The Most Baffling Thing About Tolkien

I am currently listening to various YouTube essays on LOTR lore. I have read most of the books and watched the films multiple times. Now it is entertaining to listen to summaries about deeper lore from people who also read The Silmarillion, The Book of Lost Tales, and have researched various other writings by Tolkien himself.

I find it fascinating how deep the lore he has invented for his world is, and I totally respect the amount of work he put into it. He did create a great piece of literature that I like and undoubtedly will read again.

But I never read The Silmarillion. I tried twice, and I could not get thru the first chapter. It read like the Bible, albeit more coherent.

And that is the thing baffling me the most about Tolkien. He was sufficiently self-aware to notice that what he writes sounds like a religious text, yet not so to realize what it implies. He essentially wrote a creation myth that is more logical, more internally consistent, and in much better prose than the Bible, yet he remained a devout Catholic for his whole life.

I have never believed in any God, god, or supernatural being, or superstition. Not really, really believed, although there were times when I tried, and there certainly were times – and still are – when I would much wish for a benevolent and kind omnipotent being who would intervene on behalf of those in need, me included. It would be nice if I could pray for good weather, for example. But deep down, I always recognized this as an irrational desire disconnected from reality. The only thing that religion more broadly, and prayer and various superstitions (knock on wood) in particular, do is give a comforting illusion of hope and control when there is none.

Thus, I fundamentally lack the understanding those atheists have, who had an epiphany during their life and lost their faith. I never had faith; therefore, I cannot empathise with those who do. I never had an epiphany losing my faith; therefore, I lack personal knowledge of how that happens.

But if I had to guess one way such an epiphany could happen, it would be a direct, detailed confrontation with the human ability to create fictional deities and spin intricate stories about gods out of the fabric of imagination and legend. And Tolkien had such a confrontation as detailed as it gets. Yet he remained a believer in the Virgin Birth and the whole convoluted, contradictory, and downright nonsensical and idiotic mess that is Christianity as a whole and Roman Catholicism in particular.

He is proof that highly intelligent and informed people can believe in objectively proven bullshit. I have struggled to understand that reality my whole life.

 

 

The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 39 – Bursting Butternuts

Since I do not have much experience growing butternut squash, this is a new-ish problem for me. I have encountered this problem with some tomatoes, plums, and cherries, but I did not know it could happen with butternut squash too.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Four fruits burst in the last week: two lengthwise, two across. The one in the picture broke almost all around; a centimeter more and it would essentially fall off.

I guess this is because the shell hardened prematurely in the heat, and then the fruit grew too quickly after the rain. I had to harvest this one prematurely, and I gave two others to my neighbor because they should be processed ASAP, and we cannot do that right now. The one that burst first has only a small crack that dried out, so I left it on the plant for now. But I will harvest and process it at the earliest possible time too.

I do not think there is anything I can do about this. Even if I watered the plants during the heatwave more than I did, it would not help; they could not take up the water during the day fast enough anyway.

The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 39 – Large Loofahs

The loofahs are a-growing. Yesterday, I counted 8 fruits, 7 of which can be found in this picture.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Can you find them all? I made the picture larger than normal, so you have a chance to spot all of them. One is really hard to see, which is why yesterday was the first day I spotted it. The biggest fruit in this image is as big as my forearm and is starting to piss me off, because it is at the exact height where it is hard to see, but easy to boink with the head.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

The eighth piece is the first that started early in the summer. It is behind the door to the right and already drying out.

I missed several female flowers and did not pollinate them, but bees and wasps pollinated some of those. If all these fruits manage to ripen enough to be useful, I will be fully satisfied with this crop. Eight fruits should be enough compostable dish-scrubbers for at least two years.

Socks’ Adventures: Fly like a bird!

