Old Fields & New Corn

Autumn Planting Festival, or What I Learned From Killing a Chicken (part 3 of 3)

2011-10-17T22:08:00.003-07:00

And so, I was the first one up. I reached in and after a little bit of shuffling around managed to get ahold of one of the hens. We decided to do the rooster last, since he would likely be the hardest to kill and we wanted to refine our method. I walked over near the table and began swinging the chicken. Then as I contemplated bringing the chicken’s head down on the table, I realized that I was swinging it underhanded, so I was going the wrong way. Stop and try again, swinging overhand. Around ... around ... around ... bring it closer to the table ... miss ... around ... closer still ... smack!

Wings flapping wildly ... look at it ... eyes still open ... struggling ... around ... smack!! ... still fluttering ... around ... smack!!!

Get it on the table ... still flopping a little ... grab cleaver ... what do I do now? ... get knife under the feathers ... cut? no ... pull cleaver back and bring it down hard ... hit with the heel of the blade, draw blood, but little else ... is it going to spurt? ... put the cleaver on its neck ... push hard ... nothing happens ... pull the cleaver back again ... aim is good, hit the neck with the front of the blade ... goes through most of the neck ... it’s bleeding, but slowly ... there are three or four splatters on the table ... bring the knife back for another blow ... there’s blood on the knife ... Oh My God!, There’s Blood On The Knife ... bring it down again ... no effect ... the head is off except for the skin of the other side ... set the knife in the gap ... there’s a gap between its neck and its head! ... slice and they’re completely separated ... push the head away from the body with the knife ... set the knife down next to the head ... I’m done ... step away from the table.

I remember stepping away and everyone coming down to the table. At some point I picked it back up and there was discussion about how to drain the blood. In the end I just put it feet up in a bucket.

Then I realized that I was breathing heavy and fast. My heart was beating fast. I as giddy, maybe hyper-ventilating. I don’t really know what I was feeling. It wasn’t triumph or exultation. I didn’t feel particularly accomplished. It hadn’t been difficult, either physically or emotionally. I hadn’t felt bad for the chicken or like I was doing something cruel. But I definitely felt _something_. And pretty strongly.

Kelsey was up next. She had a little trouble getting the chicken up and around, but she did it. It took a couple of tries to stun the bird, but she eventually got it. The video shows me helping her cut off its head, but I do not remember that at all.

Layla took the third one and it (or maybe it was Kelsey’s, I don’t remember now) was really active even without its head, managing even to flop its way off of the table.

The rooster was last, and Doug decided that he would take on that beast. He had a little trouble getting out of the dog carrier and the only way he could get it was to grab it by the neck. I guess that gave him an idea because then on the walk over the to table he suddenly, to everyone’s surprise, just wrenched the rooster’s neck around, first one way then the other. It was over very quickly and with a minimal amount of kicking and flopping around. It bled a bit more than the others, but still there was very little blood, even once we started cutting them open.

Once all four had been killed there was a definite party atmosphere. The spectators came down and got a close look at the birds. They took pictures and got close up looks at the bloody tools and table. We talked. We laughed and joked. We reminisced. It was a lot of fun. There was a certain amount of closeness and togetherness among us that I have rarely felt. Maybe this is why people go out on team-building events. But the emotions going through me (whatever emotions they were) really made me feel something special with everyone there. It was especially true with the Portland folks, Doug, Jon and Gwynn, who I didn’t know nearly as well, but by the end of the day I knew we would all be lifelong friends.

Still flush with our victory over chicken-kind it was time to butcher them up and turn them into meat. The first step was the de-feathering. We dunked them into hot water to loosen them up and then began that messy job. The smaller feathers came out very easily, but the larger ones on the tail and the wings were stuck on there good. Many of mine broke before coming out and had to be pulled out with tweezers later. The process was easier, work-wise, than I had expected, but more tedious and time consuming than I had thought.

The real time consuming part was the butchering. Doug, Gwynn and I (and maybe someone else, my memory is a bit hazy already) did this part. Kelsey was there helping, because she had at least seen it done before, while Chris stood on the porch with her laptop giving us unstructions (that was a typo, but after seeing it and remembering how not helpful they were, I decided to keep it) off of the internet.

The first step was to get the neck and crop out. The crop, I guess, is some sort of second stomach in the chicken’s neck or high up in its chest. The goal was to get it out without piercing it so all of that half-digested glump didn’t get all over the bird. These birds had recently fed, so the crop was full of grass and grain. There was a lot of slow going and being extra careful with the knife, trying our best not to puncture it. I wound up cutting into mine, but it was near the top and containable.

The next step was cleaning out the intestinal cavity and that wound up being a lot of work. It started with cutting ope a large hole in the bird’s abdomen, all the while being very careful not to cut too deep and puncture the intestines. So once again, not really knowing what we could and could not cut deeply into, we cut very slowly. Our knives too, were not the sharpest. These chickens had a ton of fat on them, especially in their bellies that we were cutting through.

Once the hole was made, we had to insert our hands into the cavity and separate the internal organs from the walls of the cavity. The worst thing about it? They were still warm inside. It was a very disconcerting reminder that this bird had been alive two hours ago. Once the guts were out, a few quick knife cuts removed the whole kit and caboodle from the chicken. And there you could see everything, much clearer and more obvious than in 10th Grade Biology class frog. Liver, heart, intestines, kidneys.

Meanwhile, it was starting to get cold. The sun had gone down behind the house and the wind had picked up. Most folks had gone inside, both in search of warmth and there were things to do in there. Christine cleaned and did some of the detail de-feathering that we hadn’t. Kelsey and Layla finished up the bread and got it into the oven. Kelsey get her Rosemary Chicken all prepped and ready to go. I’m sure other stuff happened in there too, but Doug and I were outside and didn’t see most of it.

I got a second chicken that had been cut open, but nothing removed, and knowing what I could and couldn’t do a lot better, made quick work of getting those guts out. Doug, meanwhile, had gone to work on the rooster. Now he turned out to be quite a bit different on the inside than the hens had been. His breastbone was a lot longer meaning that the opening to his internal cavity was smaller, which we were initially worried about, but wound up only being difficult because Doug has big hands. Why? Because he had practically no fat on him. The hens had been covered in fat, both under their skin and surrounding their intestines. Bright yellow, shiny masses of it. But the rooster must have been a lot more active because he had none of that and once Doug was able to get his hand in there to loosen everything up, his guts came right out.

And there we had it. Four chickens looking much like they would have in the store. Not exactly, as I realized as I began chopping them up into pieces to go in the various dishes. The breasts were very small. The skin was tougher and more yellow in color. The dark meat was much darker in color. And they were a lot fattier, at least the three hens.

One went in the soup pot. One went into a baking pan whole, flavored with rosemary. One went separated into a baking pan covered in white wine and apricot preserves. And the rooster went into a ziplock bag and into the freezer. After all, we’d only expected three chickens for dinner.

There was some time for hanging out and talking while the chickens cooked. The mulled mead, my regular mean, watered down and with cinnamon sticks, whole cloves, whole allspice berries and nutmeg mixed in and heated, was a big hit, so we made another batch of that. There was some playing of Rock Band.

I was just glad to have my hands washed and be warm. By the end there, it had gotten bitchly cold outside and I had disembowelled two chickens and chopped into bits three more. I’ll be happy not to have to do that again for a couple of weeks. I was a little disappointed that we hadn’t been able to get to the planting of the grains, but that was pretty minor. We’d been busy!

The chickens cooked for an hour and we had two more people arrive -- Ali and Erik, friends of mine. The chickens were all done at that point, but I realized that I’d forgotten to make noodles to go along with the one dish, so we whipped those up quickly. We also hadn’t made any plans for what we were going to eat off of, but at last I found some old paper plates, two more than we needed.

We all stuck in and ate. The chicken was ... disappointing. It was very tough. This had been a concern of mine. Several websites had said that the chicken needed to be aged for 48 hours after killing to let the rigor mortis and other death processes run their course. Other websites and forum posts had said that it wouldn’t be a problem. Well, it was, or at least something was. Even the chicken in the soup was tough, so we decided to forgo the soup and just keep cooking it, and see if it would soften up. It eventually did, but not until the next morning.

Also, the chicken did really taste different to me. Some people said it was “gamey” but I didn’t taste it. It’s one of those things: people go on and on about how much better fresh food is and how it’s worth the extra price, but you know, to me, it just tastes the same.

But the bread was a big hit and there was enough food for everyone to get their fill. We sat around a talked for another hour or two, split up into two groups. Eventually the Seattle people had to leave, so we said our goodbyes. But the Portland crew was staying the night on our couches and they were up for some TV, so we watched quite a few episodes of Black Books and had Cake Martinis. And that was the Fertility Festival.

I did actually forget a couple of things. At some point before dinner, Doug and I were cleaning up. It was after dark and there was still a big tub of water in the yard with the guts of one of the chickens (my second one) which had accidentally fallen in the tub while I was cutting it free from the chicken. We looked at each other, wondering what to do with it, and then Doug suggested we bury it in the field. Christine, earlier, had emptied one of our bowls of knife cleaning water into the field, with a brief invocation to Demeter. Both of these remembrances of the field meant a lot to me.

My daughter, Becca, had left the party after the killings were over, because she had a big school event going on, but before she left she said that she wanted one of the heads so that we could render down the flesh and get a chicken skull out of it. Now, we all knew that by ‘we’ she actually meant someone who was not her, more than likely me. But we took the rooster head, since it hadn’t been smashed against anything and put it in a pot on the barbeque’s stove. We wound up throwing the other three heads in as well, because ... why not? They simmered there all through dinner with no change in fleshiness and wound up stinking pretty bad (maybe because they still had some feathers on them?) We quizzed Becca the next day about whether she would help out to get her skull, and she vehemently declined. So, I decided to take them and bury one in each corner of the field, my little sacrifice to the grain spirits.

So what did I learn? I don’t really know. I picked up some skills. I could probably butcher a chicken in half the time it took that first time. Medievally, I guess I learned that there isn’t really that much meat on a regular, somewhat natural bird, but there can be a lot of fat, which in the medieval/iron age mind is a big thing. I gained some new respect for butchering a bird like that. I mean, our knives weren’t very good modern ones, how hard would it be with an iron one? But I can certainly see that a couple eggs a week would be a lot more valuable than the meat off of the chicken.

What did I learn about myself? Share more. Invite people into my world. Everyone had a great time. Not because I kept to myself and expressed the interests of the herd. But because I shared what I was truly interested in and it turned out that other people were too. Several of us commented afterwards that we’d remember that day for the rest of our lives. Does that happen by being boring? By doing what everyone else does? By keeping those ideas hidden away inside? Nope, only by sharing them and making them happen.

The other thing that I ‘learned’ or may yet learn from is that emotion I felt after the killing. I’ve been thinking about it all day as I write this and I still don’t have a good explanation or description for it. I guess it feels like exhilaration, except that I had no expectation of feeling that way, no ramp up ‘this is going to be so exciting’ feeling before hand. And so it doesn’t quite feel right to call it a thrill. (It’s also mildly disturbing to call it exhilarating when it was murdering a living thing.) I would expect that such a feeling would dissipate as I did it more and it would become mundane, which was how I was expecting it to feel.

And everyone had a great time. It was a memorable experience that brought us all together. I think the lot of us that killed and gutted those chickens in some way bonded over that experience, and that feeling, that effect doesn’t need anything else. Even if we hadn’t learned anything, or felt anything, that bonding was enough to make it a wonderful day. Thank you, everyone, for being there and sharing it with the rest of us.

Autumn Planting Festival, or What I Learned From Killing a Chicken (part 2)

2011-10-17T22:08:00.001-07:00

We got to sleep late that night and there was a little bit of panic when I woke up and realized that I had slept in by a few hours. I got out my laptop with the intention of writing myself a script of what I would say later on and then wound up taking to Chris and then Doug and Jon and Gwynn as they woke up. Before I knew it, it was 9:40 am and time to get the chickens.

I had borrowed a small dog carrier from Kelsey a few days before, so I loaded that up in the car and drove down to get the chickens. Google maps had suggested one route, but it had seemed to go in circles, so after a bit of futzing with waypoints I got it to give me a route that looked much more direct. Except that it wound up taking me through the parking lot of a huge apartment complex which would have actually worked, except that the back entrance/exit to the parking lot was blocked off with a locked gate. Fifteen minutes later, I finally found the place.

I was met by a very nice Transylvanian lady (I kid you not) who took me over to a small coop containing four chickens. We talked for a bit, her pronunciation of words was excellent, but her grammar was not so good, and wound up coming out sounding like someone doing a bad Romanian accent. Her best line was, “Planning trip back to old country soon. Be gone six months, maybe more. Men, they cannot be trusted to keep care of chickens. Must sell them before.”

She also said that her husband had said to give me a good deal, so she was throwing in a rooster along with the three hens. Four birds for $60. Seems like a lot to me, but Gwynn thought that the hens at least were some pretty prime poultry. She tried to talk me into buying some ducks too, which were quacking up up a storm, but I begged off of those. They were pretty mellow birds and were easy to corral into the dog carrier. It was probably just as well that I hadn’t noticed the huge, mean-looking bone spur on the rooster’s legs until near the end.

