grain.

Hordeum nigrinudum barley from PR seeds was ripest and I couldn't dent it at all and which the voles left alone, but all 5 were well into the hard dough stage: faust from Ellen, previously via Salt Spring Seeds and which voles liked; Excelsior from Salt Spring Seeds and which the voles absolutely devastated and which also tasted pretty good during the ripeness test; Arabian Blue also from salt spring seeds; and purple dolma barley from the experimental farm network and which the voles really left alone.

Prelude wheat from PR seeds was undentable hard and nice and tall, the heads were beginning to bend. Ethiopian Blue Tinge wheat from salt spring was surprise ripe, at least it was in the very firm dough stage and difficult to dent. It grew closer to knee high, like barley, while the other wheats grew more like shoulder high.

I also harvested most of the bouchard soup peas since the pods were yellow and various levels of deeply wilted and dry/papery. They were in the ground exactly 3 months.

Ceres might be ready soon.

I'm pretty sure there's ergot growing on my triticale! That's... something to think about.

They're in my house drying, all of them, some in brown paper bags and the three bigger harvests (purple dolma and the wheats) in cardboard boxes.

I went out originally because someone on the forums was asking something about uniformity or what they looked like and I wanted to take pictures for her. Then I realized the voles were making serious inroads on my barley and the wheat was ripe, so... I cut it and brought it in.

Do you know those moments when you fit so well and so perfectly into the world that nothing else can possibly have space to feel bad? That feeling of bliss where there is nowhere to go but down, but it doesn't matter because it's just so good in that moment? The feeling of completion where there's no seam between you and the entirety of what is supposed to be? The times when you are given more than you could ever need until it lifts you, like water lifts you, stealing all the weight of everyday? The world-stopping moments when you know you are fully loved, right down to your core and without room even for the shadow of a doubt?

These couple hours of tasting and taking pictures and cutting stalks with my hand-shears and disentangling stalks of different kinds of grain: this is what I was made for. I am so lucky to get to do it.

Edited to add: I somehow forgot to mention just how beautiful these grains are. Hordeum nigrinudum is a two-row awned barley: it looks like a children's drawing of grain but in a dark midnight purple, two short rows of grains in a neat plane on either side of the stalk. Excelsior and purple dolma have marbled green/beige and purple leaves and husks; purple dolma has rather disorganized looking seed-heads like a quick linework sketch while excelsior has rows that wrap around the head and husks that part slightly to reveal very uniform glimpses of shining dark purple-almost-magenta-but-too-dark kernels against the matte husk. They're beautiful. There's nothing better.

Embodied

Jan. 11th, 2019 09:23 am
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So a couple weeks ago Josh was over and broke the snowblower by driving it into the fence. Instead of just breaking a shear pin the whole thing got kinda fucked. It was my new snowblower and I super enjoyed using it.

Luckily Josh is an engineer and ordered the parts; he's coming today to put it back together.

In the meantime we've had a lot of snow.

I've mostly ignored the snow. The geese trample it down by the back door/their waterholes, I park outside the gate, and I wear tall boots back and forth. I worked from home yesterday and shovelled off the decks because it was supposed to warm up today (if it gets warm the snow gets heavy, and if it gets warm then cold the snow gets heavy and then refreezes with a sharp, icy crust).

Yesterday I learned I (or any normal person) can take landrace wheats out of Plant Gene Resources of Canada. They have maybe 300, a bunch seem to have been given from Russia. You get a couple seeds, and you can just... grow them, test them. There are also a bunch of heritage potatoes. But here's the thing. A landrace is the physical manifestation of culture plus an environment. It's the touch of anyone who's ever eaten in a culture, everyone who's touched the soil and everyone who takes food from that soil and prepares it in a certain way, of all the ways animals were kept and used and of what labour was considered reasonable and what was not. To be able to take one of those genesets and grow them and maybe pass them on to someone else to grow in the future-- I imagine it is like handing a bible with a blank extra page at the end to a christian and giving them a pen. I can't describe the feeling. But anyhow, wheat is a big rabbit hole and I love it. I will be test growing a bunch this year (necessary since they don't really sell the old varieties in large quantities so I'll need to save my own seed for the following year's big field).

Today I drove in to work and the power was out. This doesn't mean I get the day off, because I'm set up to work remotely, but it does mean I get to come home. And on the way home I parked on the street and shovelled the end of the driveway for half an hour or so, and filled up the duck pools, and I'm going to let the fire go out and check the chimney to see if it needs cleaning. It feels like spring out there, maybe 2C wih a nice thick clean blanket of snow that's definitely melting a little. Also, half an hour of sweating tank-top-in-January manual labour is really good for my spirits. Plus I got to come home to this:



It feels like sunreturn. Soon it will be light out at 5pm. Soon after that I'll be doing chores in the light. Then the rush of spring will come and everything will happen at once, planting trees and spreading hay in the potato/squash field and making garden beds and moving the greenhouse and season-start training at work.

I've spent the last couple weeks mostly solo here, not many visitors, not going out much. I feel grounded and engrossed in my life.

Embodied

Jan. 11th, 2019 09:23 am
greenstorm: (Default)
So a couple weeks ago Josh was over and broke the snowblower by driving it into the fence. Instead of just breaking a shear pin the whole thing got kinda fucked. It was my new snowblower and I super enjoyed using it.

Luckily Josh is an engineer and ordered the parts; he's coming today to put it back together.

In the meantime we've had a lot of snow.

I've mostly ignored the snow. The geese trample it down by the back door/their waterholes, I park outside the gate, and I wear tall boots back and forth. I worked from home yesterday and shovelled off the decks because it was supposed to warm up today (if it gets warm the snow gets heavy, and if it gets warm then cold the snow gets heavy and then refreezes with a sharp, icy crust).

Yesterday I learned I (or any normal person) can take landrace wheats out of Plant Gene Resources of Canada. They have maybe 300, a bunch seem to have been given from Russia. You get a couple seeds, and you can just... grow them, test them. There are also a bunch of heritage potatoes. But here's the thing. A landrace is the physical manifestation of culture plus an environment. It's the touch of anyone who's ever eaten in a culture, everyone who's touched the soil and everyone who takes food from that soil and prepares it in a certain way, of all the ways animals were kept and used and of what labour was considered reasonable and what was not. To be able to take one of those genesets and grow them and maybe pass them on to someone else to grow in the future-- I imagine it is like handing a bible with a blank extra page at the end to a christian and giving them a pen. I can't describe the feeling. But anyhow, wheat is a big rabbit hole and I love it. I will be test growing a bunch this year (necessary since they don't really sell the old varieties in large quantities so I'll need to save my own seed for the following year's big field).

Today I drove in to work and the power was out. This doesn't mean I get the day off, because I'm set up to work remotely, but it does mean I get to come home. And on the way home I parked on the street and shovelled the end of the driveway for half an hour or so, and filled up the duck pools, and I'm going to let the fire go out and check the chimney to see if it needs cleaning. It feels like spring out there, maybe 2C wih a nice thick clean blanket of snow that's definitely melting a little. Also, half an hour of sweating tank-top-in-January manual labour is really good for my spirits. Plus I got to come home to this:



It feels like sunreturn. Soon it will be light out at 5pm. Soon after that I'll be doing chores in the light. Then the rush of spring will come and everything will happen at once, planting trees and spreading hay in the potato/squash field and making garden beds and moving the greenhouse and season-start training at work.

I've spent the last couple weeks mostly solo here, not many visitors, not going out much. I feel grounded and engrossed in my life.

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