Did you know that birds can fly? Like really fly? I was always suspicious of them being able to pull some kind of trick, because at home, those evil bastards hop around on the forest path and when I get there, they’re suddenly somewhere higher up. At home there’s a lot of trees. And a lot of birds. In trees. What there is not is a lot of open space. At the North Sea, it’s different. They’re really lacking in the tree department. BTW, mum, that was a dirty trick, promising that on holiday, I’d get a treat at every tree when you knew that there were very few trees. Anyway, back to the birds. They’re mean, and they can fly. Long distances. Fast. Especially the swallows. I really, really wanted to play catch with them, but mum said no. That was not cool. The stupid swallows kept teasing me and I was still on the lead.

Then one day, when I was trying to get to the swallows really hard, I head mum say something like “Gods, he’s pulling so much, I’m going to secure him around my body”. I didn’t understand exactly what she meant, but I knew it was now or never. While she was fumbling with the snap link, I took my chance, gave a good pull and there I was, running free. Into the Wadden, chasing those swallows. Wel, lots of yelling and running later I did come back, but man, that was good.

A small dog sitting far off in the distance in the Wadden at low tide

©Giliell, all rights reserved

Did I run away even thogh I knew I shouldn’t? Yes!

Did I get dirty as fuck and need a shower? Also yes!

Did I get all that muck over mum as well? You bet!

Do I regret anything? Absolutely not!

A very dirty small black and brown dog sitting in the sun, looking very proud of himself

©Giliell, all rights reserved

The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 37 – Cosplaying Cinderella

Except I am the wrong gender, and I didn’t have a costume. And I was sorting peas of my own accord, not at the behest of an evil stepmother.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

I sorted undamaged and damaged peas. In the picture, there are approximately 3,25 kg of healthy-ish yellow peas in the jars. Healthy-ish because I am not entirely certain – some of them do have black spots, which might indicate there is a weevil pupa inside. The same goes for the 400 g of green peas on the right. And on the left are 200 g of badly damaged green peas. Not depicted is about the same amount of badly damaged yellow peas.

The healthy-ish yellow peas will be briefly frozen to kill any potential weevil pupae that might lurk in them. Then they will be used next year as either a pre-crop, companion crop, or even a main crop. To reduce weevil infestation, I will use a technique I read about on the interwebs and tested this year: staggered sowing. I will sow about a third as early in the season as possible and let them flower and fully fruit on some secondary plot. And about two months later, I will sow the main patch where I want them to grow for food. If I fail to grow food-grade peas, still no problem; they will be useful as green fertilizer even so.

The damaged yellow peas I have sown (together with some bad oats) in the raised bed where I had garlic this year. Some will decompose right away, but some will sprout and grow. Either way, they will serve as an organic fertilizer.

The healthy-ish green peas get the freezer treatment too, and they will be used to grow green peas next year as pre-crop with corn. The plan is to sow these as early as possible and harvest them as fresh green peas sometime in May, at about the same time that the Painted Mountain corn is supposed to be sown.

And the damaged green peas will be sown as green fertilizer now in the fall on the patch of land where I grew oats this year.

The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 36 – Crusty Camels

Another heatwave has hopefully ended, but the rains have not come yet; thus, I stood before the decision – to harvest the Camel potatoes before or after the rain.

Although the camel potatoes were not completely dry above ground, they were in the process of dying, so the tubers were no longer growing. For long-term storage, it is ideal to let the plants completely dry in the field so the tubers develop a slightly thicker and more resistant skin, but that has to be weighed against the fact that tubers grown in the Ruth Stout method are more susceptible to pest damage from both rodents and slugs. And the slugs are dormant right now, whereas they will come out after a bout of rain.

So I decided to rip out the remaining plants and harvest the patch already while the soil is still dry. Even so, there were many damaged tubers, several rodent tunnels, and quite a few slugs huddling in groups that I destroyed mercilessly.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Again, each of these crates contains 4 kg of tubers, except the middle one in the lower row, which contains 3,5 kg of the tiniest ones. The sack on the left weighs approximately 5 kg and contains 100 pieces of seed potatoes for next year. Not depicted is a bucket with circa 7 kg of heavily damaged potatoes that will need to be sorted and processed quickly.