I got them home with no problems; they barely made a cluck on the drive.

Once home, there was a bunch of work to be done. I got the bread started rising. I got all of our buckets and filled a big tub with water. Pulled around a big wooden table into the back yard. Got the gas burner on our barbecue working so we could have hot water to help with the feather plucking. Chris made the cheese and meat plate. We put the others to work as wee needed them, but Becca was getting them in the historical mood by showing them the video game Brütal Legend.

When we first came up with this idea, Kelsey and I had decided that we were going to do it in costume. So, a little after 1:00 pm (as the others were going to be arriving about 2:00 pm), I locked myself in the bedroom and got into my Anglo-Saxon garb. Which, I have to say, looks pretty damn good. I still need a few things. I could use an undertunic and shoes and maybe a cap. I love the woolen leg wraps, though between those and the long tunic, you can barely see the trousers. I got it together just as Layla and Kelsey arrived (both of their boyfriends were forced to go into work, so neither of them made it). We hung around and chatted for a bit, and nommed our way through the cheese and meat platter. By about 2:30 pm, we were ready to get down to business.

Gwynn was the only other person who donned a costume, although Doug made himself a blood-splatter tunic by cutting holes in a black plastic garbage bag. So I was feeling a little exposed and embarrassed, but it wasn’t to bad.

We went out into the backyard. The weather had turned out to be great -- sunny, but cool with a bit of a breeze -- which is a lot better than the dark grey with scattered showers they had been forecasting earlier in the week. I gathered everyone around and told them I had a few words to say. Becca and Jon videoed.

This was the moment that I had been working up to all week, even more than the actual chicken killing itself. There was a brief moment of panic just before I started and then again about half a minute in where I forgot how to speak for a couple of seconds. But I got my focus back. I got into character and said what I had wanted to say.

The gist of the speech was to ask everyone to imagine that we were in the 6th Century. Once there, I got into character as the Germanic head of household of a small farm. I went on to explain that my son had traded our last cow for some magic grain that was supposed to grow through the winter (I haven’t been able to get a good handle on when these strains actually came into use in Europe. Are they modern? Not sure.) and that he didn’t know what kind of ceremony to use to bless his field with the strange wheat. He gave a brief overview of the ceremonies that his people would have used for summer grains, and then asked for help in extrapolating out to the winter grains.

I thought it went well, that I said what I had wanted to say and that it had come out in an entertaining and interesting manner. I delivered it well enough and didn’t make a complete fool out of myself. So that was all good. I invited everyone into my head for 13 minutes.

Then our attention turned to the chickens. Now, one of our Portland friends, one who hadn’t been able to come, had sent us a link to a how-to website that had given very good and explicit instructions on one method of killing the chicken and instructions on gutting it as well. I had found a YouTube video that did much the same thing, though with a different killing method. Another website had offered an outrageous sounding procedure. And the good Transylvanian woman had suggested a different method. So we had five basic methods to choose from:

1. Hit it on the head to knock it out. Then either take it’s head off or bleed it out. (Website #1)
2. Find it’s jugular vein just under its chin and slice it. (YouTube video)
3. With the chicken on your lap, grab it by the head and yank hard, dislocating its neck. (Outrageous website)
4. Pinch the carotid artery in its neck until it fell unconscious, and then chop. (Transylvanian lady)
5. While still alive, chop its head off. (Commonly known, that’s what everyone knows about chicken killing method)

We had all looked at the website of #1, so we decided to go with that method.

I guess that I’m being a little inexact with that method decription though. Hit it on the head needs a little more detail. You can’t just hit it with a hammer. They move too much and there would be a real chance of hitting yourself or the other person holding the chicken. So, this method had you grasp the chicken by the feet, twirl it around at full force and then bring the chicken’s head down on something solid, like the edge of our table.

Autumn Planting Festival, or What I Learned From Killing a Chicken (part 1)

2011-10-17T22:07:00.000-07:00

This is the first time I’ve done this, and I not going to make a habit out of it, but in this case, I think it’s appropriate. I’m crossposting this post to both my personal blog and my historical recreation blog. Just so you know....

Remember a few posts ago when I talked about reading the Golden Bough ( link ) and mentioned that it was listed in the Call of Cthulhu RPG book as causing a loss of sanity? That’s silly, right? Books don’t drive you crazy. They don’t make you do things you wouldn’t ordinarily do. Right?

Oh, but that is the power of books, isn’t it? To teach. To inspire. And that is exactly what it did. Inspire me. ::insert maniacal laughter::

But, back to beginning of the story. I finished pulling all of the weeds -- my nemeses, the ivy, the dandelions, and especially the European Buttercups --
and was thinking I was done preparing the field. But then I realized two things, that the ground was a little hard and that the weeds were coming back very fast. So, instead of just going after the weeds as they pooped up, I decided to take the shovel to the whole field again.

Not double digging this time. That took too long and was too much work to do every year. And plus, it may have made my weed problem worse. No, this time my bright idea was to single dig -- just scoop up dirt, turn it over and rake it back in the hole. But as I raked, I made a strong effort to pull out any roots or creeper vines that were in there. The raking actually wound up being the hard and time-consuming part of the operation. I pulled out tons of roots and vines, at least 6 wheelbarrow loads of them. It took just about a month, working in 1-2 hour sessions, 2-4 sessions per week. Estimate it at about 18 hours for my 750 sq. feet.

I also soil-tested the ground, and it came back as being very low on nitrogen. So I added some fertilizer. Anyone who’s interested about the fertilizer, I’ll make that a sperate post.

And I picked a crop. I decided on winter red wheat and winter spelt. They both recommended being planted by October 15th. The 15th happened to be a Saturday, so I aimed for that day as my planting day. So far so good.

But then a friend of mine, Kelsey, started talking to me about The Golden Bough, especially about the animal sacrifices. We had talked before about wanting to go through the process of killing an animal, butchering it and eating it, and so, one thing led to another and we decided that the two of us (and probably my wife, but she hadn’t actually been asked at this point) would get together on Oct. 15th and have a little planting festival. We’d kill a chicken, plant some wheat and spelt, cook, and probably drink a lot of mead.

And we’d probably dribble the chicken blood in the field and say a few words to the grain spirits about giving us a good harvest.

Now, I’m not religious, not religious at all. I don’t really believe that there are grain spirits or that Jupiter or Ceres or Horus are looking after my field or the fertility of my field. But, perhaps just because of that, I am very curious about religion, about feeling some connection with the absolute or the hugeness of the universe. My roleplaying game is largely about playing immoral characters in a moral world and the paradoxes and punishments that go along with that. I’m also very interested and respectful of traditions and rituals. So I wanted to try and get a little of that from this planting party.

And then Kelsey and I told another friend, Layla, about our little get together and she wanted to come. And then Kelsey’s boyfriend wanted to come. And then Layla’s boyfriend and another mutual friend. And my wife thought it would be a hoot. She mentioned it to some of her friends in Portland (200 miles away) and they thought it sounded like fun, so three of them made plans to drive up. Before I knew what hit me, my little 2-3 person get-together and mushroomed into a nine or ten person party.

And it totally stressed me out. The entire week leading up to it I was a basket case, just going over the plan, marshaling all of the little details of food, snacks, prep work and that kind of thing. But also, what was I going to say. What kind of a little ritual was I going to put on over my field. That was where the major anxiety was.

Thursday morning, I realized what I was really stressing over. It wasn’t so much the performance anxiety of getting in front of all of those people and talking. It wasn’t that I was worried about my talk being inaccurate. Messing up the logistics wasn’t really the thing that was bothering me. Oh sure, all of those things were on my mind, but they weren’t what was causing the lion’s share of the stress.

It was the the idea of opening myself up to these people. Of coming right out and saying, “This is the crazy stuff that interests me and this is what I think about it. This is where I am when my eyes glaze over and I’m spacing out. This is the special place I go when the real world is being too difficult to take and I need a few minute vacation. I go to a 6th Century, Northern European farm.”

And once I realized that thoughts such as these were the ones getting me all anxious, it was a lot easier to deal with and the stress greatly decreased. And that was good.

Kelsey and I came up with the basic menu for the day. We’d get three chickens and turn one into soup, bake one fairly simply with rosemary and oil packed in under its skin and the third would have a wine and apricot glaze and be served over pasta. Yes, I know, not 6th Century, but the purpose of the day wasn’t to be perfectly realistic. It was to have fun first, and then to get a glimpse into what life might of been like a millennia ago in Europe, or even just get an idea what life would be like in rural parts of the world today.

Christine, my wife, added a summer sausage, cold-cuts and cheese platter to the menu while we were getting set up and that was a great addition. I made two different kinds of bread. There was mulled mead and raspberry wine. There was supposed to be a wheat berry salad, but that got canceled. There was a green salad planned, but we forgot about it in the heat of the moment and it’s still in our fridge. Gwynn and Jon from Portland brought sour apple cupcakes which were a big hit. I think we went through something like three dozen of them.

None of us had any idea how or where to get live chickens, so I made a posting on Craigslist. I only got one response, but it was from a nice enough sounding Eastern European immigrant family not too far away from our house here in the suburbs. I made an appointment to meet them Saturday morning at 10:00 am.

I took most of Friday off of work. There was still a lot of work to be done. There was still a 3’ x 8’ section of the field that hadn’t been turned over. I hadn’t fertilized yet, or made furrows (I decided that I would try to plant the wheat and spelt in rows this year, to make the continued weeding and harvesting a little easier). I needed to grind grain into flour for the bread. There was last minute cleaning to be done. My daughter, Becca, had an appointment to take her driving test in order to get her driver’s license. The Portland folks would be arriving. I still had to figure out what I was going to say in front of the field and the chickens. And my desktop computer, the one that I was doing all of the layout of Ellis on, had died the week before, and the replacement was due to arrive on that Friday. So, it was a busy day.

We managed to get nearly everything done. Furrows didn’t get made and only about half of the flour got ground. Becca failed her driving test and was extremely disappointed about it, but handled it very well. There was a lot of “Just let me do one more thing involved in setting up the new computer, and while it’s processing, I’ll do other work.” But even with that nearly everything got done.

Doug, Jon and Gwynn arrive a little after 8:00 pm and we ran out to our favorite Mongolian grill for dinner before they closed. There was much joking about the day-to-come’s festivities and everyone seemed to be looking forward to it.

Which I guess still surprises me. I suppose it shouldn’t. Maybe that’s the lesson that I really need to take away from this whole experience is that I’m not as alone as I think I am and that if I was actually to share what I think and feel, other people would actually find it interesting. .....

Actually, that is the lesson I’m going to take away from this and do my best to keep it to heart, because it is a valuable and important lesson.

Soil Testing

2011-09-24T13:26:00.000-07:00

The other day, I went out and bought a soil testing kit from my local garden supply mega-store. I was curious, because there had been that crop circle in last year’s wheat crop, and I wondered if the soil wasn’t in poor condition, especially since those damned European Buttercups are supposed to really eat up the nitrogen in the soil.

So I bought a testing kit and on Wednesday I used it. It came with four plastic test tubes, each for testing a different aspect of the soil -- ph, nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. For each of them, with small amounts of variation, you put some soil in a tube, add in some water, drop a chemical pill into the water and shake for a long time. Then compare the color of the water to the laminated color chart and read the results.

I took four samples from around my field and it took about 90 minutes to run through it four times, and by the third time through I had streamlined the process pretty well. My results were:

PH: between 6-7 across the field.
Nitrogen: no reading. Either my chemical were bad or there was no nitrogen anywhere in that field.
Phosphorus: Medium.
Potassium: Medium.

So what does that mean? According to _Small-Scale Grain Raising_ wheat likes a ph of 6.4, so that’s not too bad. It needs nitrogen, certainly, but how much I don’t know. SSGR says a “typical” nitrogen supplement would be 30 lbs. of nitrogen per acre or 3+ tons of manure per acre. After some quick math that would be 0.017 x 30 = 0.51 pounds of nitrogen or 0.017 x 6000 = 102 pounds of manure. But that’s only “typical” and I think I am “desperate”. So I think a trip to my local garden store or coop is in order.

SSGR gives advice on adding phosphorus to a regular rotation of wheat, but doesn’t say what it wants, so I’m going to assume I’m okay. And it says that wheat doesn’t see to respond to artificial additions of potassium, but I’m probably good on that anyway.

So the big problem is nitrogen, which could be fixed by crop rotation (SSGR suggests rotating it with soybeans) but I’d really like to at least get a good harvest of grain before growing the peas or lentils.

So, off to get advice!

A Long Overdue Post

2011-09-05T17:57:00.000-07:00

Well now. How long has it been? Over a year? Damn, that’s terrible!

Did I really not post any harvest pictures? Or say anything about it?

So what happened? Well, at this point, I’m sure no one’s wondering. But I do feel like I owe an explanation, and a recap of what did actually happen.

The why is easy, I got a second job to help pay for a really expensive, emergency home repair (a new roof). Plus I was selling a bunch of stuff on eBay, so I was really working two-and-a-half jobs. I kept up with the field as best as I could, but in the end, somethings had to get neglected and the wheat was one of them. Unfortunately my family life was another of them, but that is more in the present than it was (at least in the front of my mind) last summer/fall.

