Whew! Finally we got the wheat in the ground. The weather is warm enough in the daytime to allow the seeds to sprout but chilly enough at night to slow the growth until spring harvest.
We purchased the seeds from the JA, doused them with pesticide to keep the bugs in the soil from eating them up, loaded them into the seed hop and planted them by tractor in all of our 4 fields. The seeder is kind of cool, if you've never seen one (and you won't here because I forgot to take a picture), a little wheel with holes rotates when the tractor moves and the holes around the wheel fill up with 3 seeds that drop down the slot. The other hopper holds fertilizer and that drops down as well. The cultivator turns the soil, the seeds drop in and a little wheel pats it down into neat rows. The mud kept getting clogged in the seed dropping spouts and with high tech coat hangers and bamboo sticks we had to knock the mud off. Because the hoppers are so small, my role was to refill them every couple of rows. It made for a long day. At least it was nice weather!
Then, to frighten away the crows, we put out fearsome bamboo sticks with terrifying pieces of black plastic on them. Frankly, if I were a crow I'd be laughing my feathers off. I should probably stand in the field - that'd scare more of them than these flapping bits of plastic.
No comments:
Post a Comment