Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Grain identification update

As the member of the family with actual work experience in agriculture I have high expectations for myself in identifying various crops to the city born and raised females who have inhabited my house for the past quarter century. Obviously it has been a while, but when I worked on the farm I could identify all of the various grains out the window of the car while driving past at highway speed.

I did work on Gullekson's farm. It has always seemed to me to be a reasonable expectation that I would have retained this grain identification ability in my knowledge base. As a result, I was quite dismayed to discover in recent years that what I was identifying as barley was, in fact, wheat. This clearly would not do and I have set about trying to rebuild the knowledge base.

Today as I was riding past these I again began considering to myself what a bozo I am for not being able to tell wheat from barley when I had a eureka moment. Those are oats, I said to myself.I stopped, leapt off my bicycle and made an up close inspection. Yup, oats. And while not identified at highway speed, they were successfully identified at bicycle speed. Now if I can only find some barley.

I read in the newspaper today that TRAM has begun. Allez Betsy, have a good ride.

1 comment:

Santini said...

Amazing what - and who - you can find on the internet.

I have some grains that need identifying. Not all fields have blueberry bushes in them, even here.