But I quit that job back in June of 2011, and after a long vacation to Europe (including some medieval farming related stops) and some time off to rest and much time spent finishing my roleplaying game (I really do have a bad habit of biting off more than I can chew!), I finally have time to get back to my wheat field.

What happened? The bald spot continued to stay bald. I didn’t have the time to properly weed, and the ivy, THE DAMN IVY, got into the field and took over. It didn’t look too bad at a casual glance -- it didn’t seem to be hurting the wheat, strangling it or dragging it down, but when it came to harvesting, the ivy was so intertwined and wrapped around the individual stalks that you had to pull the stalks out of the icy one at a time.

Harvesting in the ivy free portions went well. I used an electric hedge trimmer as my scythe, and it worked quite well, though it was hard on my arm, using one hand to grab a clump of wheat and the other hand to hold the heavy trimmer and bring it under the clump. But I got help from my wonderful wife and had a good time doing it.

A few days later I bound the stalks into sheaves and stacked them out to age, dry and harden in the sun. But maybe I waited to late in the season, or maybe it was just a wet season, because a day later it started raining. We moved the sheaves into the shed (actually my daughter did it, on her own initiative, even though she hates the whole garden/wheat field. Thanks again Becca!), but it never got warm again that year, and the grains quickly became speckled with black mold.

Perhaps if I’d paid more attention to it, spent more time fussing and watching it, it wouldn’t have come to that, but there it is. I was disappointed, but not beaten, and told myself I would try again.

By Spring, we had mice living in the sheaves and when we drug the wheat back out into the field, we disturbed the mouse nest and killed a bunch of newborns. It was actually very sad.

And so there the field sat. The ivy grew. The dandelions grew. But mostly the buttercups grew. I still had fantasies of planting a new crop, but I was exhausted, the family problems were erupting and I just didn’t have the time or energy. Everyone once in a while I would buy a book, or read some webpages, but that was about it.

From one of those pages, I did learn that Washington State considers the European Buttercup to be one of the 10 most dangerous invasive, non-native species of plants. They are very fast spreading, nearly impossible to kill and the worst thing to do with them is to till them under, either mechanically or by hand, because every little bit of one can regrow itself into a brand new plant. And guess what I had done...

But finally, I got some time. I had also been re-inspired my my visit to the Ullandhaug Iron Age Farm in Norway (more on that another time) and really wanted to get some grain going.

So I started pulling those weeds. Hard back-breaking work. Grab handfuls of leafy greens and yank until you can see the ground. Then scrape your fingertips along the ground, trying to get under those ivy and buttercup creepers. Then pull -- not with your arms, because your handful has enough resistance that you need your legs. Repeat. Over and over again. I figure it took about 16 hours all told for my 750 sq. feet.

And then I cheated. I got some Roundup and sprayed it. Actually I sprayed it as I went, so now the early portions are very vegetation clear and the recently cleared parts still have green shoots poking out of the ground. I’ll go after them more as the days go on. Put here’s a picture of how things looked yesterday, when I finished the “weeding”.

The today, partially because it sounded like fun, partially because I really want to kill those bastards, I went out and bought one of those propane-powered, weed-killing flamethrowers. It wasn’t hard, though once again there was a lot of using a heavy implement one-handed, but I’m not convinced how well it worked. Plus, I was pretty paranoid about setting the yard or the fence on fire. According to the websites I’ve read, you don’t actually have to burn the weeds to a crisp, you just have to get the 500,000 BTU exhaust over the weed to scald it, and that will kill it. So we’ll see how it looks in a few days. Here’s a pic of the field after the torching.

And I smell like I’ve been roasting marshmallows in a brush fire.

More about my plans and the next steps in a future (yes there will be a future) post.

Planting Day: 9 Weeks in

2010-05-29T09:33:00.000-07:00

Or, are those crop circles?

As a general statement, the wheat is growing great. It’s about knee high with wide blades of healthy green leaves.

The problem is that it’s not growing like that everywhere. In the center of the field, growth is stunted, the seeds inconsistently sprouted and some are turning yellow. But only in the center which seems strange to me. I’ve just been doing some research on the interwebs and found this pdf from Kanasas State University. The paper is specifically about winter wheat rather than spring, but the nitrogen deficiency pictures look like my problem, so a trip to the garden store for some fertilizer might be in order.

I think if I do get some, I’ll just try it in one area and see if it helps, that way I’ll know that it is truely the problem and I can try some other ways to increase the nitrogen in the soil (like legumes).

Planting Day -- 2 Weeks later

2010-04-16T07:03:00.000-07:00

Two weeks and a lot of days of scattered showers and sunbreaks, I have remarkable results in the wheat fields:

All of that green there is my new wheat, roughly in the rows I made. I had thought that the raking I did to cover the rows had horribly upset them and dragged them around, but obviously not.

In other news, my parents are visiting this week and I told them I'd break open the cheddar cheese I made last October. I'll post a full report of that after we do it.

2010-04-10T07:34:00.000-07:00

Here are those pictures I promised.

The field with the border:

You can see the footpaths in the dirt in that one.

And here's a closeup of some of the seeds on the surface that have started to sprout:

Planting Day, March 27th 2010

2010-04-07T10:07:00.000-07:00

After I last posted about my double digging being done, I went out to the hardware store and bought some 2x6s and built a little frame around the garden. I figured having a real border would help me know where (and where not) to weed and would keep me from straying into the wheat with the lawn mower. They went in without major issue, although my border lines were not very straight and needed to be trimmed up a bit.

My next free day, Saturday the 27th of March, I got ready for planting. My Hard Red Spring Wheat had arrived from Howe Seeds and I was ready. I started off by leveling the plot a bit. In my double digging there were sections that were higher and lower than others. I’m not sure what caused it exactly, but I used my birthday hoe (thanks Layla!) and got it fairly level. There were quite a few weeds too, but they were easy to pull up with the use of the hoe.

That also loosened up the top layer of the soil and made it easy to make little furrows. I wasn’t sure exactly how to make them, and wound up just using an old piece of scrap 1x4 fencing and dragging it along the soil. I tried to space them about 3-4” apart, but it was pretty hard to control the board. I also marked out for myself where the walkways through the plot would be, so that I could reach everywhere with the hoe at least, while still using as much of the area as possible.

Then I distributed the seed. I really had no idea how heavy to lay it on, so I just did it until it looked good. I tried to get most of the seed in the furrows, but especially where they had strayed apart from each other, I threw the seeds down where ever. I did it by hand, just taking large pinches of the grain and throwing them where I wanted them to go, often parallel with the furrows. By the time I had spread 5 cups, I still had a bit that I hadn’t covered yet, so in the end I used about 6 cups (which worked out to about 3.5 lbs.).

The last step was to rake. I pulled dirt into the furrows and generally spread things out. A lot of the seeds ended up on the surface, which disappointed me. I finished it off with a spray from the hose and called it a day.

I'll post pictures in a few days . . .

Realizations from the reading

2010-04-04T12:03:00.000-07:00

So I’ve been reading the two books I mentioned last time. Grow Your Own Grains is not much of a book, it’s a self-described white paper. But it has some very useful information, especially the large table in the back that lists the properties of some 20 or so different grains, including planting times, growing times, how much to plant, yields, and that sort of thing.

One of the interesting things I got out of that was that it suggested planting 6 1/3 Tablespoons of wheat per 100 square feet of garden space. At first consideration, that didn’t seem too bad. Tablespoons are pretty small, right?

Small Scale Grain Raising is a pretty neat book too, although it’s a bit . . . larger scale than I thought it would be. It’s written by a farmer with a great deal of experience doing commercial farming. It gives good advice, but to find it you have to read around all of the instructions about how to use tractors, combines, seed drills and the like. The book is written very casually and has a very unintimidating style (except when talking about big machines). It’s full of anecdotes and asides, as well as recipes for the produce of the various crops.

It too, makes recommendations for broadcasting wheat seeds -- 1-2 bushels per acre. That requires a little math.

There are 43,560 square feet in an acre
There are 2,383 tablespoons in a bushel (isn’t the internet wonderful?)
So, 2 bushels is 4766 T over 43,560 sq. ft is 10.95 T per 100 square feet.

Well, that’s in the same neighborhood, 5.5 T to 11 T. But I started thinking: Especially if I err on the high side and plant 11 T per 100 sq. ft, I’m going to plant 750 sq. feet, which would be 82.5 T . . . which is . . . just over 5 cups. (Who would have thought there was this much math in agriculture?)

Hmm. My harvest from last year was only 5.5 oz. Did I even have 5 cups? So I went and measured -- it was only 7 Tablespoons.

This was a huge surprise. So I had planted 115 sq. feet and only gotten 7 T? But, I knew I had harvested much more than I had planted. But I had only harvested as much as I should have planted. That meant that I didn’t plant nearly enough last spring.

As you can read here, I planted 2 little envelopes of spring wheat in 2009. The package said that it was more than enough for that amount of space . . . if you started them inside and transplanted them when they were 5” tall. Oh. At the time I hadn’t thought it would really matter, but obviously it does.

So I didn’t have enough seed. I needed more and I wanted it fast, because I was nearly done with my stupid, @#$% double digging. After trying and failing at two local coops, I found Howe Seeds online and ordered 6 lbs. of Spring Wheat. I paid by Paypal and they shipped within 12 hours.

Seeds!

2010-03-26T06:37:00.000-07:00

I ordered the seeds that I plan to plant this spring. I got them from Bountiful Gardens again and they are:

Scarlet Emperor Bean, Runner
They didn’t list any heirloom varieties of beans, so I just had to pick one. This one sounded tasty.

Laxton’s Progress #9 Bush Pea, Shelling
Although they don’t call it an heirloom variety, the description calls it a “standard old variety” which sounded good.

Dwarf Grey Sugar Pea
This one is an heirloom, dating back to 1773.

Belgian White Carrot
Another heirloom variety, this one dating to 1885.

Carrot Mix
These are modern orange carrots, that I decided to get to please my daughter. I’m sure she won’t want to come anywhere close to a ‘mutant’ white carrot, so these are going in the garden for her.

EA Special Strain Celery
We use a lot of celery in our cooking (I absolutely love celery) and this one is here more for our table than for anything period.

Green French Lentil
Roman authors call them “poor man’s meat” and while I was never fed them while growing up, I have come to like them very much. And they are very period.

Cereal Rye
They sell this seed mainly as a cover crop, to help fight back erosion during the winter and then be plowed under in the spring. I’ve been intimidated for most of my life by dark rye breads, but have recently found some good recipes that I really like (I really need to post some here!).
Rye is not the highest yielding of the grains, but it will grow well on poor soil and is tolerant of cold conditions that wheat and other grains cannot stand.

Kamut Wheat, Ancient
A spring-planted wheat with a very old heritage. It is high in protein and has large grains of silvery-blue color.

Early Stone Age Wheat, Ancient
This heirloom variety of wheat is perhaps 12,000 years old. It is spring planted, hard to thresh and very high in protein and other vitamins.

I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to do with these last two. I may plant a little and see what happens, or I may hold off another year.

I also bought two books:
Booklet 33: Grow Your Own Grains
Small Scale Grain Raising

I’ll post book reviews shortly.

I did it!

2010-03-22T05:29:00.001-07:00

It took way too long and was a ton of work, but I finally did it.

I overdid it trying to finish up last night. My arms and back ache, but in a good way.

The new garden plot has been entirely double dug. 25 feet by 30 feet. 750 square feet.

Here are a few pictures. The dark patch in the upper right was the part that I actually worked on today. The patch of white near the bottom right is where I had a tarp laid out with the dirt of the first trench, so the grass that was under it has been dying.

I think tomorrow I’ll hit the hardware store and buy some 2x6 boards and put a border around it, to make it easier to mow around if nothing else. Then I need to actually decide what to plant!

It was a good experience that I will never forget, but a rototiller is looking awfully good right now.

A Long Answer to a Simple Question

2010-03-21T06:34:00.000-07:00

A friend of a friend, Wade, who responded to my last posting in my personal blog rather than here said: “In regards to your wheat post, you had a comment about wooden tools and double digging. Bear in mind that breaking through sod like you're doing was probably fairly uncommon. They were probably working fields that had been worked for generations. Even if they were kept fallow for one year, that's not going to produce the sort of root system that your lawn has. This is my opinion, no basis in historical fact. :)”

Wade is probably right here, depending on which part of the Middle Ages we’re talking about. My recent interests have really shifted away from the High MA to the early, Dark Ages period. Late Antiquity really. 500-900 AD. This is the period where Germanic, Celtic and Roman practices of settlement and cultivation are co-existing and mingling, and with the decline of the Roman administration, these methods are free to adapt to local conditions, rather than be dictated by Roman fiat. It is a time where people are thinking smaller -- no longer are there massive legions to feed or Imperial cities to maintain; smaller regions are figuring out what resources and manufactured goods they need, who will provide them and how they will be transported.

