Tuesday 6 August 2013

First Grain Harvest


Very exciting day today as I've harvested, by hand, our first oats. The photo doesn't look very impressive but the wheelbarrow is full of organic oats on their stalks. The oat seed were from taken from the Rabbit feed and were then planted in an unused piece of rotovated land just to see what will happen. The biblical sowing technique worked but it made harvesting very hard as the random pattern combined with weeds meant that it was easier to uproot the whole crop then attempting to swing a scythe or sickle.
I'm not going to thresh the harvest but feed everything to the rabbits who will have a field day munching through this.  Overall, this has been a success and I will be dedicating more land to growing traditional farm food including alfalfa, sunflowers, oats to help lower our animal feeding costs. In order to realise this, I'm probably going to have to invest in a small seed drill to ensure straight lines of dense crops which will reduce weeds and hopefully improve yield.

3 comments:

Wulf said...

Do you have any rabbit-toxic weeds? If not, could you just move a temporary shelter over an area and let the rabbits forage directly, saving yourself any harvesting?

Unknown said...

Unfortunately, there are lots of not nice weeds; we would need to build (fort) Bunny knocks and the boys might be distracted by the girls

Unknown said...

The last two bits means that the rabbits would probably escape or be rabbits with eachother!