A Harvest Spoiled by Sparrows, Heat, and Hail

It is difficult for me to believe that two months have passed since my last blog entry.

Although the harvest of the early and "short season" wheat and barley varieties went smoothly, I was plagued by several problems later in the season, namely: sparrows, hot weather, and hail. These problems were sufficient to prevent me from satisfactorily completing my trials.

For a number of years I have observed the occasional sparrow in my garden and have never been overly bothered by them. Mind you, I have never been able to grow any Mesembryanthemum species or lettuce plants due to the fact that small birds and pigeons devour them within a few weeks.

The sparrows totally ignored my wheat and barley plots until we had a week of extremely hot weather. This coincided with the ripening of the grain in many of the plots. A few sparrows must have nibbled at the green heads of grain and discovered the milky fluid inside. These flew off to tell their mates about this hidden bonanza. Before long I had dozens, if not hundreds, of these little flying rodents in my plots, devouring everything in sight. I am certain that at one time almost every sparrow from the town had come to join in on the banquet that I had unwittingly provided for them.

The Common house sparrow (Passer domesticus), an introduced bird
that is as pretty as it is annoying. Some may even call it "pretty annoying"!
Source/License: Public domain photograph.

I resorted to covering some plots, but it was not feasible to cover everything. Sparrows are remarkably clever. I tried humanely trapping them but found they evaded every kind of trap set to catch them. Even a yummy pile of bird seed or bread was not enough to seduce them. They would not touch it unless it was outside of the trap. However I did manage to catch and release a pigeon that was clearly either very hungry or of considerably lower intelligence!

Source: Mike's Classic Cartoon Themes
 http://melaman2.com/cartoons/index2.html

I tried a variety of things to scare them, but nothing worked for long. The most successful deterrent proved to be a motion-activated water squirter. But these are expensive to make and a great number would be required to deter birds from an entire yard. I found that if I chased the birds from one place, they simply moved to a plot of grain further away.

They attacked the free-threshing varieties first, before moving on to some of the more difficult-to-thresh varieties. They had a nasty habit of biting through the stalks while adding body weight to the tops until the stalks toppled over. They could then attack the grain head on the ground rather than have to tackle it on the stalk. They obviously learnt that if several birds attack the grain head at one time, it releases more grain than if one bird is trying to extract the grain by hanging on to an upright stalk. (I think I have already mentioned that they are very clever birds!)

The sparrows generally ignored some of the non-threshing emmer and spelt varieties. Obviously these proved to be too much trouble. If more energy must be expended than the rewards, there is little point in working. However I did notice that once no other grain was available, they did start to attack these varieties too, especially the ones with brittle heads. They learnt to carry these over to a nearby paved area where I observed them dropping the heads from the edge of a roof. Other birds would use their beaks to thrash the heads against the concrete. (Have I already mentioned that these are very clever birds?!)

I found that some of the free-threshing varieties that are susceptible to lodging were less likely to lose all of their grain to bird predation. This is because the stalks covered by the lodged plants were protected to a certain extent and the birds simply passed over them. Luckily I was not troubled by mice this season, but I strongly suspect that the opposite may be the case in the event of a mouse plague, as lodged plants would be much closer to the ground and mice would actually prefer the shelter provided by the lodged plants.

Some of the spelt varieties, as well as the einkorn, have required such a very long season to mature, that I suspect I will not be harvesting them until after Christmas. If I plant any of these varieties in future I will plant them extremely early.

The least productive of all varieties were the emmer varieties known as Vernal and Yaroslav. This was despite the fact that we had adequate low temperatures and frosts and the plants produced abundant grain towards the end of winter. However the heads were so slow to ripen and so brittle that even rain and wind would dislodge them, meaning that by the time I harvested the plots, very little grain was left. I actually got less grain from these plots than what I planted, making me wonder how any farmer could make a living from these varieties. However, all of the other emmer varieties I grew were extremely productive.

To add insult to injury, we had a very short spring, followed by unrelenting heat and high humidity. This made conditions for manual harvesting very oppressive and caused many delays due to excessive moisture content in the grain.  Then last week I copped the full force of a hailstorm which blanketed my garden in hail as big as golf balls and larger. It caused so much damage to the remaining plots of spelt that the harvest from these will be minimal, but I have not written them off entirely.

As for the future, I made a couple of selections from mutant plants in several plots and intend to grow and select these further in future. I also intend to grow less varieties in total, but more of the bird-resistant varieties, and to grow every variety under protection of bird netting.