This period lays the foundation for all that comes after. Here, complex systems are created that have to answer these simple questions:

Who are we?
What do we need to survive?
How do we make what we need? If we can’t make it, how do we get it?
What do we want in addition to what we need (and how do we make/get it)?
How do we all work together to make that happen?

So, with that in mind, there are a few things to consider. First off, many early communities throughout Northern Europe (in Denmark, Germany and the Low Countries) continued a millennia-old way of life based on mobile settlements, which either packed up and moved along every generation or two, or that gradually shifted their boundaries, and moved, amoeba-like, around their territory. This had been common from the Bronze Age through the Roman Age and, although it was going out of style and the movements decreased in frequency, it continued even into Late Antiquity. The point being, that these people would be breaking new ground.

Secondly, even later in the medieval period, as populations increased, many villages expanded, either by adding new fields to their properties, or by creating dependant communities nearby. Often this new arable land was made from land thought inferior and not worth the trouble only a generation or two before. While these people are more likely to have access to plows and iron tools, it is worth keeping in mind.

Also, my experience is probably special, in that my backyard is completely free from tree roots or any thick vegetation. I can only assume that was was removed a century ago as the neighborhood was forming on the, then, outskirts of the city of Everett. I have noticed a thin layer of charcoal just above a layer of clay about a foot under the current level of the soil. There have also been small pieces of charred wood down there. A forested area would certainly require a mattock or axe to deal with roots.

So, yes. While the Medieval farmer might not have needed to hack into virgin soil very often, when he did he would need (or be greatly aided by) metal tools.

Spadeing the yard

2010-02-28T07:12:00.000-08:00

So.

The double digging continues apace. At a slow pace. I’d really wanted to finish by the end of February, but here it is and I’m only about 80% done. Between weather and increased job responsibilities, I just haven’t had the time. (And yes, I know that in days of old, rainy days were thought to be best for working in a garden, but I’m a soft modern American, and while I did dig in the drizzle, I wasn’t going to during a full-on rain.)

While out there digging, I have had the opportunity to connect with my neighbor, something I never did while I was a sit-in-front-of-the-computer homebody. He is a Ukranian immigrant, and raises homing pigeons, which is pretty neat. He keeps trying to get me to grow tomatoes and has all sorts of advice on how to do it.

Anyway, one day while I was out there, Alex asked me if I’d like him to sharpen my shovel. Sharpen a shovel? The idea blew my mind. But it makes sense -- less resistance makes for an easier thrust through the dense soil. So I asked him to do it, mostly just to see if I could feel the difference. And boy, quite a bit of difference. It is much easier to make the initial thrust down to cut the sod, but I feel the improvement most when I undercut the sod, jamming the entire shovel horizontally through the roots of lawn.

After I thanked Alex, he also suggested spraying the shovel blade with WD-40 (definitely not a medieval technique, but it did arouse my curiosity), which I tried once but it didn’t seem to make any difference. One morning I went out to dig, only to find the yard covered in frost. It was not the first time that has happened, and it doesn’t have much of an effect on the digging (the sod cuttings seem to stay in one piece a little better). But this time, the caked on dirt from my last session was frozen onto the shovel, giving me maximum resistance and making the digging nearly impossible. The frozen dirt did not want to scrape off either, until I resorted to hosing it off.

But things are moving ahead. I ordered seeds this week, and will post my planting plan later in the week.

Double Digging

2010-01-10T09:41:00.000-08:00

When I’m done writing this post, I’ll be going out to “toil in the fields,” the phrase we throw around the house to mean that I’m going to work in the garden.

Last year I planted a small plot, about 115 square feet of red spring wheat. This year, using the fruits of that field, I’m going to plant a much larger plot of about 600 square feet.

The 'before' picture

Last year, I prepared that plot in the spring by mowing the grass short, covering the area with newspaper, spreading manure and topsoil over the paper and planting onto that. That technique was neither historical nor did it work particularly well. The weeds were able to push through the newspaper, the wheat roots were unable to penetrate the newspaper and firmly anchor themselves and a nearby tree seemed to create a shadow over about a third of the plot that little grew in.

So I wanted to try something different. What I wanted to do was to plow, but that was unrealistic because of the small area that I do have and the costs associated. So, I decided to do the next best thing: Double Dig.

What is double digging? Essentially, you’re turning the soil by hand. You dig a trench and set that earth aside. Then you dig another trench the same size, adjacent to the first, filling the first trench with the dirt. You keep doing that over the entire plot until you’re left with just a trench, and then you fill that hole with the dirt you set aside from the very first trench.

The initial trench

It does several things. First it turns the soil. The sod from the top of each fresh trench goes in the bottom of the trench (and I’ve been being very careful to deposit the sod upside down) and is then covered by 8-10 inches of dirt. It loosens the soil and de-compacts it, making it more suitable for planting. And thirdly, it plows under the grass, allowing those nutrients to return to the soil.

The second trench and the filled first trench

Is it historical? I don’t know. Nothing I have read so far has mentioned it, but I have yet to read anything that specifically discusses Medieval or Iron Age agricultural techniques. I suppose that is a huge oversight on my part and I should really do that before next year. But, there is nothing about the technique that couldn’t have been done, since all it requires is a shovel and a strong back. And a lot of time.

It is very slow though, at least for my city-living, unathletic, desk-job of a physique. It tales about an hour to do two trenches, each 18” wide and 15 feet long. The first day I put in four hours straight of work and it left my arms and back aching for several days after. Since then, in between bouts of bad weather and the holidays, I’ve been putting in an hour here or there and today I should get to the halfway point.

Three trenches

My experiences? It’s hard work, but I enjoy it. Maybe it’s the novel aspect of it, but I’d much rather be digging than running on the treadmill. It does strain my 40-year old back, which is probably good for it. I do wonder how historical it might be in this one area: I have read in several places that wooden tools were the norm for the Early Middle Ages. Even if those wooden shovels were iron shod, I am a little dubious that they could withstand the abuse that I throw at my steel one. Stomping on it to cut through the sod, jamming it into the dirt, prying/lifting the heavy, damp soil . . . The wooden handle has survived so far, so maybe, but I don’t know. It does at least make me wonder.

Near the end of that first, four-hour day. Six or seven trenches.

OK, so off to work. But before I go, here’s two pictures of me, in my costume, toiling in the fields.

A New Year

2010-01-02T07:43:00.000-08:00

So here it is, 2010. My biggest regret for 2009 is that I let this blog slide into no-use in the last quarter of the year. I will try to do better this year.

So a quick little look back and look forward. I’ll come back to each point eventually, until I’m all the way caught up.

I bottled the batch of mead I was making on Sept. 1st. Tasting at the time made it out to be very sweet and not overly alcoholic. I also started a batch of Blackberry wine (with the donation of blackberries from my neighbor). I know they’re not medieval (Blackberries are a New World plant), but I’ll continue to mention it here because it’s related, at least tangentially, to the other wines.

I went to a meeting/seminar held at the local community garden about planting winter vegetables. They handed out fava bean and kale starters which I planted. The kale didn’t survive the transplanting, and the beans were never able to produce beans before we had an early frost and they immediately turned black and died.

My birthday, a few days off from Michelmas, was wonderful and I was surrounded by the best of friends. They gave me a medieval send off, complete with gifts of gardening implements, a cheese-making kit and and a pair of linen trousers and leg wraps.

[Hmmm. The link for the winningas doesn't seem to work anymore. Maybe they've stopped carrying them? Or maybe it will work again whne they re-stock?]

Decked out in my Anglo-Saxon costume, complete except for shoes and gloves, I started getting the backyard ready for the planting of winter wheat. The plan was to double dig (that subject gets its own post) about 600 sq. feet of the backyard. I got maybe 1/6th of it done before exhausting. After that, rain and life hit very hard and I still haven’t finished (but I’ll go out a bit and work on it more today if the weather holds). So no winter wheat this year. Spring wheat again!

[Pictures will come later. I'm such a tease....]

I tried making cheese twice, with difficulties both times, but I do right now have a very ugly-looking blob a wax wrapped around some proto-cheese sitting in my kitchen. Hopefully it will turn out. I did manage to make some ricotta as well, and used some to make Libum with. I came out very good, a little more sour than with the store-bought cheese.

The plan for 2010 is to make more cheese, more wine/mead/beer, and do a lot more gardening. I will have sextuple the area of wheat planted and last year’s field I want to plant with beans. I’ll try some other veggies as well, but I’ll have to find a way to use them in food that I’ll actually eat. A garden plan will certainly be forthcoming.

Catching Up and Getting Things Off My Chest

2009-11-01T07:38:00.001-08:00

It’s been nearly a month since I’ve posted, mostly because I’ve been really busy, but also because I’ve been annoyed at myself for writing my last post. I could go back and change/delete the offending bits, but that strikes me as very ‘trollish’ (the internet kind, not the live under bridges kind). So in the interest of full-disclosure . . .

It’s really just that penultimate sentence, “Neolithic Farming figures that yields of 300 kg/hectare (2.47 acres) were well within reason for pre-historic Europe.” Who cares what Neolithic Farming says about yields? Those are Neolithic, not medieval. They are using techniques not common in the middle ages in Europe (intensive agriculture of small plots, using a variety of crops, entirely by hand; at least that’s the thesis of the book).

Now admittedly, I had Neolithic Farming on my brain since I had just read it, and the post was written pretty quickly one evening, but still. I want to hold myself to a higher standard.

And now back to our regularly scheduled program . . .

Planting Day - Supplemental

2009-09-12T18:35:00.001-07:00

I harvested what is probably the last of the red, summer wheat today. There is still a little bit of green wheat out there, but I’m expecting the birds to eat it before its mature enough to harvest. We’ll see.

The total is 4.5 ounces of wheat out of 115 sq. feet of garden. So if we follow the math out we get:
1 pound = 16 oz. which would need a garden 3.55 times larger = 409 sq. feet
1 acre = 43,560 sq. feet which would produce 106.5 lbs

These number might be quite a bit off, since we’re dealing with quite a small sample and projecting those numbers very big.

According to Neolithic Farming in Central Europe: An Archaeobotanical Study of Crop Husbandry Practices a person needs about 660 lbs. (300 kg) of wheat/year or 3300 lbs. (150 kg) for a family of five. That would be 6.2 acres / person or 31 acres for the family.

Which says to me that my yield was pretty low, which is hardly surprising considering my lack of skill, the patch of the garden (maybe one-fifth of it) that didn’t grow anything, probably because it was under the tree, and the poor weather for the season.

Neolithic Farming figures that yields of 300 kg/hectare (2.47 acres) were well within reason for pre-historic Europe.

All in all I’m very pleased and ready to try again and see if I can do better.

Meadmaking Update - 10 weeks in

2009-09-04T06:54:00.001-07:00

The short update is that it’s chugging along slowly but surely. It’s been ten weeks and I’ve racked it twice. Racking is when you transfer the proto-mead from one container to another, leaving behind the dead yeast and other residue. It has continued to bubble steadily, which says that the little yeasts are still doing their thing.

The specific gravity is 1.100, which means it hasn’t changed much. It tastes very good; still quite sweet (even a little too sweet for me) and not very strong. So I’ll let it keep going. I’ll post updates as they develop.

As a non-medieval aside, I’m also making Apricot Wine, which was too bland, so I added apricot juice to it as I bottled it, which then just settled out in the bottom of each bottle. We’ll have to see how that turns out. And I’m about to try making Blackberry Wine, as my neighbor kindly offered the bounty of his bushes for a share of the wine.

New Book - Neolithic Farming

2009-09-03T06:45:00.000-07:00

I’ve had the opportunity to look at and flip through Neolithic Farming in Central Europe: An Archaeobotanical Study of Crop Husbandry Practices by Amy Bogaard.

This looks to be a fabulous book full of all sorts of the in-depth, technical information that I have been looking for. It references numerous European experimental farms and the results that they have had using a variety of proposed medieval, ancient and pre-historical techniques. It talks about yields, crops types and methods.

This is definitely one that is going to be read and re-read.

Planting Day - 21 Weeks in

2009-09-02T21:31:00.001-07:00

Like in the last picture, some of the wheat is a nice, harvestable, tan, straw color, while some of it is still very green and growing. So all of it was certainly not ready to be harvested. But there were two issues.

First, I was worried about mold. I’d gotten sooty mold on my winter wheat from letting it sit out on the stalk longer than it should have. I didn’t want that to happen here and some of those dry stalks had been ready to harvest for quite a while.

Secondly, some of the stalks, especially those that had fallen over after the rain storm of a few weeks ago, were missing some or all of there wheat berries. Under them was the chaff that belonged to the ear, and I first thought that the seeds were falling off the stalk. But when I looked more closely, there were no seeds on the ground. So I immediately blamed the squirrels that are always chittering around the back yard and even came inside to rant to the wife and kids about how those damn squirrels were eating all of my grain. When I went out the next morning to go to work, however, there was a flock of little birds (wrens?) sitting on the fence above the field. They were easy to scare off, at least temporarily, but I think they are the grain-eating culprits.