Even though I put aside seeding potatoes, I am not so enthused about this variety as I am about Bellarosa:

  1. The overall result of 43,5 kg from 5 kg of seed is slightly better than Bellarosa, especially considering that they were partially destroyed by mice in the spring. This variety sprouted later and had a slightly longer growing season.
  2. There was no blight, and the pest damage was slightly more than with Bellarosa. This was somewhat offset (the overall number of damaged tubers is about the same) by my not damaging as many tubers with the rake, but the waste from that bucket will be substantial.
  3. The size of the tubers is more spread out than with Bellarosa. I got one 4 kg crate with just 12 tubers, which is impressive. But overall, the tubers do seem smaller on average – 12 kg of big, 16 kg of small, and 3,5 kg of tiny tubers fit for storage.
  4. The plants did survive the heatwaves well, but…
  5. … as the title implies, the tubers seem to be much more scabby/warty than Bellarosa. So despite the name, they did not cope with the heat quite as well. This is mainly a cosmetic issue, but it slightly increases the waste from peeling.

So still not impressed, but content with how this turned out. We shall now test which meals these are suitable for and whether they can be dehydrated.

 

Adopt, Don’t Shop! – and its Limitations

I’m a big fan of adopting rescues and very critical of most modern dog breeding.

The rescue part you might have already guessed from Socks being, well, a rescue dog. The goodest rescue dog.

front view of a tricolour small dog lying on the grass

©Giliell, all rights reserved

You might have also guessed that I’m not the biggest fan of most modern breeding, with varying degrees from hatred for puppy mill owners and people who breed dog breeds that are inherently unhealthy (German has the apt word “Qualzucht”, torture breeding) like Frenchies over people who breed dogs that are mostly not suitable as family dogs but being sold mostly to families (Border Collies and Aussies, anybody?) to being mildly critical to dog breeds that need more genetic diversity to counter (manageable) health issues but who aren’t getting any due to stupid breed standards.

I’m not going to call everybody who gets a puppy from a breeder names, just a lot of them, so let’s look at the arguments being made in favour of getting a purebred puppy and which ones hold up, but also at the arguments pro and against getting a rescue.

First of all some necessary information before we start talking past each other:

In Germany and other wealthier European countries there exist two parallel rescue systems. The first one is the local shelters, which are all no kill and will take in pets that are surrendered but also pets that are confiscated or abandoned. The second system is foreign adoption from Eastern and Southern European countries with low animal welfare and kill shelters. Both have their pros and cons and I’ll talk about those as well.

First argument: But I love breed X!

This is the one I can simultaneously understand the most but that also infuriates me the most. Dog breeds have been created over centuries for specific purposes with specific goals in mind, so members of a breed are very likely to not only share a look, but also certain character traits. I mean, who doesn’t love a Golden Retriever? There’s still reasons I don’t have one. So there are people who either want a dog for a specific purpose (i. e. hunting) and get a specific working breed, or there are people who are really looking into which breed fits their lives and get those and I can understand that.

Unfortunately, most people don’t look at all aspects of a breed, they look at the optics or the image. They get a breed that has been popularized by media or celebrities. Border Collies are one of those breeds, as are Dalamtians and most tragically, French Bulldogs. Fuck Lady Gaga, The Rock and the rest of them who popularized Frenchies. In Germany there’s a huge problem with breeds like the Belgian Malinois or Kangals: Both dogs that require experienced owners, lots of attention and real good training, not to mention the right living conditions. But people will watch three videos on the internet and go “awwwww” and now German shelters are full with them, as well as the assorted bully breeds. This is a huge problem and ties in with argument #2.

Second argument: They wouldn’t let me have a rescue dog!

Congrats, so you went to a backyeard breeder, because if you didn’t get a rescue, then no responsible breeder would sell you a puppy. Now, I know that some local shelters can be a bit over the top, but most are not, if you’re being reasonable as to which dog you want. And often there will be no dog available that fits you, because see #1. When we looked for a doggo, we also looked at the local shelters. They had German Shepherds, Malinois, Bullies, their mixes and a very sick pug. These dogs need knowledgeable people and nobody should have given me any of them, should I have applied. Which I didn’t. I went to a (reputable) rescue organisation and yeah, me, a first time dog owner full time working person got a dog. But one that fit our lives.

