cereal – BrownhillsBob's #365daysofbiking

#365daysofbiking The wind that shakes…

May 23rd – Seemingly very early to me, but probably not: The barley is growing beautifully in the fields all around us at the moment. Every year seems to have a different crop that local farmers major on, and this year beans and alley seem to be the popular choices.

Barley is an odd crop aesthetically: it’s spiny heads interact with the wind in a beautiful way and the colours are stunning, yet close up it seems almost hostile and maybe just a bit insect-like.

Either way, it’s a sign of the rapidly advancing summer and made for a lovely sight on a beautiful morning.

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July 26th – The very hot weather seems to be coming to an end, timing almost perfectly with the end of the major session of the harvest. Locally now for a couple of weeks, the grumble and whine of fantastically large and complex harvesting machinery has been a continual backing track to rural life, and often I’ve ridden through clouds of wheat dust from this year’s crop being threshed in the harvester.

Not much spilled this year, which is interesting, the roads are usually thick with spilled grain, called ‘gleanings’ as traditionally workers and the poor were allowed to collect – glean – this harvest bounty and they’d feed it to their animals and fowl.

Interesting also to note the return of the rectangular bale. Well, they do stack better.

And with harvest and the end of the heatwave, the year gallops on…

June 3rd – Every summer one crop will seem particularly common, as prices are high or subsidies increase for that product, and this year the golden grain seems to be barley.

I’ve never seen so much of the suff. All across the plains of East Staffordshire, acres of land shimmer gently as this strangest or seed-grasses bobs in the breeze.

All this grain will make plenty of malt, or beer or breakfast cereal; and for the price to be high, there must be demand, but it’s a very odd sight, I must say.

August 21st – To my surprise, the cereal harvest – thanks to largely dry weather – is almost over around Stonnall and Lichfield. Most of the oilseed rape seems to have been cut, too, and fields are now turning back, first to stubble and bales, then bare earth ready for replanting. I don’t think I’ve known a recent year when the process has been done and dusted so quickly. Last year in this field at Springhill, rapeseed was grown, this year, wheat. Wonder what the next crop will be?