So I wanted to harvest those ears of wheat that were ready. I’m not sure if this phenomenon is normal or not. Gies and Gies in Life in a Medieval Village make a big deal about the September harvest and about how quickly it had to be done and the labor shortages associated with the harvest. You think of people out in the fields with scythes, mowing down all the wheat, not taking time to select some stalks and come back to others. So I wonder if this particular harvest is a bit odd because of the dry summer and the hard rain about 2/3 through. (I also have some questions about the Michelmas harvest, but I’ll save this discussion for a later date.)

Following the technique I used successfully on the winter wheat, I went out there with a large plastic bowl and my kitchen shears and snip, snip, snipped. I quickly determined that for an ear to be ready for harvesting, the entire ear had to be tan with no bits of green. Otherwise the wheat berries were soft and unready.

Once I had all of the ears that I could get, they went into the old pillowcase. The red wheat needed more beating than the white, winter wheat did, but they did eventually all separate from the stalk and husks.

Then I got an old bed sheet (that matched the pillowcase!) and poured the contents of the pillowcase onto the center of the sheet. I recruited my reluctant daughter and we spent 10-15 minutes tossing the wheat and chaff into the air. I was downwind, so all the chaff blew in my face, and it all worked surprisingly well. The hard seed kernels fell straight back onto the sheet, while the stalks and husks were whisked away into my hair.

That all actually happed about a week and a half ago, on August 23rd. I went out again yesterday and harvested more, though it is still sitting in the pillowcase. There is still quite a bit left green in the field, and I have probably only harvested about half.

I forgot to take pictures of any of that, so I will make sure to take pictures next time I harvest.

Threshing

2009-08-23T09:11:00.001-07:00

I really didn’t have a good idea about how to do this step. I had the lovely ears of wheat (ok, maybe not so lovely as they has spots of mold on them) and they were all stuck together with their long awns poking out and their thick husks. I needed to get rid of all that -- get them separated and lose all of that chaff.

I of course, could do it by hand. It’s not that hard. Tear off a kernel from the ear. Squeeze/roll it between your fingers until the husk falls away or the wheat seed falls free. Easy to do, takes forever. Really only feasible when sampling to see if they’re ready to be harvested.

Do I do it the medieval way? Lay it out on a large tarp or clean floor and beat it with a flail? It would work I supposed, but I really only had a small amount. I was very worried about being too violent and loosing some of what I had.

So, with a little hint from our old friend the internet, I compromised. I feel that it has a medieval spirit but is better suited for my small harvest. I took an old pillowcase (a modern concession, it should have been a linen sack or something) and threw the wheat ear into it. My original intention was to beat the bag with a stick, and thus feel like I was threshing properly. But it was immediately apparent as I tried to find a good way to seal the open end of the pillowcase, that the easiest way to do it was to bring the wheat to the stick, rather than the other way around. So, holding the bag closed with hand and wielding it like a blackjack, I beat it against the side of my porch for a few minutes. To excellent effect!

Large pieces of stalk and chaff were easily removed by hand, the grains being heavier they rested at the very bottom of the sack. Once these large pieces were removed I poured what was left into a pan and considered winnowing. I was still worried about losing anything, so I didn’t want to take it outside and throw it into the wind. I also didn’t want to go through the laborious task of doing it by hand.

I eventually came up with the plan to float the chaff off. I filled the pan with water. The light chaff floated tot he top and I scraped it off, leaving fresh, clean wheat kernels at the bottom. After three goes with this to get every last bit I laid the berries out on a towel to dry so that they would not sprout -- no malting yet!

Here it is -- the fruits of almost a year of watching this grow in my little pot:

Sooty Mold

2009-08-17T08:36:00.000-07:00

Saturday, I harvested my winter wheat. I should have done it two weeks ago as they were hard and ready to be reaped, but I was busy and threw out my back and never quite got around to it.

There was also the problem of how to do it. Do I get a scythe? What else would I cut them with? Do I cut at the top or the bottom of the stalk? How do I winnow and thresh? Etc. I eventually decided to cut them just below the ear of grain with a pair of sharp kitchen scissors. Hardly medieval, I know, and surprisingly time consuming.

When I got out there to finally do it though, the tops of the stalks were covered in black spots. I cut them anyway and then went inside to do research about the spots. Here’s a picture of the harvested ears of corn:

Once at the computer, I found a website, The Guide to Wheat Diseases and Pests, which was very good at diagnosing my condition. It is a Black (or Sooty) Mold.

From these two websites: Wheat FAQ (USDA) and Weekly Crop Update it appears that it is not a serious problem and the wheat is still usable.

Now I just have to figure out how to thresh it. It’s not a big deal doing it with my fingers but it would be prohibitively time consuming to do it for a lot of grain. So I’m going to try a few different things this week and see how it goes. I’ll keep the events posted here.

Planting Day - 19 Weeks in

2009-08-16T11:03:00.001-07:00

How long did the Red Wheat say it needed to grow? Checking back to the Bountiful Harvests website, I see that it says 17-19 weeks.

Well here we are at 19 weeks:

We had a hard rain a few days ago and it bent/knocked over many of the wheat stalks. That probably has something to do with my shallow planting, since my winter wheat were not so affected.

As you can see in the picture, some of the wheat is tan and dry, looking ready to be harvested and some isn’t. How can you tell if it’s ready? Several websites I have read have mentioned a fingernail test: apply pressure to a kernel with your fingernail and if it doesn’t leave a dent in the seed then it is ready to harvest.

Applying that method, some of them are ready and some of them aren’t. Considering what has happened with my winter wheat, I will harvest the ready ones this week and leave the green ones to fully mature.

What happened to my winter wheat? I will explain all tomorrow.

Planting Day - 16 Weeks in

2009-07-26T09:55:00.000-07:00

I’ve been very bad about posting but the summer has been very busy -- in a non-medieval way. Real life, I’m afraid, has reared its ugly head and kept me away from reading and medieval projects. Hopefully that will change soon.

The big news is the wheat. Thanks to either a good deal of rain (it’s been a dry summer here) or some more time to grow (probably some of both, really) the field is doing much better.

Three weeks ago I reported that there were 31 ears of corn on the stalks of wheat. A week later, there were 74. A week after that there were 111. After being away at the Oregon Shakespearean Festival for most of the following week, I returned to find an explosion of wheat seeds. There are currently over 200 stalks with sheaves of wheat atop them (that’s where I lost count).

Last year’s very experimental winter wheat is now dry as a bone and the kernels are hard. I couldn’t crush the one I tried to in my teeth. I’ll give them a few more days to make sure, then I’ll try harvesting. More on that to come.

Planting Day - 12 Weeks In

2009-07-01T22:07:00.000-07:00

I went out the other day and weeded again. It took 90 minutes or so. I made several interesting discoveries.

First off, there was a patch where no wheat was growing. Since I weeded at a different time than I usually do (in the late afternoon), I noticed that this bare patch matches almost exactly the shadow cast by one of my big maple trees. So, one mystery solved.

Secondly, I didn’t bury the seeds very deep. In fact, I just sprinkled the wheat seeds across the topsoil. The roots have not penetrated the newspaper or spread out horizontally very much. Now that the stalks are growing, some of them have very little connection to the earth. Some have fallen over and others I have accidentally pulled out while weeding. So next time, I will bury them.

The good news is that 31 stalks have ears of grain on them. We finally got some rain about a week and a half ago, and it looks like more could still be ready to produce some grain.

My pot of winter wheat seems to be done growing and is turning brown. The wheat kernels are still soft and green on the inside. I pinched one off and squeezed it between my fingers and it gushed a white paste.

Meadmaking

2009-06-28T12:30:00.000-07:00

So today (and by today I actually mean Monday, June 22nd) I headed off to the local brewshop. I bought bottle brushes, yeasts and a automatic siphon.

But I suppose I should take about my meadmaking history, my credentials, so to speak. I was first introduced to mead about 10 years ago by a gaming buddy of mine, John. He brought a bottle over that was just heavenly. As I’ve already mentioned, I have a very sweet tooth, and his mead was the first alcohol that had really tasted good to me, without being mixed with syrup or hidden by soda.

The next time he made a batch he invited me over to help and most of what I remember of that day was watching a gigantic pot of honey water boil while we scrapped scum off the top. Once it cooled we mixed in some freshly squeezed orange juice, making it actually not a mead, but a melomel.

John later moved across the country and when he left he gave to me all of his brewing supplies, since they were so large to try and ship. I gave it a try on two occasions. The first time I made very young mead (I was impatient in my youth) that tasted strongly of yeast and was pretty harsh. The second batch I decided to let age longer, but I think I let the vapor lock dry out and the must went bad.

So today, armed with a new and quite wonderful book, The Compleat Meadmaker, by Ken Schramm, I decided that I wanted to give it another try. The summer has been very busy, but I felt like I needed to get the mead going over the summer, since we don’t heat our kitchen/laundry room over the winter, and the yeasts need the room temperature to be in the 60s.

So I’ve been looking around for good prices on honey. WinCo had orange blossom honey for $3.24 / pound, but could only sell them in little 2 cup jars or in the industrial 40 lb. buckets that they got them in. I only need 18 lbs. for this recipe, so it was a bit of a conundrum, but eventually I decided to get the big bucket and have enough honey for two batches.

The recipe I’m going to try in the Sweet Show Mead on page 164 of The Compleat Meadmaker. 18 lbs. of honey, 4 gallons of water (bottled spring water), and some modern yeast energizer and nutrient. The yeast I used was two packages of dry Lalvin D-47 yeast.

I heated one gallon of water to boiling in a large stock pot. I then added the 18-20 lbs. of honey (using a sterilized soup ladle). This took a lot longer than I expected and by the time it was all in the temperature in the pot was 110°, while it was supposed to be about 150°. The recipe wanted the honey water to sit at 150° for a while to kill any bugs in the honey. So I heated it up on the stove to 150°. No problem.

The next step, was to pour the hot honey water into the rest of the water. There were two important sub-step to this:
Don’t pour the 150° honey water on yourself (which I managed to succeed at).
Use refrigerated water so that it would reduce the overall temperature of the honey water to 80° so that the yeast could be added at a happy temperature for them.

Well, I had forgotten to buy the water until just a few hours before starting, so it wasn’t very cold and only dropped the overall temperature of the must to about 125° -- way too hot for the yeast. But, not anticipating this, I had already proofed the yeast -- poured it into some warm water to re-hydrate it and get it going. The instructions on the package had been very adamant that the yeast should bloom for 15 minutes and no longer.

It took something like three hours for the honey water to cool down to 85°. I was worried that the yeast might not be good anymore. Maybe they had woken up, found nothing to eat and starved to death. But I pitched them in anyway, and the stirred the heck out of it, to aerate the stuff as much as possible. Then I sealed it up, attached the vapor lock (a water-filled valve that lets CO² exit the airtight container, but doesn’t let bacteria-filled air in) and waited.

By bedtime it wasn’t doing anything but in the morning it was bubbling away.

It started fermenting with a Specific Gravity of 1.140. That’s a little higher than expected, so I probably put in more that 18 lbs. of honey. I want a sweet mead anyway, so that shouldn’t be a problem.

More details as things develop.

Sorry for the delay

2009-06-24T06:48:00.001-07:00

Life has come to a head and I haven't been able to post about the meadmaking on Monday. Nothing bad is happening, just a lot of projects coming due at once. My roleplaying game, Ellis: Kingdom in Turmoil, which I try not to talk very much about here, is coming along _very_ well and I am doing a lot of playtesting and final refining. But it has taken me away from writing about mead and wheat.

The short of it is: the mead did get started and it is bubbling away in the kitchen right now. Due to a few small errors it took much longer than planned and I did worry that I had bloomed the yeast too soon. But I had no reason to fear. By morning those little guys were eating their way through the honey maying wonderul CO2 and ethanol.

More tonight or tomorrow as things calm down.

--Tim

Hi honey! I'm Home!

2009-06-21T18:52:00.001-07:00

I just got back from WinCo, a local chain of discount supermarkets. I have a 40 pound bucket full of honey. That's $123.50 of honey.

The meadmaking will start tomorrow!

Working the Fields

2009-06-12T06:51:00.000-07:00

So if the heavy plow is turning over the ground, all of those weeds and grasses are being flipped under 4-8 inches or soil. That’s a lot deeper than my inch of topsoil and newspaper.

Just as a quick experiment, I recently broke out the shovel and dug down 6 inches or so and flipped over the turf. It’s been 10 days now and nothing has grown up there, whereas with the newspaper I had dandelions poking through within a few days.

Quoting from The Carolingian Economy which is in turn quoting from a capitulary from the year 800 from the town of Le Mans in Western France:

Every man holding a quarter of a _factus_, must be plowing his lord’s land a whole day with his beasts and thereafter his lord may not ask him to do handiwork service [such as carpentry or weaving] during the same week. And he who has not enough beasts to do this in one day shall complete the work in two days; and he who has only four infirm beasts, incapable of plowing by themselves, has to join other beasts in order to plow the lord’s land in one day and thereafter shall do one day of handiwork services in that week. And he who cannot do anything of these and has no draft-animals shall work three days (in a week) with his hands for his lord from dawn until sunset and his lord shall not ask more from him.

