it's the twenty-sixth of march...the ambient air temperature is around frezing...and it is snowing...time to start the season right? a day off found me headed for campus to open the asparagus bed...
so i pulled off the fabric i had covered it with last novenber...
and raked back the layer of compost i had put on top of it to make it a bit easier for the spears to break surface in a week or two...
i raked that compost back over the rest of the bed, added about another eighty pounds, turned it under, worked it with a warren hoe, and raked it back reasonably level ( not looking for perfection here )...
using a finger i dug a couple of shallow trenches...
and planted around two hundred einkorn wheat berries and covered them up...i went with rows rather than broadcast because, despite being a staple, wheat has fragile stalks and broadcast wheat ( like the winter wheat in my back yard ) is very difficult to weed without doing some damage to the crop ( at home i am inclined to intercrop the wheat with a legume like sweet clover that will set nitorgen and take up space some less beneficial palnt might inhabit )...i am at the very southern end of the range for spring wheat and with the climate changing there may be issues with this...there are issues with this no matter what happens...einkorn is an ancient variety of wheat domesticated about ten thousand years ago...it is short, with small seed heads, and the husks are tough to thresh ( i can see why they let the oxen walk on it in the threshing room )...it is, however, ancient dna and i can't help but want to keep it going...where would we be without dna? so the campus season is on...we'll see how this goes.
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