Saturday, May 17, 2008

Harvest


No blogging today, I'm too tired. Just got back from a long day in South Lebanon, where we are entering the wheat harvest season. These are magical days.

4 comments:

Leila Abu-Saba said...

How is the wheat harvest looking? You had said earlier this season that the drought stunted the crops terribly.

Rami Zurayk said...

The crop this year is about 60% of what it should be. But in this particular piece of land, I have used a drought-resistant variety called Masarra known locally as Tuliani (Italian). It is a bread wheat that has been around for more than 50 years although its origins might be Italian (cannot be sure. I have also used organic fertilization early in the season, with added humic acid, this has helped improve the soil characters and store more water than in other soils in the same location. So in this plot, the yield was just OK, mediocre but not disastrous.

Leila Abu-Saba said...

Did you harvest yourself? have you read Anna Karenina? There's that long passage where Levin scythes wheat with his serfs. Of course you don't have serfs. But still. You might want to read it.

I think I read it one summer in MIeh-Mieh when I was a child. It's a very vivid scene.

Leila Abu-Saba said...

Don't ask why a ten-year-old was reading Anna Karenina. I was a voracious reader and I ran out of books appropriate for my age. My father had a library in his parents' house and I read all kinds of books for grownups. Nobody was paying attention. Now it occurs to me that it was about adultery and suicide, but I don't think it harmed me to read it.