Seeding barley
The best-laid plans…
Quick! Pop quiz!
How many of you can actually finish that saying? 10 kernels of our heritage Abenaki corn to anyone who can answer without Googling it. Got it?
“The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.”
Mice? Planning mice? What kind of nut came up with that one?
Robert Burns, Scottish poet from the 18th century. It’s from his poem, To a Mouse and the actual line reads, The best-laid schemes o’ mice an ‘ men/ Gang aft agley
We were going to title this blog post Gang Aft Agley just for fun, but we were worried folks might think we’d been hitting some of that (delicious) Talnua whiskey a little too hard, so we went with something a little more understandable. Can’t speak for Poet Burns though. Maybe he just wrote funny because he lived in the 1700s. Or because he was Scottish. Or because he was a Scottish poet living the 1700s and hitting that Scottish Ale a little too hard. If he was talking to mice about planning, the latter seems a distinct possibility.
Regardless, the possibly-tipsy original version has been paraphrased and shortened to the more modern, yet cryptic “The best-laid plans…” that we know today, and while we have absolutely no idea how things are going for the mice in our fields, we can state with great confidence that our best-laid plans this season have most definitely gone awry. (Or have ganged aft agley??)
It is often said that farming is a lesson in patience, but sometimes it feels like a lesson in chaos. Or flexibility. Or creativity. Or, on some days quite simply a lesson in Not-Panicking.
We have software that lays out what we’ll plant in each field and calculates exact acreage. We have schedules for tractor maintenance and schedules for our farmhands. We put seed orders in months in advance and we plan our crop rotations years in advance. We can plot, plan, scheme, and schedule all we want.
But, as every farmer knows, we cannot control the weather.
The Front Range has not gotten an epic amount of snow this season by any means. We had a terribly dry fall followed by a few decent-though-not-impressive snows this winter and, most recently, several light snows in March.
With farming and moisture, however, it’s not just about quantity. It’s also timing.
Weather permitting, March 1st is when we start planting barley and we keep right on planting until it’s all in, ideally before the end of the month.
March
This year, the weather was definitely not permitting.
The March snows, though hardly blizzards, have meant that the ground has been too wet to plant (working wet soil is one of the biggest no-nos of growing as it can lead to compaction and other problems when it dries) and our planting schedule was kicked back by a week, then two weeks, then nearly a month.
Finally, however, we’ve gotten some good runs of decent weather, and we’re hoping to get back on track. We’ve changed plans before (by which we mean every single year) and we’ll certainly have to do it again. Corn is going in next, and it can be even more finicky than barley. It needs to be planted in the spring in order to have time to grow to maturity, but it also hates cold soil. It can tolerate some coolness, but really, it’s happiest in baking hot weather, gettin’ its sunbathing on with a sexy pair of shades and a margarita in hand.
Corn is kind of a diva.
We are definitely nowhere near sunbathing-and-margarita weather, but we’ll see how the rest of this month goes. (Rain? Snow? A two-foot blizzard? 90-degree days?) Regardless, we’ll just have to roll with it. There’s no choice when dealing with Mother Nature.
It’s a good reminder for life. We can plan and plot and believe we’re in control. But we’re not. None of us., We adjust to what comes and keep on, keepin’ on.
Even Robert Burns knew that. Turns out his whole To a Mouse poem is actually about a farmer apologizing to a mouse whose house he has destroyed when plowing his field and the impact that might have on her.
That’s kind of sweet.
Maybe Burns hadn’t imbibed as much ale as we thought.
Photo courtesy of Loveland Aleworks
So while we’re waiting for our fields to dry, maybe we’ll grab a McAllister’s Scottish Ale from Loveland Aleworks (Root Shoot malt, of course) and take a stroll through our fields to warn the mice that the tractors will be coming soon. Only seems fair to give them a little advance notice.
In the meantime, as you’re going through your daily lives and things don’t go according to plan, remember us scrambling in the fields to finish our barley planting late, and start our corn planting even later. It’s not how we planned it, it will probably be a little frantic, but farmers have been farming for thousands of years - through drought, floods, late snows, and early frosts and we’re still here, figuring it out.
You will, too.
Happy Spring.
—Olander Farms
