More Crops

There are a few other crops I've noticed driving around the valley recently.  Canola is the brightest, coating the fields in bright yellow, but there's a little bit of oats this year, and I found one group of buckwheat fields.

I only found one field of bright yellow canola in bloom when I went looking, though I've seen a few others further afield this year. Against a blue sky, it really is a beautiful looking crop.

Canola is not a grain, but an oil seed crop, with larger leaves near the bottom, and is related to cabbage and turnips.  It was bred from  rapeseed in Winnipeg, Canada, though there is a lot now grown in the U.S., especially in North Dakota.

This field, taken looking through a fencerow in the evening sun, is oats.  When it's growing, oats has a light bluish-green colour in comparison to other grains, but I haven't seen many fields of it this year.

In appearance, oats is quite different than barley or wheat, even though it is also a member of the grass family.  The individual grains are easily visible, held seperately at the top of the stalk, not clustered together as in wheat or barley.

This surprisingly white field is buckwheat, not a wheat at all, but is related to rhubarb.  But it is used like wheat; the seeds are harvested like grain and it is most commonly consumed as flour.  Production has gone down in recent decades simply because wheat and corn respond so much better to fertilizer.

This shows the flowers and leaves of buckwheat.

And I shouldn't forget the one beautiful field of flax I saw about 3 weekd ago.  That covers the crops that I've seen around the valley this summer.