Oops and Cringes #5

Oops and Cringes are some the silly things I've done over the last twenty years, which I attribute to my city upbringing making me unprepared for country life - but it could be just that I'm a klutz!

I started this a while back, but had to postpone it. But I'm ready to go again. So if you missed the early ones, you can find them here:

First one: arriving in Wagga Wagga. You can find it here
An introduction to work is here
Joining something familiar, the Girl Guides, is here
And driving, is here

Onto more adventures.

On my first day of work, I was sent to the glasshouse to help L with setting up an experiment. L was an older guy who'd been working at the Dept Ag for more years than I'd lived. He was a gold mine and I hoped I could learn some of his vast knowledge.

It was May, so leading into winter, but the glasshouse was beautiful. The sun streamed through the glass walls and roof, plus there was an air conditioner to maintain temperature for the experiments. We were planting seeds into pots - seemed easy enough.

L was fairly quiet and didn't spare any words while showing me what to do. I had to scoop a spoonful of soil out of the container (a cylindrical plant pot) and sprinkle in seven seeds evenly spaced, then replace the soil. The seeds were triticale, something I'd never heard of.

So I asked L what triticale was and he went into this long and involved discussion about the breeding of triticale. My frown must have given me away, because eventually he said, 'That's not what you wanted, is it?' I felt like a dill, but asked anyway, 'Is it a grass, or a crop, or something else?'

I think he was horrified. I added, 'I'm from Sydney, I don't know anything about farming.' And then I answered the unspoken question, 'I've no idea how I got this job, but I did and I have to learn this stuff somehow.'

And that's how L began to teach me and gave me a glimpse into his gold mine. He told me about trials he'd worked on in the past, one in particular caught my imagination. There was a trial where in the ground they marked out areas and hand sowed seed in a specific direction to see if the way the seed was placed affected growth - so they had seed lying sideways with crease up or crease down, and seed with point up and down. They found that seed placement did not affect plant growth... which is good.

But the more I thought about some of the things he told me, I wondered if he made them up! But research is a weird beast and people do odd things, so I've always been undecided about his tales.