Third argument: I don’t want a traumatised dog /surprise box that is a rescue

Another argument that holds a bit of truth, but not much. Just like those dogs from the local shelters who are often already demanding breeds now with added issues from bad keeping, a lot of foreign rescue dogs come with trauma and trust issues. Those dogs also need expereinced people willing to work with them and put up with a lot (anybody remember Caine’s half coyote who would keep its bones in her bed? Not everybody’s cup of tea) and should also only be given to such people. Me, I’m not that people. I still found a rescue dog. Socks isn’t the biggest fan of tall men and strangers, but he’s affectionate, smart and very easy to train. It’s also not like every individual of a certain breed will be a perfect example of that breed. The one dog in our doggy school group that had the most issues and the least progress was a Golden Retriever.

Also, as I mentioned, people go for looks and images, but not actual breed behaviour. They get a Dachshund (you shouldn’t) and are surprised that it’s stubborn as fuck. Those doggos were bred to hunt badgers, alone in the dark. They do their own thinking. They get any kind of shepherd and are surprised the dog is herding and nipping. They get a lifestock guarding dog and are surprised that their dog doesn’t listen at all because for centuries those dogs have stayed with the herds without seeing a human for days.

That’s also something you have to take into account when getting a rescue mutt. Pay attention to the telltale guarding dog looks. So yeah, getting arescue requires you to do some thinking and careful choice of dog, but so does getting a purebred.

Fourth argument: I want a dog that was socialised well

It’s one I will let somewhat stand. A good breeder does a lot of work to make sure the puppies have a good start. They will be carefully introduced to stimuli, socialised, and will have some basic connection to humans. It certainly gives you a headstart with your dog. But it also doesn’t mean that you don’t have to work with the dog. As mentioned before, Socks and I go to doggy school. We’re in a group of dogs the same age and have been for the last 6 months. At the start, Socks had some catching up to do, since he didn’t have any training before he was adopted, and was also new to a lot of situations. But by now he has well caught up and is often ahead of the well socialised purebred classmates.

Fifth argument: Good breeders health test their dogs

Another two sided sword. Yeah, good breeders will health test their dogs to some extent before breeding them, but this opens a whole can of worms: Breed specific health issues, fucked up breed standards and genetic diversity. Many popular breeds have so little genetic diversity that all individuals are genetically as close as siblings or first cousins. It’s no use that their pedigree shows no direct inbreeding, they simply don’t have a large enough gene pool. Now taking out individuals with certain traits will further decrease the gene pool. This is why many breeds simply cannot remove certain unhealthy traits by no longer breeding those individuals. Apart from creating more suffering, it’s not possible to create healthier Frenchies by breeding longer snout individuals. It’s only now that we’re beginning to understand how certain things are related. Did you know that white coats and being deaf is related? For decades breed standards demanded a colour that also carried a high risk of deafness, but now breeds like Dalmatians have lost all other healthy allels. Back to the Goldie? I love them, but their hips are fucked. People joke about them eating everything, but just like Labradors most of them are missing the gene that regulates hunger and being full. While the assorted retrievers are not among them, honestly a lot of breeds simply need to go. The giants and the teacups, the brachycephalic dogs, and many many more. No amount of health testing will solve issues that are breed standards, especially if there isn’t a viable population without those issues. They would need to cross in other dogs nad that will never happen. Not only would it change their beloved standards, it would also mean investing money and not making it (that’s also the reason why doodles won’t become breeds).

Does a rescue guarantee a healthy dog? Nope. After all, their gene pool is the same fucked up mess, you’re just combining more. Our neighbours have a lovely rescue mutt who’s going blind. White coat, blue eyes, high probability. But it means that you’re not supporting a sick system.

Sixth (and for now final) argument: Foreign rescues are just puppy mills in disguise / they clogg local shelters 

Again one that has some truth to it. With foreign rescues being pretty popular, it attracts two types of unethical players.

