Ever get partway through a task and thought, hmm, maybe this wasn’t such a great idea?
Such was today’s task, making mustard shocks. That is, bundling mustard stems together so that the mustard plants would stand upright to dry, rather than lying on the ground.After all, corn shocks were once a common way to dry corn stalks to preserve them. To make those shocks, cut corn stalks were loosely fastened together to form an upright conical tower, and left in the field to dry. Separately, sheaves of wheat is more-or-less the same concept, but with the grain still attached.
Source: University of Kentucky.
So, why not try that with mustard, as it is ripening? It should keep the mustard off the ground and make it a lot easier to cut.
Below, you can see the problem I’m trying to solve. The yellow mustard I’m growing keels over after it flowers. This is perfectly normal. But that, combined with lots of rain the past week, left my still-green mustard plastered to the ground.
Here’s the same patch pictured above, but as of this AM
So, I figured, pick it up gently, tie bunches of stalks together, and I’d end up with little conical bunches of mustard, standing upright. If they’ll mature and dry in that position, it’ll be a lot easier to cut them for harvesting.
What seems reasonable in theory sometimes fails in practice.
To be clear, you can do this. Above, there’s the same patch, with green shocks of mustard surrounded by bare areas. I used bits of garden twine to tie groups of stalks together. Those stalks are now off the ground.
But:
- It’s time-consuming.
- Mustard is too short to form good shocks.
- Green mustard stalks are fragile.
On that last point, you have to handle the green plants gingerly, and even with that, I ended up putting a lot of kinks in those stems. (Which, I note, was already happening, as most of this batch had kinked at the bottom as it fell over.)
In any case, the deed is done. I shocked most of it, but left a little patch as-is, just to hedge my bets.
I’m guessing I need to give this another two weeks, for the majority of the pods to turn brown and dry. And at that point I’ll proceed with the harvest.