The emphasis is mine and shows that even with the heavy plow some people were still working the fields by hand. It implies that a day’s worth of plowing was equal to 3 days of hand turning the soil, though plowing could be much more efficient and this may be simply as much work as a lord could get out of a peasant and still allow him to take care of his own fields (especially since how much of the day is not specified for the plowmen).

So I think I have to call my first field a failure. I mean it’s been a lot of fun and I am very happy with it. But the experience isn’t medieval enough. I’ll keep posting about it and continue talking about the experience.

The important question though, is what do I do to fix it next time? What can I do to make my experience more medieval? I could plow, but I don’t have access to a team of oxen, horses or even a tractor. And the space I have is really too small for that anyway.

I could use a sod cutter. A sod cutter is a modern piece of equipment used to remove grass in those strips that you can buy from landscaping stores. They work essentially like a plow except that they have a moving blade that cuts horizontally under the level of the ground. Here’s a video showing how they work:

The problem with a sod cutter is that they all have a pre-set cutting depth -- which is 2.5 inches. While that is great for grass and gets the majority of the grass roots, it won’t get some weeds and if you just flipped that over you’d have a dense web of roots pointing up. I don’t think that would work.

So, I have bought myself a very nice spade and will do it, like in the quotation above, by hand. I have marked out a 600 square foot section of the lawn and I have plans to make a sowing tool. I’ll plant that section this fall with winter wheat and see how it goes.

You can trust that I will post all about it (and what it does to my poor old back) when the time comes.

Plowing Videos

2009-06-11T07:05:00.000-07:00

A quick one of a hand plow pulled by two draft horses.

Here’s a three-horse team tearing up a field. There are some good shots of the sod being turned over and of the smooth, flat path the plow has left behind.

A close up of what is happening to the soil during plowing. It’s done with modern equipment, but shows very well what is happening to the ground.

The Truth About Plows

2009-06-10T05:15:00.000-07:00

OK, so the simplest plows are nothing more than a blade attached to a frame that can be pulled by people or animals. They have been around since pre-historic times and function like I mentioned yesterday -- they carve a shallow scratch or furrow and leave an undisturbed strip of ground between the furrows. So several passes over the field, usually at right angles to each other, were necessary to fully ‘till’ the land.

The heavy plow is more complicated and does much more. It consists of four main parts, the coulter, the plowshare, the moldboard and one or more wheels at the front of the plow.

The coulter is a vertical blade that cuts into the turf. It creates a slit in the ground that the plowshare can get into to do its work.

The plowshare is an iron or steel piece of the plow that dips under the sod and has a horizontal blade that cuts the earth parallel to the top of the soil. It essentially cuts out the top layer of the ground in one long strip and feeds it up to the moldboard.

The moldboard is a curved board that takes the turf cut by the plowshare and pushes it to the side, at the same time flipping it over. This takes that strip of sod and inverts it, dirt-side up off to the right side of path of the plow. All of the grass and weeds are now root-side up and are effectively buried under inches of earth.

The last important piece of the heavy plow is a wheel or set of wheels, whose height can be adjusted, which allows the farmer to set the depth at which the plowshare is cutting.

This is obviously much more work for the animals pulling the plow than the scratch plow. The horizontal blade of the plowshare is dragging through the ground 4-8 inches under and encountering a lot of resistance. In his book, Medieval Technology and Social Change, Lynn White Jr. talks a lot about the ramifications of the adoption of the heavy plow, making these important points:

That the plow required the pulling force of 8 oxen
That these large teams of oxen required a lot of effort and coordination to turn around, which changed the shape of fields to long strips
That few farmers could afford 8 oxen of their own, so peasants had to form alliances in order to come up with enough animals to pull the new plows
And that with this change came an essential change in philosophy: whereas peasants had once held an amount of land theoretically able to produce enough food to feed themselves, they now held land in proportion to how much they could contribute to the plow-team. Man was now no longer part of a natural cycle, he was now part of a ‘machine’ that exploited that cycle.

Unthinkingly Plowing Through Life

2009-06-09T12:21:00.001-07:00

You know, it’s amazing how when you think you know how something works, you stop paying attention. Whenever the subject comes up in a book or whatever, the brain just turns off and says, “I already know this, I don’t have to pay attention any more.”

An example of this has come up this week in regards to the wheat project. I’ve been thinking a lot about my little 115 square foot plot and all the weeding I’ve had to do. If it took me 2 hours to weed 115 sq. ft., that would mean it would take me 758 hours (63 12-hour days) to weed an acre.

I’ll admit that I’m slow and that this is the first time in my life that I’ve really done this, so with the sort of practice makes perfect that you get from doing a job all your life let’s say that you could cut that time down by a factor of five (which is probably generous). Even then it’s taking you two weeks to weed an acre that will then need to be re-weeded after a one or two week’s worth of time. That means that one person would be continually weeding a half or a full acre.

So during the season, a family of four (ages 10+) would be doing little all day but weeding 3 acres. That does not pass a reality check. Or it just barely does if you take the few acreage figures in the polyptychs, and cut them in half, figuring them to be fallow. But only barely. And even though it may have been possible, that doesn’t mean it was done or that it even needed to be done.

I could also be doing things wrong. In an effort to save the wheat and the newspaper’s integrity, I have not been using a trowel or other tool to try and get out the weeds’ roots. This is certainly making me weed more often, but since the newspaper technique isn’t historically accurate, the problem remains, probably on a larger scale since the newspaper is actually working in large areas.

Let’s go back to my initial paragraph. I’m not a farmer, nor have I ever spent any time on a farm. I have always known that fields get plowed. I know that the scratch plow used in the Mediterranean world was unsuitable for the heavy soils of northern Europe. I know that in the second-half of the first millennium AD a newer, iron-shod or iron-constructed plow was invented and revolutionized farming in the north. But I never really thought about what that meant to the ground.

It’s particularly funny/odd/disconcerting because I’ve just finished re-reading Medieval Technology and Social Change and it has my highlights in the section on plowing, so I really have no excuse for not having internalized this information.

I know that seeds need to go in the ground to grow. So I figured that was what a plow did -- made furrows in the ground for seeds to go in. But, as I am discovering in my own back yard, it’s not that easy. What about the wild grasses and weeds that are already there? Surely you’re not pulling those out by hand?

After a little bit of research, I have been educated as to what a heavy plow with a moldboard really does. And I will discuss that, tomorrow.

Planting Wheat -- 9 weeks in

2009-06-08T06:35:00.000-07:00

I have my first ear of seeds in the Red Wheat!

The close-up is a bit blurry, but hopefully you can see the grains there. I examined them just the day before and I swear there was nothing there. I really think that those all grew in 24 hours (48 tops!).

Here’s a look at the whole plot:

Some small few have grown tall while most of them are still just grass-like little clumps.

My bucket of winter wheat had been stagnant for a while. Nothing had changed, no new ears of grain had appeared. Then in the middle of last week I watered the bucket on a whim and now there has been quite a bit of growth. Every single stalk has seeds now, even one stalk that had fallen over and was laying down flat.

Roman _Libum_

2009-06-07T21:03:00.000-07:00

So I made the Libum last week. The recipe that was in Around the Roman Table: Food and Feasting in Ancient Rome was pretty weak, but I was able to play with it and fill it out. Here’s what I did:

Ingredients:

1 2 lb. container of Ricotta Cheese ($4 at my local mega-mart)
2 pounds of whole wheat flour (I weighed it out and then forgot to measure that in cups) I only wound up using about 1 1/3 lbs. of it.
1 egg
1.5 teaspoons of salt
2 tablespoons of melted butter

Dump the Ricotta into a large mixing bowl. Add the salt and the egg. Stir in as much of the flour as you can before your arm gets tired (or be smart and use a mixer -- I didn’t think it would get that stiff). Pour the mixture into a greased bread pan. Smooth the top with a spatula and perforate the top many times with a fork. Brush on the melted butter. Cook in a 350 degree oven for 1 hour. The dough will rise a small amount and brown on the top.

The family had a few slices that night and were quite pleased. The taste is subtle and mild, and it has a dense cheesecake-like texture. The next day I took the leftovers to a small party and everyone enjoyed it. Many thought it needed something to spice it up -- strawberries, cheesecake and chocolate were suggested. Another friend commented that he thought it would be good to slice up and deep fry.

Some Latin Measures

2009-05-29T06:50:00.000-07:00

This is more for me than for any other reason but as long as I’m making a crib sheet, I might as well post it in case it is useful for someone else. I will add to this as needed.

Hectare -- a modern measure of area, equal to 2.471 acres or 107,639 sq. ft.

Roman Modius -- a measure of volume, often used to measure grain. I will use 8.73 liters as the size of this unit. It is interesting to note that it is often translated as “about two gallons”.

The Roman Modius is equal to 8.736 liters according to http://www.livius.org/w/weights/weights2.html
It is given as 8.75 liters in Agricultural Implements and Farm Equipment in the Roman World, by K. D. White
It is given as 8.732 liters in The Oxford Handbook of Engineering and Technology in the Classical World, edited by John Peter Oleson
According to Pliny’s Natural History (18.66), 1 modius of wheat weighs between 20-21.75 librae (Roman Pounds) or 6.55-7.12 kg).

Carolingian Modius -- According to Verhulst and Grierson-Blackburn, it is suspected that in 793-4, Charlemagne increased the size of the official modius by 50%. This would make the new modius equal to about 13.1 liters.

Bonarius (aka Buonarius, pl. b(u)onarii) -- a measure of area used in the Carolingian Empire, given as 1.38 hectares (or 3.41 acres) in The Carolingian Economy (Cambridge Medieval Textbooks)
, by Adriaan Verhulst. “The normal occupancy of a mansus is one tenant [family] and it’s legal size is 16 bonarii.” p. 45. 16 bonarii is 54.56 acres.

Iornales (aka Iurnales) -- this word appears not to be a unit of measurement, but rather a vague word meaning “plowlands”.

And Another

2009-05-28T21:14:00.000-07:00

I got my other shipment of books from Kalamazoo today, this time from The University of Chicago Press. I got The Masculine Self in Late Medieval England, but I probably won’t get a chance to read that one for a while, and it’s not quite appropriate for this blog.

The other one though, is quite pertinent to what goes on here: Around the Roman Table: Food and Feasting in Ancient Rome. It contains over 150 recipes reconstructed for the modern cook.

With a quick glance I’m both very impressed and disappointed. The recipes appear to very weak. They do not give good quantities and measurements (though they are better than the original latin), nor do they give good substitutions for hard-to-find ingredients, like garum. On the up-side, there is a lot of good additional information and detail both on the recipe, the ingredient and its relation to Roman culture.

There was one recipe that stood out and grabbed me and I may try it out over the weekend. Called Libum it is a flat bread simply made by combining white flour with ricotta cheese, then baking the cheese dough. It sounds simple and it sounds good. I’ll post how it turns out.

Two 15th Century Cookery Books

2009-05-27T07:44:00.000-07:00

While I was at K’zoo I ordered three books and the first one arrived today -- Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books. It is the re-print of a copyright-free text available online here.

I guess I didn’t pay too close attention at the con, because it was quite a surprise that it is in Middle English. That’s not a major problem to translate, but I was taken a bit aback. It makes me happy that I found this website a few weeks ago:

A Concise Dictionary of Middle English -- I like this one because you can just peruse through the words without having to search.
Another excellent resource is the Middle English Dictionary

If I get really into this, I could see myself translating and adding modern measurements to many of these . . .

Planting Wheat - 7 weeks in

2009-05-26T19:16:00.000-07:00

After my last post I was really going to try to post every weekday. As you can tell, that hasn’t happened. I’ve got four separate entries half-written and I just need to find time to finish them.

I spent another hour plus weeding yesterday and the field looks good.

The big surprise is my pot of winter wheat:

I don’t know if you can see it in this pic, but most of the tall stalks have ears of seeds. Yes they do! I have grown grain!

In this close-up you can see the sheaf and and the spiky awns coming off of each grain. They are still quite green and the other stalks don’t have nearly as many rows of grain as this one, but I am very pleased.

Yeah, wheat!

Carolingian Economics

2009-05-18T23:41:00.000-07:00

[And he manages to get the post in on Monday with 18 minutes to spare. Phew!]

Charlemagne ruled over the Kingdom of the Franks from 768 to 814 AD. He was crowned Emperor of the Romans on Christmas Day in the year 800. His reign saw a number of reforms and steps toward civilization. He standardized coinage, standardized writing scripts, and encouraged his underlings to be organized and efficient.

Part of this latter effort led to the creation of polyptychs (or polyptyques), theoretically standardized books of accountings and inventories of the royal and ecclesiastical estates of the Empire. While they aren’t standardized or organized by modern standards, they do list things like: how much land they control, how many people work that land, what sort of obligations to they own to the estate, are they free or slaves (or in-between), what is grown on those lands, etc. They bear some similarity to the Domesday Book of 250 years later.

The University of Leicester has a wonderful website that details ten of these documents, both in the original medieval Latin and translated into English. A truly stunning resource that likes of which one does not expect to find for free on the internet.

One of my purchases at Kalamazoo, The Carolingian Economy by Adriaan Verhulst, has led me through them quite nicely, reading every nuance to get as much information as possible out of their sparse words. Reading them myself I’m left wanting more. In places they are so precise, listing tenants off by name, for example, or counting off exactly how many animals people own. Yet at the same time they are so vague, using words like “plowlands” instead of acres or similar unit of actual measurement.