Type one: The puppy mill. They always have cute puppies for adoption. They’re all mutts, so nobody suspects a puppy mill at first and they will tell you some sob story. A good rescue will have all kinds of dogs. They will occasionally have puppies, but you will also be able to get the spayed momma dog after the puppies are weaned.

Type two: The Good Samaritians Without a Plan. While Type one is in for the money, these people are in for feeling good themselves. Their goal is to get as many dogs out as possible without actually making sure that those dogs go to good homes. They will often allow people to adopt just after having seen a cute pic and heard a sorry tale, they will not check before, they will brush over issues and have absolutely no plan B. They do significantly contribute to the local shelter population.

If you ever look into getting a foreign rescue, these are the signs of a reputable organisation:

-There are dogs you cannot adopt. Not all dogs will adjust to a family life. Some are too traumatised to ever trust humans again. You can sponsor them, and they get to live the rest of their days in peace, fed, safe and cared for.

-They work locally. That’s like the biggest point. A good rescue organisation wants to make itself unnecessary. They offer spaying and neutering for the locals, they educate people on how to prevent unwanted litters, thus reducing the number of animals that need them.

-They have foster places where the dogs can adjust and you can get to know the dogs. While they may also do direct adoptions where you get the dog without it having lived with a foster family, they do so responsibly

-They check on you and won’t just give you a dog. The foster lady we got Socks from is a friend of my friends, so we already had a good reputation by hearsay, but she still had us fill out all the forms, talked about problems that may happen and checked us at home to see if our data was correct, the same way a good breeder does.

-They have a plan B. Even with a careful adoption process, things can go wahoonie-shaped. A goood rescue still feels responsible for the dog. Our contract states that we cannot sell or surrender the dog without their approval, if they disapprove the dog goes back to them. That’s an important point. It also means that they’re a lot more careful about whom they give which dog. They want things to work, because otherwise the dog becomes their problem again.

-They never apply emotional pressure to make you adopt a dog. No sob story. No “if you don’t take it, it will be killed”. They may ask for your money (I swear, in the end you pay as much for the rescue as you pay for a purebred, just that you pay a little every once in a while), but never for you to adopt more dogs than you can handle.

-They are honest. If you llok at their website and find dogs with trust issues, there’s a good chance that you can also get one without trust issues and not one who is deeply traumatised but has been lied about.

 

As you see, I’m not at all unsympathetic to people who responsibly get a certain breed, and I won’t claim that rescue dogs are for everybody, but I’m so sick and tired of those bullshit arguments.

I Am Officially Half a Century Old Now

Yay me. Yesterday was my 50th birthday. For those extremely quick on the uptake, that means I was born on Friday the 13th. If my life is anything to go by, the superstitions regarding that date do seem somewhat justified, though not entirely – I was very lucky in some ways, but even more unlucky in others. And from my personal perspective, the balance was shifted towards “unlucky” where it mattered to me. It is most probable that I am well into the second half of my lifespan now, and only time will tell how that turns out. I expect things to get only worse, tbh.

I spent the day working and forgetting that I wanted to write this post entirely.

Socks’ Adventures: The Big Water

Socks:

Did you know there’s different types of water? I didn’t! I mean, water and me, we go way back. Like, I practically started drinking that stuff when I was a puppy. But the Fam showed me that you can even use it to get your paws wet? I’m still not the biggest fan of swimming. Usually we go to a small waterhole where the water is always cold and tastes really good. Mum and the Fam insist on throwing my toys in there when they could just throw them in the meadow, but I will admit that it does cool down. Also you can rub yourself dry in the dirt afterwards. Mum loves that.

Small black and white dog in the "Watt"

©Giliell, all rights reserved

Now, where was I? Right, water. There was a big water there. Like real big. But only sometimes. Sometimes there was a lot of mud. Mud is cool. The Fam took me there the first evening. There were puddles and mud and I quite liked that, but that water tasted really bad. I tried it and it was way too salty. And I tried again and it still hadn’t bettered its ways. Not even the third, fouth and whatever numbers come after that time. Stupid water.

