Kicking and a' gouging in the mud and the blood and the beer

A couple of weeks ago, I was saying there was no way I could plant barley up at Ravenna with all this snow. Last week’s 60 degree temperatures changed that. But this weekend’s rains made me feel like one of the peasants stacking mud pies in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

I’d had a grandiose goal of clearing a 40 ft square barley field. But, you see, mud gets heavy and is hard to shake off of shovels, rakes, etc. More importantly, I did not have as much barley seed as I’d thought. So the result was these two trenches instead of a square field. I removed all the sod, tilled and raked the rows, and planted the seeds. There’s no time to order more barley seed for this year. I’m just going to see how this much goes, what it yields, and then decide whether to expand my operation. It was a much easier time clearing the spots for my apple and grape plants.



Saturday morning, I thought the flood was going to get into screen house in front of my parent’s place. Didn’t happen. I’m very glad of that, since I remember painstakingly scraping all the mud off the concrete stones after the 1996 flood.