Scything Pt1

So, I’ve started to scythe a field in Botton, here it is before I started:

After 45 minutes of work….


Its gonna be a long day!

My beauty!

Places to Go in Berlin: Museumsdorfes Düppel

Hello, well, this isn’t usually a tourist information site… But this is one place I want to strongly recommend you go to. (If you’re in Berlin.. Maybe don’t go there just to see this place…)

Here in Yorkshire we’ve got a museum called the Ryedale Folk Museum, it’s basically the local history from Iron Age up to the Victorian period. It’s a nice little museum, quite poshly done, with some interactive displays, some tractors a horse, some goats and some chickens. It’s also worth a visit if you’re up here by the way… But I’ve got side tracked now!

So, I was on holiday in Berlin with my girlfriend this summer, and she recommended a place with an unpronounceable name, (actually it’s quite easy, Museum’s Dorfs Dupple). She’d been there as a child, but not been back for many years, so we decided to give it a go.

What it is:

I’m gonna call it Dupple, it’s easier to remember, and I don’t have the u with the eyes on on my keyboard. Dupple is a reconstruction of a Slavic Village. I’m not going to pretend I know much about the Slavic people, I know they are from the east somewhere, and they came west to Berlin… That’s the extend of what I’ve picked up.

The village is designed around archaeological finds from the area, and the date they’ve gone for is 800 years ago (1200s). Well, on the surface it is your regular medieval village, they have some displays of finds in cases, etc. That didn’t really get me interested that much.

The first thing I found that I absolutely loved was an audio.. thing, what do you call them? You press a button, it tells you something interesting.

This was something on that track, but it was this wooden box ^

There were 2 big holes drilled on the front, labelled “Play” and “Stop.” So, I pressed play, and there was a whirring noise, then it started to tell it’s tale, but it was not some fancy high tech audio device, it was a tape player, and the holes were in line with the play and stop buttons

When it got to the end, it repeated, and you had to press the stop button. It was so primitive, but so effective, I thought it was absolutely great, and very sweet!

The thing I loved about all of the museum is that it is essentially how I would make a museum (If I had those skills…). The Ryedale Folk Museum is very professional, and suffers because of it, everything has a neat little sign on a plate, and is all very official. Dupple has little laminated tags that someone has probably just printed off and laminated themselves. All the “exhibits” are totally hands on.

 

Well Well Welll

A good example is this well, in the Ryedale Folk Museum, I imagine this would be padlocked so it didn’t move, and behind some sort of fence to stop you touching it. Here you are actively encouraged to use it, no warning about trapping your fingers in it, or a safety fence to prevent you from doing so.

There are often events on at the museum, and the morning of the day we came (We came in the afternoon) they’d been running a workshop on how to make tar from Birch bark, something I’ve since tried to do, and failed miserably at… But it was very hands on, they were using bean cans with a tube stuck in the bottom and collecting the tar in camera film cases.

We saw a green wood turner (Bodgers we call them) and he was very proudly telling everyone watching how he made his tools himself, it was very sweet. Sweet seems to be the key word here…

The museum is very armature, and that is, in this case, definitely not a bad thing. That doesn’t mean that if you’re a serious historian that you may not learn anything, I’m sure you would, but you need to be able to speak German, or have a translator… I was more interested in the practical side of what they were doing, how they were hand forging the sheep shears, how they were trying to recreate ancient breeds of sheep and pig and how they made tar. It is very strongly into Experimental Archaeology, which, besides Dr Daniel Jackson, is the best kind of Archaeology, recreating the techniques used back then.

I’d definitely recommend it, the entrance fee was €2, so really, you can’t go wrong. It is very nicely done, and well, very sweet! I hope it continues for future generations, I’d love to bring my kids there.

Get yourself there and support them, and know that if I had made a museum, it would look just like here!

 

 

 Getting There

The first issue we actually had was in getting there, so this is what we found:

The best, most direct route we found on the way back it is U3 to Krumme Lanke (It’s at the end of the line, otherwise take the S-Bahn S1 towards Potsdam and get off at Mexikoplatz (The station building is pretty cool looking)

Mexikoplatz S-Bahn Station

From there you are gonna have to hop a bus to get any further. The bus you want is 118, going towards Potsdam. Get off at Clauertstrasse, then head down Clauerstrasse, onto the funny cobblestone road thing until you find the sign!

But here is it on the map:

 https://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=museumsdorf+d%C3%BCppel&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=en&sa=N&tab=wl

Custom Snails

Custom paint job on a snail!

I’m not sure… really… I was a little bored at tea-break time…

How the seeds are coming on

So, the seeds that I planted a little while ago have now begun to grow. The lines are not as straight as I would’ve liked, and there are some gaps in places, but overall, it’s not too bad!

We planted some pumpkins about a week ago, and today I went up and checked to see how they were growing, as we’ve another 500 more to plant tomorrow.

When I got there I begun to power harrow the next bed ready for planting, and I moved the fleece off the pumpkins and found that all the pumpkins had been eaten!

There was almost nothing left! Damned slugs! 600 pumpkins! GONE!

So in the end I power harrowed the whole lot and we planted the new pumpkins in the place where the old ones were….

Final Steps

So, the final steps are to grass seed on top of the barley. This is done with a similar seed drill, but without the “drill” part.

See:

Broom! Broom!

The grass is seeded twice over, once up and down like the barley, then side to side to ensure a complete covering of grass. The side to side is bumpy as hell as you’re going through all the wheelings from before… Waaa!

After this the grass seed is rolled in with a Cambridge Roller, which is a bit lighter than the heavy roller.

20h that took me…

Field Work Continues

So, today I had to roll in the Barley I’d seeded yesterday. This is done with a heavy roller

This roller makes a hell of a noise moving it on the road!

Almost there! You can see the turning pattern at the bottom, where you turn over the previous row and end up with a bit missing which you get the next time when you go over the previous row again.

My Ipod got incredibly dusty!

What a full day!

Good things come to those who wait… Apparently. Well, I was hoping for some serious tractor work, and today I got my wish.
The morning began as per usual,
Made Pikachu a nappy,
fed some animals
drank tea.
Then I went to Honey Bee Nest and got the seed drill….
Good old fashioned technology! The seed drills:

My…. almost straight lines… The bit on the right is drilled, the bit on the left is still to be done:

So I finished the field at about 8:30pm and went home and had supper.
Actually it wasn't even that much time, at about 9 I got a call that one of Botton Farm’s sheep was lambing, and since the farmer was on holiday….
Ah…. Well, the first one was incredibly weak and didn’t make it, despite me stomach tubing it with colostrum…. The 2nd was fine… So I took them both into the barn and then was told there was another lamb wondering around in the field….
Sure enough there was a new, wet lamb…There was a sheep seemingly claiming responsibility for the lamb, but she had 2 old lambs already, and I’ve not heard of any sheep having a 3rd lamb so far after…. I brought her and the 3 lambs into the barn and she was determined that this little one was hers… But when I put it with the first mum, she started licking it, so it must’ve been hers!