Teh whezzer forecast for the next few days is: another heatwave. Thus, I decided to harvest my oats.
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Here is my little field of gold this morning shortly before the harvest. There are still some specks of green in there, but according to what I could find on the internet, this is the stage when naked oats should be harvested. When it is too dry during harvest, it tends to drop the grains on the ground. I have no personal experience with this crop; this is the first year I have tried to grow it, so I hope the information I found is accurate. When extracting the seeds manually from the flowers, they are hard and ripe.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
Oats is not insect-pollinated, but I had an opportunity to spot one of the IMO prettiest butterflies that are to be seen around here. I could not fetch my proper camera for fear of it flittering away, but the tiny beauty was kind enough to let me snap an adequate picture with my phone. I am not a butterfly expert; all I can say with certainty is that it is a member of the family Lycaenidae.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
I thought about how to go about the harvest. I have a scythe, and I do know how to use it, but I was afraid of the aforementioned seed dropping, and I thought that bashing the growth with wide scything sweeps might be detrimental. I considered harvesting it with a sickle, but then I remembered that I have a tiny battery-powered hedge trimmer. That proved to be perfect for the task, and it took me just slightly over half an hour to cut the whole patch.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
I cut it really close to the ground, and if you do not know better, it now looks almost indistinguishable from mown lawn. There are a lot of weeds in there.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
I was far enough with processing the woodpile that one of the old flooring mats on which it was dumped from the truck became available. I laid the oats on it during the harvest just to collect them all in one place.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
And finally, I bound the stalks into sheaves with twine and stood them on the mat. Now I should hopefully get some advantage of the incoming heatwave, and they should dry out nicely. The heatwave should not be long, and it should break with some rain on Friday, so I hope it will completely dry before then so I can thresh it on Thursday afternoon.
As far as that goes, I do not have a process yet. I do not think this is enough for a flail; I will need to devise some small-scale threshing method.
The oats look great, I hope they dry enough before Thursday.
The blue butterflies are by a long way my favourites.
What yield do you expect from this patch? Was it a small scale test or will you glean a usable amount of oats?
This is really cool, thanks for posting about this -- I don’t comment often, but I read all of these posts, and find them interesting and informative. Looking forward to reading about how you end up processing this harvest.
:)
@amts, I do not know how much to expect; we shall see. It was circa 20 m2, so hopefully I get a few kg at least.
I’ve taken the habit of growing a few stalks of oat in a pot on my balcony every year, because they’re very easy to grow and I can start them so early in the spring that the seedling phase passes for Easter decoration. In Finland people almost always plant ryegrass seeds for Easter, but I once happened to buy a small pack of oats that were sold for Easter grass seeds. I always save the ripe oats I get for next year’s seed, because throwing them away feels somehow wrong. At one point my mom was slightly confused, and asked to clarify that my balcony oats were indeed for decoration and not like, for food. I didn’t bother telling her that I would actually try eating the surplus seeds if this was a naked variety.
(I also once tried growing ryegrass to maturity, just out of curiosity, but it doesn’t look good as an ornamental plant. I surprised some people who didn’t know you can grow ryegrass beyond the usual seedling stage.)
Last August, I absentmindedly nicked a ripe ear of wheat as a souvenir while visiting a farm. Then I couldn’t throw it away either, so this year I planted a few wheat seeds together with the oats. Now they’re all ripe and looking reasonably decorative while I let them dry up in the pot. My urban cereal growing hobby is getting slightly out of hand.
@lumipuna, oats look kinda pretty when ripe, but we have never grown any grass for easter ornamentation. Ryegrass is common ordinary grass where I live, and a very persistent and difficult weed at that.
Historically, people in northern Europe would plant whatever seeds they had at hand (most likely cereals, I guess), or put turnip or carrot tops in a plate of water on their windowsill, to get some green sprouts for Easter. In the modern era, cultivation of forage grasses became standard part of agriculture, and garden shops then started selling the cheap mass-produced seeds of ryegrass and such for Easter sprouts. In Finland, ryegrass was somehow established as the one standard species everyone expects to use. I think it maybe has the right size of seeds and seedlings for a neat-looking, densely planted “lawn” on a plate.
I just found there’s a wiki article for Easter grass -- only on Finnish Wikipedia! The photo shows a typical “baby chicken” trinket accessory. Rairuoho is the everyday Finnish name for Easter grass, raiheinä is the formal name for ryegrass (Lolium spp.). The words ruoho and heinä are near-synomyms in everyday language, meaning loosely “grass”.
https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rairuoho_(p%C3%A4%C3%A4si%C3%A4iskoriste)
Both ruoho and heinä are probably old loanwords, Ruoho could be Germanic and heinä is Baltic. The Fenno-Ugric-speaking peoples were more into fishing and hunting before Baltic and maybe also Germanic peoples brought cattle husbandry and agriculture here.