After watching a rather inspiring Jamie and Jimmy’s Food Fight we decided we just had to brew our own beer. Jimmy made it look easy peasy and we had a lot of things growing we could flavor our beer with. Fresh honeycomb from the bees. Lemonbalm. etc etc.
Obviously I decided we should grow 100% of what we needed to brew. I started researching barley. I decided on trying Calypso barley for winter planting. Now, we have no idea if it will grow. It’s winter tolerant in Michigan, we have no idea about here. We bought seed from Schmidt Farms. They send us a bushel of untreated Calypso seed with the promise of Odyssey barley to try in the spring.
I never do anything “normal” and growing barley is no different. I planted a nice amount of it in the fenced off garden. I even watered that. I suppose that is my back up barley plan. That barley is likely to grow and succeed. The other plantings, who knows. Fascinated to find out! Some of it is going to be planted in the tree line. I’m interested to see how it does there. Some has already been planted in the un-planted kraters. Then we will plant a few of the bare spots on the land to see if it grows there. May go throw some in the dam area to see how it does there. Based on what grows where we’ll do our spring plantings maybe a tiny bit more structured.
So how am I planting it? Well that varies as well. In the garden I did till. *gasp* I know. Unfortunately the garden keeps getting broken into by chickens and ducks and they’d obliterated the mulch. We had A LOT of weeds growing in the garden and I’d done nothing about them. I could have mulched again but that wouldn’t help us horribly much when I wanted to plant immediately. So we borrowed a tiller and tilled it up. Then I spread the seeds around by hand and raked them in. Then watered. I’ve already chased the stupid ducks out once. I’m trying to keep the annoying creatures locked up. I have no idea how they are escaping the pen. It’s just a few of them that have figured it out, the smaller ones. Probably squeezing under the gate. Anyway, so if the darn birds don’t eat all the seed that one is a sure win for growing.
The kraters were planted by hand. I simply used my new weeding hoe to scratch a trench. Then the kids sprinkled seeds in and I covered it over and stomped it in.
I have no idea if this will work but hey, we’re experimenting here people!
The rest hasn’t been planted yet. We really need to get on it. Unfortunately the tractor battery was dead, dead, dead. We replaced it and now I just need a minute to go get the stuff ready for planting. We are going to plant the rest of the barley like we planted the sainfoin. Use the grader/scraper to rip up the top of the ground, sprinkle the seeds and then grade over it again.
Taking a little planting break with the pup.
Getting her out of the bucket is the hard part.
Coming soon is our hops plant which I believe I will keep inside until spring where it will hopefully be planted on our new pergola by the swim pond.
Wheat isn’t something we don’t have to plant. We get enough seed blowing over from the fields around us that we can just harvest wheat without effort. Now if the wheat grows like that, fingers crossed for this barley!
