THE SWEETEST OF GRAINS
This was the first time I had got my hands into so much of the whole, unhulled grain, and I found it intoxicating. Spelt has a
unique, wholesome, sweet scent quite unlike that of any other grain and I instantly understood what a German friend Tina had
told me about a special pillow stuffed with spelt grain husks she had been devoted to as a child.
This information was a revelation. For the first time I learned that the husks might provide more than nuisance value. One of
the reasons farmers had cited for giving up growing spelt was the extra time and money needed to convey the crop to a seedcleaning joint after harvest.
SEVEN HECTARES OF SPELT
We fuelled up the tractor and travelled in separate vehicles back up to the acres set aside for spelt. Bill brought the truck down
the hill so we could load the culti’s twin bin with fertiliser. He set the levels at which the fertiliser and seed would drop to the
ground: 60kgs to the hectare for the fertiliser and 70kgs to the hectare for the seed, and I was ready to go.
From the start it was a bastard of a run. The first problem was the difficulty of seeing where I had driven before, as I was
ploughing over recently ploughed land. The second was rocks. So many rocks were getting caught in the plough discs that I was
constantly up and down from the cab faced with unwieldy piles of earth and the task of knocking stones out of the discs’ jaws
with my boots, like a constant violent flossing of teeth.
About a third of the way around the paddock it dawned on me that the soil piling up in big clumps wasn’t always about rocks,
and something else was afoot. As with any situation where experience and knowledge are deficient, the anxiety levels rose and
I worried I was damaging the machinery. I had noticed that two plough discs weren’t turning, or at least weren’t turning all the
time. By the amount of clay caked on the plough it was clear the rig had done some heavy work the night before, so I figured
the problem might be discernable under the hard layer of dried mud. I trudged over to the car and came back with a tool, in
this case a spanner. By wrenching, whacking and swearing I managed to remove the clay and used my boots and hands to force
a response from the discs; they unstuck and started to turn in an almost-normal manner.
I was exultant. At this stage it was late in the morning and I had seeded about two-thirds of the paddock; not completing this
part of the job wasn’t an option.
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