They do often say something like “enough land to sow 20 modii of grain”, which could be used to get some raw numbers. I think in the future, I’ll play with some of these and see what I can come up with.

Trencher Denying

2009-05-15T05:59:00.000-07:00

If there’s one thing that people know about Medieval bread is that people used to use bread instead of plates and eat off of it.

This is a great bit of SCA theater that really draws you into the era. I mean, it’s great to be able to do something so very easy that is also very alien to our modern sensibilities that it pulls us into that fantasy world and out of the modern. And eating your stew off a stale slice of bread does this very well.

But I’m going to call shenanagins. At least for the common folk.

It just doesn’t seem practical to me, and practicality matters to people living in a marginal environment. Certainly people used bread to soak up and mop up every last bit of soup, porridge, pottage or broth. Certainly, soup, stew or broth (or even milk, ale or water) were used to soften and flavor stale or fresh bread. A lack of waste would be the goal.

Trenchers seem wasteful to me. Or at least you have to be very careful to not be wasteful. If you pour soup or stew that is going to be liquid enough to soak into the whole trencher, some is going to soak through onto your table/eating board/bowl. If it is thick enough to not soak through, there are going to be large parts of the bread (ie. the edges and corners) that don’t get softened.

Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, in her book, The History of Food, claims, “Soup, in fact, derives from ‘sop’ or ‘sup’, meaning the slice of bread on which broth was poured.”

My Webster’s (Third New International Unabridged) Dictionary says for the etymology of Sop: “a piece of food (such as bread) dipped or steeped before being eaten” and “the liquid into which food is dipped before being eaten”. For Sup, it gives several different meanings: From the Old French soupe meaning “a piece of bread soaked in broth, soup” but under another definition, from the Old English, Old Norse, Old High German and Middle High German, “to sip, to drink, to swallow”.

Even going with the Old French definition I don’t think that proves that Soup = Trencher.

Now we know that trenchers were used by the nobility and maybe even during festivals, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Everyday, common usage by everyday, common folk is what this blog is about and how this look at trenchers should be taken.

I'll post more evidence for this as I find it.

Planting Wheat - Weeding (6 weeks+)

2009-05-14T05:33:00.001-07:00

I spent an hour and half weeding the rest of the plot. It’s not the most fun I’ve ever had, but it has a certain charm that is growing on me -- assuming the weather is right. It could be hard on the knees (but I have knees pads) and it could be hard on the back (less so if it was planted properly in rows).

One thing it did give me was a very close-up look at what is happening at the ground level. There are spots where seeds just didn’t germinate. I can still see the seeds lying there on the soil. There are spots where they grew quite well and taller than in other areas. I have no idea how to explain the difference nor did I see any patterns.

Here’s a picture of the garden (compare it to yesterday’s pictures):

All of the green visible in this picture is wheat.

And here is a patch that grew well:

Planting Wheat - 6 weeks in

2009-05-13T08:57:00.000-07:00

I just got back from the medieval congress at Kalamazoo. It was a fun time, an educational time and an exhausting time. I met good people (though not as many as I wanted to) and I can’t wait to go again, although that night not be for a few years if my daughter really does go to Germany as an exchange student.

If anyone is interested in my experience at Kzoo 2009, it can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. It’s mostly not about living history, so I didn’t feel like I should post directly here. Over the next few days though, I should get the specifically food, mead and daily life bits and post about them here.

I also visited my parents who live in an RV but who spend some of their summer visiting my aunt in rural Indiana. There I got to see mile after mile of corn fields (maize, that is), still filled with the stubble of last year’s harvest. I was told it was still too wet to plow and plant this year.

But that means that I haven’t even looked at my own wheat field in two whole weeks, and what a lot has happened in those days!

The weeds have taken over! The wheat is still there but definitely needs help. I spent nearly an hour today pulling them out, and that is a pretty tedious job. I did about a third of it in that hour and the results are obvious.

My little planter of winter wheat has really taken off. The picture's not great, but these stalks are now over a foot long.

I’m going out right after this to finish up since it is supposed to rain this evening.

Medieval Bread Recipes On-Line

2009-05-05T05:37:00.000-07:00

History.uk Recipes

Frequently Asked Questions about Medieval Bread
I like this one. It has several translations of period (late period) recipes.

CeltNet Recipes

A Short Note of Medieval Bread

Medieval Bread Baking

Serendipity

2009-05-03T04:33:00.000-07:00

I just got an email from Bountiful Gardens advertising some of their new items up for sale. Among them was this book:

Booklet #33: Grow Your Own Grains by Carol Cox, 2008, 28 pp

Ecology Action Research Papers,

At last! Basic grain raising and harvesting on a small scale, appropriate for a home garden. How to grow and use barley, oats, cereal rye, triticale, wheat, amaranth, corn, millet, quinoa, rice, sorghum and teff. Carol Cox is the Garden Manager at our Ecology Action Research Mini-Farm in Willits, and has been growing all kinds of grains for many years. A working paper.

I think I’ll put in an order for that one . . .

Planting Day, 2 weeks later

2009-05-01T05:24:00.001-07:00

I have shoots!

The weeding has gotten more difficult now since I can’t reach across the garden to reach all of the weeds I need to get to without trodding in the garden. But I don’t want to step on my nice little sprouts, so I’m treading carefully, leaning farther out than I should and straining my back in interesting and unexpected ways. Planting in orderly rows with paths between them definitely has its merits!

One thing I do notice is that there are some patches that are putting up a high density of little shoots, and there are other patches that seem devoid of wheat. I am very curious to know whether this represents poor sowing or some other effect. Maybe some patches are growing faster than others due to light or soil? Maybe some areas got more water than other? Unlikely that one. But I’m curious.

Medieval Bread, Myths and Misconceptions

2009-04-29T16:46:00.000-07:00

This topic is actually what made me want to start this project: that modern people are so willing to turn pre-modern men and women into knuckle-dragging imbeciles who are not just non-technological, but non-common sensical.

Take this quote in answer to a student’s question about medieval bread for a school report (Posted on Yahoo Answers):

...all bread in medieval times was a flat unlevened bread as yeast had not yet been thought of as an ingrediant to make the bread rise. it was baked in kilns fired by wood, most prominent households would have one in the house when the bread was baked the under side became a lot harder than the top part of the bread , the harder part was given to the servents and children while the upper part given to the more important members of the household, thus they became known as the upper crust still used as a name for a class system to this day you will often hear people of more importance called the upper crust...

Besides indulging in perpetuating that awful e-mail meme, “The Bad Old Days” it is neither helpful to the student nor accurate. The discovery of yeast, leavened bread and wine/ale/mead is lost in history but even the Romans recorded that the Gauls skimmed yeast off of their ale to make bread rise (Pliny, Natural History XVIII-26).

One website I found (that I now cannot, for the life of me, re-find) asserted that since the earliest medieval text to mention salt in a bread recipe dated to the 15th-Century, salt must have been unknown or unavailable to earlier bakers. This is another one of those over-simplifications that so annoys me.

Salt? Unavailable? Unknown? Salt was a prime medieval commodity, required in large quantities for the preserving of meat and fish. Extracting salt from seawater or mining it was a major industry. A little salt goes a long way in flavoring and lightening a loaf of bread.

Even good articles talk about medieval ovens in such a way as to imply that there is no other way to cook dough. To we modern Americans, it may seem like bread must be cooked in an oven, but that is simply not the case.

Every village house would have had a fire pit/area for cooking and heating. Bread, even leavened bread, can be cooked on that fire -- either fried above it or by immersing a both under the coals, dutch-oven-style. These methods make a lot of sense to me. A specialized oven seems to require a lot of wood and resources to operate. There must be another method, smaller in scope, more personal, that the oven evolved out of.

Planting Day, 1 week plus

2009-04-28T07:31:00.000-07:00

Since my last post, I’ve gone out twice to weed some more. Those weeds grow like . . . weeds. Really fast. For the most part I’ve just been content to rip the heads off the weeds as I try to get them out. There are a few places where the newspaper has deteriorated enough to expose patches of grass. I’ve been trying to rip out what I can and place newspaper as best I can back over them.

This, though, is all the problem of converting a lawn to a garden.

The wheat itself seems to be doing well. Here are a few pics of sprouting seeds:

So far, that darn lawn has been the biggest obstacle. I suppose next year I should do it properly and actually dig up and till the soil.

Bread

2009-04-24T06:47:00.000-07:00

I have a bread machine. It makes great bread. But what it does inside that that plastic box has always been a mystery to me. A wonderful, fragrant mystery that fills the house with such wonderful smells.

Part of this whole experiment is removing those mystery processes between ground and belly.

Last Election Day I tried making a loaf of bread and was pretty impressed by the result. Don’t get me wrong, it tasted like jogging shoe, but I actually made bread!

Since then, I’ve wanted to make good bread. Recently I was at my local used bookstore and found a book called The Tassajara Bread Book. I was convinced it was a small press, never-be-able-to-find-another-copy-of-this-great-book, but here it is on Amazon touted as the best bread baking book ever.

And it is.

I’ve baked several loaves of their basic bread recipe (using fresh ground flour) and have found it to be good, but not perfect. Earlier this week I made a few changes to the recipe and the two loaves (yes, their basic recipe is for four, so this is smaller too) and it turned out perfect. The recipe looks something like this.

3 cups of Water
0.5 cups of Honey
1.33 cups of Powdered Milk (the next time I make it I’ll try leaving this out)
4 cups of flour
1 Tblspn of Dry Active Yeast

Whisk these ingredients together and leave for an hour to rise. Then add (by folding, not stirring):

1 stick of Butter (melted)
0.5 cups of Honey (if you don’t have my sweet tooth, leave this out)
1 Tblspn of Salt
6 cups of Flour

When the dough becomes too dense to stir, knead it on a floured tabletop until it no longer sticks to the table.

Let rise an hour, punch down. Let rise another hour. Cut into two pieces and place into bread pans or roll into balls. Let rise for 30 minutes. Cook in a 325-350 degree oven for 50 minutes.

See, this blog isn’t always about growing wheat. ;)

Book-hoard

2009-04-23T07:16:00.000-07:00

I mentioned the other day the lack of books about peasant life. Here are the few that I have found and read. When I start to run low on things to talk about, I’ll write up some reviews of these books.

Life in a Medieval Village by Frances Gies and Joseph Gies

Anglo-saxon Food & Drink by Ann Hagen

Lost Country Life - How English Country Folk Lived, Worked, Threshed, Thatched, Rolled Fleece... by Dorothy Hartley

Peasants and Landlords in Later Medieval England by E. B. Fryde

Medieval Technology and Social Change by Lynn White Jr.

Feudal Society: Vol 1: The Growth and Ties of Dependence by Marc Bloch

Feudal Society Vol. 2: Social Classes and Political Organization by Marc Bloch

The Medieval Economy & Society by M. M. Postan

A Medieval Home Companion: Housekeeping in the Fourteenth Century by Tania Bayard

To the King's Taste: Richard II's Book of Feasts and Recipes Adapted for Modern Cooking by Lorna Sass

A History of Food by Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat

Marc Bloch’s books are classics in the field and I haven’t read them since college. I think I’ll take them with me on the plane to Kalamazoo and give them a good re-read.

I haven’t read Peasants and Landlords, mostly because it’s later than my preference, but that really shouldn’t dissuade me. Lost Country Life is even later, stressing the conservative and cyclical nature of rural life before the 20th Century, but giving details about farming life on a month-by-month basis.

I almost forgot, I also have a copy of Hesiod's Works and Days that I often pick up, read a couple of pages and then put down again only to not come back to it for a month or so. It too is off-period and Mediterranean rather than Northern European, but is one of the earliest discussions of agriculture, dating to 700-600 BC. This edition is excellent as it has a tremendous amount of notes and comments accompanying the text.

Planting Day, 1 Week Later

2009-04-22T08:29:00.000-07:00

It’s been a wet week -- lots of rain, a few grey days. But it was actually dry today so I went out to take a look. There was a lot of green and that was not good. Dandelions had pushed through. Grass had found some cracks in the newspaper. And there were no wheat shoots. Here’s a picture of the dandelions:

I got down and tried to weed them out. The dandelion stalks break with very little pulling. Instead of pulling out the plant by the roots, you just get a handful of crunchy greenery. I guess I’ll have to keep that up for a while, at least until the wheat grows taller than them.

The seeds on the other hand, have just started to sprout. It took a few days longer than I expected, but they are starting. I tried to take a picture of them but all of the close-ups came out really blurry. I’ll try again in a few days.

I don’t know what to do about the grass. I guess I’ll rip it up as it grows. My advice to anyone else doing this though -- use more layers of newspaper (more than 3) and make sure they overlap more than a few inches.

Why Am I Doing This?

2009-04-20T07:21:00.000-07:00

I’m really interested in a lot of the details of early, everyday life -- the kinds of things that no one things about, everyone takes for granted and that so many people dismiss our early ancestors for. I want to see early village or farmstead life as a complex system of struggle against nature, time, resources, law, tradition, overlords and invaders. I want to understand the personal, social and technological institutions that help regulate and manage those struggles. I want to see what those coping mechanisms were and how they worked.