Small dog swimming in the sea

©Giliell, all rights reserved Help!!!

 

Socks’ Adventures: Holidays

In memory of the unforgotten “Jack’s Walks”

Holidays are a curious human invention. We pack up our lives to go and live them somewhere else for a while. Socks, with his glorious 13 months had no idea what they are.

Socks:

I knew that something was up. One day, they brought a big box home. A bit like a car (I don’t like riding cars), but not quite, so when the fam offered me treats, I was willing to enter. They praised me a lot, but really, I don’t know why. It smelled like the fam, but old. Whatever. Then they started putting a lot of boxes where they don’t belong. Really, mum, I know you’re not the best housekeeper, but clothes in the kitchen? As this went on, I got more and more nervous until finally, one day, you guessed it, they put me into the car. I don’t like riding cars! But there was a lot of treats (Leberwurst!) and actually there weren’ many stops or those wiggly things where your body moves without you doing anything, so I decided to take a nap.

A small black and brown dog napping in a doggy car seat

©Giliell, all rights reserved

A couple of naps later we arrived somewhere strange. It smelled very different, a bit like fish. I like fish! And the trees were gone. What did they do to the trees? But at least there was green grass and it wasn’t as hot as it was at home. There the grass is turning brown. I don’t like that. It doesn’t taste good, either. I was a bit confused as to what we were doing there, but hey, I thoght, now we live in the box on the green grass.

 

A small black an brown dog lying on the bed in the caravan

©Giliell, all rights reserved

To be continued….

 

 

 

 

The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 35 – Thistle Test

I love thistles from an aesthetic standpoint, but in the garden, they are admittedly a huge pain in the wherever.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

One huge Carduus acanthoides emerged near the south wall of my house among the runner beans. That is a place where it actually does not disturb me in any way. It does not impede mowing the lawn, watering the beans, or moving around the garden in general, so I left it grow. It is beautiful, and pollinators love it.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

I especially like the spiky flower buds just before they open. They can be dried and painted for nice decorations, but I am not going to invest the effort in that. I enjoy them outdoors when walking by.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Thistles are pioneer plants capable of driving their roots even through compacted loam very deep. And they are not perennial, so they are actually good for the soil because the roots decompose after two years, leaving channels in the clay through which water can seep into the soil. That way, they help to de-compact it over the years.

But what am I actually testing with this thistle right now, I don’t hear you ask? Well, nothing gardening-related, actually. After eight years, my phone was getting slow, and the battery was no longer holding charge for very long. And to top it off, I dropped it, and the loudspeaker started to sound crackly. So as much as I did not want to, I had to buy a new one. And after a whole day of setting it up with all the apps I use, the thistle provided a nice opportunity to test the camera.

I learned that it makes nice macro pictures, as long as I do NOT use the built-in macro mode. All pictures made in the macro mode were blurry and just 1600×1200 px. I got better results by taking the pictures in the default mode and cropping them afterwards, just like I did with my old phone. Funny how that works.

The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 34 – Bellarosa Bounty

I harvested my first potatoes of the year, the very early variety “Bellarosa”.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Since I was growing these on top of the lawn under old compost mixed with some soil, moss, and tree leaves, I did not have to dig. I merely carefully raked the muck aside and picked the tubers off the ground. They did look quite nice, although they were not all nice. But that is normal.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Each of these crates contains 4 kg, except the far left one, which contains 2 kg of the smallest tubers. There were also approximately 8 kg of tubers that had various degrees of damage from mice, slugs, insects, or the rake. Those will need to be processed, i.e., eaten, fairly quickly.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

I put aside 100 pieces of 40-60 g seed potatoes for next year because I do want to grow this variety again for the following reasons.

