Rainy Afternoon Blahs

I've been so busy lately not doing farmwork, and then this week I had three full days with no reasons to leave the farm. Oh, ecstacy! That's what I thought, anyway. Tuesday I really did get out and do some serious work, turning a bed I had previously readied for planting, and then actually getting to seed it with an unusual barley ('Montcalm Mutant' barley, from the wonderful late Robert Lobitz through Seed Savers Exchange) and red spring wheat at the other end. One never gets very many seeds from an SSE participant; that's sort of the whole point--to share a few endangered seeds that can be multiplied and then grown as an actual crop later on. I sincerely hope some of it comes up, as it's old seed, from 2005. But the other barley I got from Mr. Lobitz, 'Orange Lemma' barley, is just as old and is now nearly two inches high in the little bed back of the greenhouse. This is exciting, and I'm looking forward to being able to harvest enough seed to plant for several years, plus having the straw for the birdies. In the long run, it's all for the birdies.

The alfalfa is trying to come up in a couple of the beds, though it's very slow. So far there are only a sprinkling of cotyledon leaves sitting splayed on the soil, waiting for something to happen. Hey, leafs are supposed to happen! Maybe it's too cold still. Maybe they're afraid of the pigeons, which are always on the lookout for salad. Maybe they're just slow.

Meanwhile, some of the earliest iris are starting to bloom, though it's always iffy at this time of year. Right now most of the open ones are Miniature Dwarfs, including 'Pipit,' very tiny in yellow and brown, 'Crouching Tiger,' ditto, and 'Hidden Dragon' in purple. Those last two are actually species crosses and don't count as MDBs, but who's counting. Then there are several of my seedlings, Standard Dwarf Bearded to be precise, but they open early for me, plus 'Just A Croc' of Brad Kasperek's, which is supposed to be an SDB but is always very early and very short here, making me think it should have been registered as an MDB. Picky, picky. I would be doing some hybridizing with these little guys, but they're going to get frozen some time in the next couple of days, so there's no point.

Which is why I have the rainy afternoon blahs. Not that it's that rainy, but it's dark and cold with little spritzes, and it's of course snowing on South Mountain right over there. It's just a bit depressing; I recognize that when I can work with my plants, that's where all my creative impulses go, and if I can't, I get fussy. But then I remember, "Oh, yeah, coffee!" at which point things improve, if only to the point where I feel like writing. Now you can see why this blog tends to disappear between the months of May and November, which is a shame because that's the time when things actually happen around here.

Did I mention the range has (finally!) greened up, and that's followed immediately by sprinklings of large herds of cows--we don't want all that grass to get more than an inch tall, do we?