I want to understand it because it interests me, but also because I want to write a game about it. Or should I say I want to write a _good_, historically accurate (at least sort of) game about it. I can’t count how many games I’ve seen brag about the “realistic medieval economy” only then to put a general store and a mercenaries guild in every village. Or even more prevalent, to have the common villager be the “damsel in distress” figure, in need of rescue by the daring hero.

I want to understand why people bake bread instead of just cooking the wheat berries. I want to understand to movement away from individual preparing of food (milling and baking) to the communal manorial monopolies. I want to understand early medieval trade, especially in important natural resources like salt and iron. I want to learn more about the shift from Roman-style slave-run villas to the serf-inhabited manor of the medieval age.

But there is so little written about the common man and woman. So little written a the time results in little to write about today. Even if there was a good, definitive book that answered all of these questions, I think I’d still be doing this. I’m loving it. It’s pushing my personal boundaries and forcing me to grow.

Methods and Methodologies

2009-04-17T21:49:00.000-07:00

So what am I doing here? I mean, first I said I wanted to re-create medieval life and then in practically the next breath I’m laying down newspaper. So what are my real goals? What am I really trying to achieve here? What am I willing to do and what am I unwilling to do?

There are several keys. First off, I have to succeed. This one is personal and unprofessional and indicative of the hobbyist nature of the project. If I spend weeks working on a project only to have it fail, I stand a good chance of getting disappointed and quitting or taking a break. I don’t want to do that.

So I’m starting off using a modern wheat strain rather than an ancient one. So I’ll use pre-packaged yeast to make bread or ale. So I’ll start off with a steel grain mill. The point is that once I become comfortable using these modern methods, I can always go back to the historically accurate version.

Secondly, if a bit of modernity helps me or is cheaper, and I can’t see any real difference in how it will effect the project, I’ll go with the modern. I may wind up being mistaken about whether a piece of technology makes a difference or not, but I’ll be honest about what I do use and will consider changing the experiment if I later learn that it makes a difference.

For example, while fermenting the mead, I plan to use a glass carbouy. I would expect that this would have been done in a ceramic vessel in earlier times, but I don’t have one and they are probably expensive. I’ll also use modern sterilization methods to make the stuff safe to drink.

There are also a few things that I just can’t do. I don’t have a team of oxen. I can’t even borrow one from my fellow villagers. I don’t have access to a lot of the tools, supplies and know-how that a good Iron Age or medieval farmer had. So I’m just going to do my best, trying to stay away from chemicals.

The last one is also a bit of a personal conceit, but the one that bothers me the most. The results of these experiments will result in food and other products. Those products are going to be consumed and used by me and my friends, so they have to conform to my tastes.

I’m not going to deny it. I have a sweet tooth, like many modern Americans. After years of Wonder Bread as I child, I expect my bread to have a pretty sweet taste to it, so my recipes are going to have more honey in them than they should. In my daily life, I still drink a 6 pack of soda a day, so I’m shooting for a sweet mead.

There’s not a whole lot I can do about this one. I want to enjoy the fruits of my labors. Since this is a hobbyist venture, I _need_ to enjoy it in order to keep it going. I do feel guilty, though, that my palette is far from medieval and so that is going to skew my results.

I will be honest about what I am doing and open to comments and criticism. I’m going to try to post frequently (I’m not sure how long I can keep it daily . . . ).

Planting Day, 24 hours later

2009-04-16T06:28:00.000-07:00

It was another sunny day and I went out to check my work from the day before. Here’s a photo:

The newspaper has turned brown, presumably from soaking up water made dirty from the top soil. The seeds have changed in appearance. Where before they were dry, slightly shriveled little things, they have plumped up and look much healthier. You can compare the picture of the seeds in the package:

With this one of a seed in the garden:

It’s good to see that something is happening so quickly.

Planting Day

2009-04-15T06:13:00.001-07:00

Today, actually April 6th because I’m delaying these posts a bit, was the first 65 degree day of the year here in the Seattle metroplex. The sun was very nice, even for an indoor troll like me. I got an early start and mowed the lawn, after fighting with the mower for nearly 20 minutes. It’s always a pain to start the first time after the long winter, but this year was worse than usual. It probably needs a tune up . . .

Anyway I got the lawn mowed. Here’s a pic of my garden plot after mowing.

The plot is 13.5 feet by 8.5 feet, about 115 square feet and on the north side of the property. It gets good morning an afternoon sun, but is blocked in the midday by a big evergreen tree and a rundown shed.

It wasn’t breezy yet (we often get a very nice easterly wind coming off of Puget Sound in the afternoon) so I figured it would be good to get the newspaper down fast. The first problem I was faced with was how much newspaper. One layer? Seems really thin. Two layers? Also seemed pretty thin. So I went with three. I started running out of the two weeks worth of newspapers I had saved near the end, so the last row was only two layers thick. It went without any problems (though with several “oh, I missed that article, let me stop and read it” moments). Here are a few pictures of the progress.

For the next step I took one bag of top soil and one bag of steer manure (each bought the week before at Lowe’s and each equivalent to 1 cubic foot) and mixed them together in my old, rusty wheelbarrow.

After mixing, I spread it as evenly and as thinly as I could across the newspaper. I wanted to weigh it down, give the seeds some soil to start growing in and as the paper broke down, give some nutrients to the soil. Then I did another bag of each and added it to the plot.

The newspaper was resting on the grass like a man lying on a bed of nails. Adding the thin layer of soil was enough to push the paper down in some places, but not enough in other places so I got a strange, “rolling hills” effect.

I watered the whole area thinking it might weigh things down a bit more and even out the newspaper with no luck. Here’s a picture after watering:

Now I was ready to seed. My process was to dump a small pile of seeds into my hand and then toss them out over the damp soil. It worked well close in, but farther than four feet or so my accuracy really suffered and it was hard to get an even covering of seeds. The directions of the seed packets said that each packet was enough for 100 square feet. I used a packet and a half to get what I considered a “reasonable-looking” coverage. I then sprinkled the entire plot with fresh grass clippings and watered again. The clippings are there to protect the seeds and to absorb and hold in moisture (the weather forecast now shows a week of rain showers coming in a few days).

In the end, it all looked like this:

Not a bad day’s work, if I do say so myself. Now let’s hope it actually grows . . .

Unexpected Finds

2009-04-13T07:31:00.001-07:00

While I was ordering the Spring Wheat, I clicked the box that said “Send me a catalog.”

I just got finished going though it and . . . WOW.

They have an incredible selection of seeds and the catalog is packed with information about how, where, and how long they grow. There is so much information that they have to abbreviate it, so there are lots of codes to look up. They have a huge selection of books, one titled Ancient Agriculture, a translation of a 16th century Spanish instruction manual. Others that give directions on sustainable agriculture in limited space.

One offers the following trivia: “Currently it takes a minimum of 10,000 square feet to feed one person in the US and often 16,000 square feet in the Third World. This booklet gives a step-by-step approach . . . in as little as 2,100 square feet.”

Bountiful Gardens also gives lectures, runs classes and travels around the world (Mexico, Afganistan, Kenya) to teach and practice their impressive trade.

New Field, New Corn

2009-04-10T05:29:00.001-07:00

I need some seed to start this off. If anyone read any of my old posts, you’ll see that I took some wheat berries that I bought at the local food co-op and threw them into a planter and, big surprise, got sprouts growing in my backyard. I planted those in September of 2008. Here’s the state of the grain in the first week of April:

It’s winter wheat, so it’s on target to produce some tall stalks by summer.

But now it’s April, and I don’t want to wait until next year. I want some grain now! So I went back online. I found the Bountiful Gardens website (located very near the small town I grew up in) and ordered some Spring Wheat. They had an ancient strain of wheat that they said dated back to the Stone Age. I was really tempted but it also talked about how difficult it was to thresh and clean.

Here’s a picture of the Modern Hard Red Wheat.

Standing on the threshold

2009-04-09T06:04:00.000-07:00

I am about to plant some wheat. What do I do to prepare the soil? How do I get rid of the grass in my lawn? What about fertilizer or peat moss or manure? I have no idea.

So I did what anyone would do in this day and age. I went online. I googled.

I came up with a plan. To build a raised bed. To make a wooden frame, kill the grass under it with wet newspaper (which will starve the grass for sunlight and biodegrade), fill it with good topsoil and plant in that. It can’t go wrong. The wood is cheap. The hard part is getting a cubic yard of topsoil.

I never got around to finding out how much that would cost. Because I found this website. On page 8 it suggests a procedure to prepare a grassy plot to turn it into a garden. It says to lay down the newspaper, thrown on some compost and seed that with wheat. Once the wheat has grown, till it back into the earth and instant (well maybe not instant) garden.

Well, I’m not looking for a garden, I want to grow wheat. So this method seems perfect. That’s what I’ll do.

Who is this guy anyway?

2009-04-08T08:28:00.000-07:00

I guess the most important part is that I know nothing about agronomy or gardening. My parents had a large garden in their first house, but when they moved out of that house (when I was 5), they had other things to do. My father planted roses while I was a young adult, but never involved me in the practice (I was given the job of doing the landscaping). I’ve planted tulip bulbs with mixed results. I’ve planted hearty juniper bushes and had them die.

So I am definitely confident that I can screw this project up at any point.

One of the things that gives me much trepidation is the ground. I don’t know anything about soil.

I do know that the area used to be a swamp and that there is a lot of gravel about 8-12 inches below the surface. Many websites I’ve looked at say that grain is just grass, and if grass will grow in an area so will wheat. That makes a certain amount of sense, but at the same time there has to more to it than that. I mean, if it was that easy to grow, there’d be no discussion of crop rotation. I never have to rotate my lawn . . . though I guess some people spend a lot of money on lawn fertilizer and weed killer . . .

Things That Have Come Before

2009-04-07T08:06:00.000-07:00

I do have another blog. That is where I post about my daily life, my writing and where I rant about the injustices of the world and sulk at the pain and sufferings inflicted upon me. So naturally, it’s on LiveJournal.

I decided to start this separate diary to give it a more professional/academic feel (while trying to be up-front about the fact that it is neither). To have all of these experiments and experiences available in one place without having to sort through the LOLcats and cute pictures of the family, though I may still sneak those in.

But I did write several articles in that other blog about growing wheat and bread making before deciding to split that subject off on its own. In the interest of completeness (and so I don’t have to re-write those articles) here are links to them.

It begins on a cruise....

I went back and read all of my blog entries from the Alaskan Cruise the family and I took in August of 2008, and even though my next entry refers to a decision being made on that cruise and it being discussed in the cruise diary, I don’t see it. I do remember deciding on that cruise, that there were a number of things that intrigued me about medieval food, and that I wanted to investigate them.

In a long post about goals (dated Aug. 12, 2008)

I list one of my long-term goals as:

I want to work on this medieval peasant cooking project I mentioned in my cruise blog. It will consist of trying to make for myself a number of medieval meals, not the good tasting ones that appear in the cookbooks of the times, but rather the subsistance foods that the common person would have eaten. I see this as something I dabble with for a long time, with large gaps between experiments, but I get to combine my interest in medieval life and cooking.

Medieval Cooking This one has some good comments from my friends

Two Paragraphs in a much larger post dated Sept. 11, 2008 The relevant bits quoted here:

Medieval Cooking: I cooked some barley much like I did the Wheat Berries and it turned out equally well. The barley is more suited (at least to my palette) for just eating boiled and puffs up and gets starchy much like rice does (though the process take 3 times as long). Reheating it on the third day I forgot it on the stove and burnt the hell out of it.

Medieval Cooking, part 2: Last weekend (I think) I took some leftover, uncooked Wheat Berries and through them into a planter that I had just emptied of all the grass that had been growing in it. Just to see what would happen with no real expectations. Yesterday, I noticed green grass-like sprouts growing in it, and figured it was just the grass that I had not cleared out entirely. On poking around however, the green shoots were definitely coming from the little white seeds I had thrown in. I have successfully planted wheat!

Medieval Cooking Experiment #3

Medieval Cooking Episode #4

Introduction

2009-04-06T07:27:00.000-07:00

Hello! Welcome to my little corner of the Interwebz.

My name is Tim Morgan and I’m a 40-something guy living in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. I’ll talk more about myself as this series of postings goes on, but the important bits are:

I have a great and abiding love for the history Medieval, Classical and Iron Age Europe.
I am, by trade, inclination and passion, a gamer. I play and write pen-and-paper roleplaying games (like Dungeons and Dragons). I play board games and computer games. Someday, I may write a computer game.
I am very interested in how things work, the rules by which processes and institutions operate.

These three things have led me to this blog, where I am going to post about my strange and naive experiments into re-creating various aspects of pre-modern life. I will be:

Planting and raising my own grain
Hand Milling the grain
Baking Bread
Building a medieval-style quern
Building an oven
Cooking food the way the common folk would do it, making pottage and soaking grain
Brewing Mead and Ale
Reviews and discussions of books and other media about Medieval/Iron Age life
and anything else along those lines that interests me