  1. Overall, I harvested about 38 kg of potatoes from 5 kg of seed. This is not fantastic, but it is good, especially for a very early variety with very short vegetation.
  2. There was no blight, and the pest damage is relatively minimal.
  3. I am especially pleased with the size of the tubers and the ratio of big/small/tiny – I got 20 kg of big, 4 kg of small and just 2 kg of tiny tubers in shape good enough for storage, and that is good.
  4. Since I grew them in the Ruth Stout method, it was relatively little work for quite reasonable gain.
  5. Despite not being planted deep, the plants fared reasonably well in the heatwave.
  6. Despite the heatwave, most of the tubers are quite nice-looking and not warty. Which is a cosmetic issue, but even so. They are also mostly round and not funny-shaped, which is a plus for peeling.

So although I am not super impressed, I am quite content with how this specific variety turned out. We will now cook a few meals with them and try to dehydrate them to see what uses they are best suited for.

 

The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 33 – Getting Grains

I extracted and weighed the oats. Let’s talk about it.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

The sheaves did dry into a very nice golden colour, although possibly still not quite enough. Maybe the threshing would be a bit easier and less laborious if I let them stay a few more days. But I wanted to be done with this so I can concentrate on other things. Also, the sparrows apparently thought I harvested the oats for them.

It did take a few hit-and-miss experiments to get a process that works for a small batch.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

First I put one sheaf heads-first into a thick plastic bag, and I chucked nuns at it for a bit. That softened the straw and loosened most of the grains, although unfortunately not all of them. I think to loosen all of them, the sheaves would need to stand outdoors for much longer, and possibly it would help a bit if they got rained on and dried again. I do not know for sure; there is not much knowledge about this floating around anymore – it was lost to combine harvesters. My mother only knew how to make the sheaves; she was doing it as a child.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

After the straw was a bit beat up and softened, I stripped the panicles into the sack using a thick leather glove, and I poured it all into a bucket. To thresh it thoroughly, I built an improvised drill-powered thresher. First I used only the wooden spokes. It worked, but not particularly well. Then I added bits of chain on the ends of all spokes, and that improved the performance quite significantly. When I have time in the workshop, I will probably build a better and more permanent structure from metal, because I want to grow more grains next year.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

If we had a bit of wind, separating the grains from the chaff would be easy. But we have almost dead calm, so I had to use an electric fan that I fortuitously was able to purchase last month. It did not work as well as natural wind would because of the limited cross-section of the airflow, but it did work. Unfortunately, the grains still need to be a bit sorted and cleaned manually, which is difficult without Cinderella, on whom such a task could be shifted.

So, what did I get? Approximately 3600 g of clean grain, circa 170 g/m². That is about half of what I was hoping for, and about 70% of what I would still consider a good-ish harvest. According to all the info I could find, 300 g per m² should not be impossible; indeed, most sources mention yields even 500g/m² or more.

I can only speculate about the reasons for such a poor yield:

  1. Poor soil. It was visible in the growth that about half of the patch had significantly poorer soil. The plants there were good 10 cm smaller, and the panicles had visibly fewer blossoms. I did fertilize the patch, but evidently not quite enough for it to really matter. This is a real-life demonstration of why most fields around here were transformed into pastures.
  2. Heatwave. The heatwave did have a negative effect. It was at exactly the wrong time, and as a result, the plants did not develop some flowers into grains. I did water the patch, but I waited a bit too long with it.

I still consider it a success in the sense that I learned something worth knowing. And I think it is worth pursuing growing naked oats (and other grains) next year on another, bigger patch of land. I will till in a lot of organic fertilizer and compost into that patch in the fall, so it decomposes and dissolves into the soil over winter, and I will do the same for the patches where I wish to grow various kinds of wheat next year. We shall see what comes of that.

As far as work goes, it is much, much cheaper to buy the oats, even organic ones, than to grow them on a small scale. I would estimate I needed about 4 hours in the spring and about 8 hours for the harvest. But it was mostly very light work, except the tilling in the spring, and the second time it will be a lot shorter, because I will know what I am doing. And I will not be tilling tough turf grass the second time, too – that also needs to be taken into consideration.

If I double the yield and halve the work time, it would be almost profitable. And I think it is doable, only it will take a ‘hole ‘nother year to find out.