Garden Update July 26 2014

I was worried, we had two days of solid rain on Wednesday and Thursday but a nice sunny day on Friday. Rain is bad at this time of the year not only for lodging but for mould and fungus. When I got to the garden this morning I was so relieved to find the barley looking very healthy and quite perky. I’m having a hard time being patient though. A lot of the barley is ready for harvesting but there are also a lot of heads that still have some green on them. You can see the green hairs in the pictures below. I hand picked some ripe heads, about 5 lbs. in an hour but it was difficult not to accidently grab a green one in the process, so I’m going to have to wait. Something very cool I’ve noticed with the Maris Otter is that it has strong roots which makes it easier to harvest. With the Conlon I found that when I tried to use a sickle it would pull the straw out of the ground without cutting it,  so I had to use the shears to cut the heads off which is much slower. We’ve got some perfect weather in the forecast so I should be able to harvest more next week.

Notice the green hairs, the one on the right is ready.

Garden friends

About 5 lbs. Lots more to harvest next week.

 

 

Garden update July 18 2014

A little lodging, this time it’s not a big deal.

If you take a close look at the green stalks on the right side of this bed you can see that they’re falling over. In this bed and one other one the chicken wire slipped down to about a foot from the ground. Fortunately the wire still kept the barley from touching the ground and I was able to lift the chicken wire up. I propped it up with a few sticks and the barley straightened out. My main concern is keeping the seed heads away from the mice – so far so good. The other beds are fine with no lodging, in fact this one is almost ready to harvest.

One more week.

Here’s a close up.

 

2014 Competition Results