I’ve always been very interested in growing a wide variety of different things, but all
of my experience so far has been focused on vegetables, with a few herbs and fruit bushes
and trees on the side.
In addition, this RED Gardens Project has prompted me over the years to reduce the range
of different vegetables that I have been growing, for a variety of different reasons.
But I think that it’s time that I started to diversify, to try new things, to experience
other types of growing.
I’ve always been interested in growing grains and other types of storable crops, but I never
felt that I had enough space to make it worthwhile.
This year I had the opportunity to grow some wheat as part of a broader project,
and so I decided to go for it.
A really good friend and a neighbour in our community is an excellent baker, producing
wonderful breads from their wood fired bakery.
And through their network of contacts with other bakers and a few farmers, they were
sent a load of wheat seed to experiment with growing.
This batch was a diverse mix of different varieties of wheat, and was seen as the start
of a process of eventually developing a localised landrace variety of wheat, that was really
well adapted to the context, the soils that we’re growing in, and the diverse range
of weather that we would experience during our growing seasons.
I was given a portion of this wheat seed to experiment with.
I could have gotten wheat from a variety of different sources in the past, but I haven’t.
I do find it interesting how being part of a larger project, with more interesting aims
and origins, is what kickstarted me into really diversifying what I’m trying to grow.
I have a spare piece of ground beside the existing Polytunnel Garden, that I’ve been
slowly working to establish as an additional growing space.
The soil is reasonably well dug and relatively clear of weeds, and I thought that about half
of this space would be an appropriate size bed for my first attempt at growing wheat.
Unfortunately I didn’t have enough compost to spare for this additional growing space,
and so I added some chicken manure pellets to help boost the fertility of the soil.
I then broadcast sowed the wheat in the spring, and raked the entire bed to help bury the seeds.
I then covered the entire bed with a crop cover to prevent the birds from picking out
all the seeds.
I then pretty much left this crop alone, apart from watering it a few times during the drought,
although it probably would have benefited from even more watering.
It was so wonderful to watch this wheat grow as it’s such a different aesthetic experience
to growing vegetables, it’s so peaceful watching it flow in the wind.
Wheat is such a fascinating plant, especially as the seed heads started to form and the
diversity of different varieties became really apparent.
Growing wheat is relatively easy, but it seems that the harvesting and processing is the
real tricky part of it.
But because I was growing at such a small scale, this wasn’t such a big issue.
I cut the plants down with a sickle, and originally started to bind them up into bundles, or into
sheaths, as this seems to be what you were supposed to do.
But then I realised that I had some empty space in another polytunnel, and so I simply
laid the curt straw down onto a piece of ground cover fabric, so that it could ripen fully and dry.
A few weeks later, I tried a number of different methods to remove the grain from the straw.
This was complicated by the diversity of varieties of wheat in the mix, as the seed heads were
at a wide range of different heights along the straw.
But I found that running the plants along a clean metal mesh of a large sieve that I’d
built was easiest and fastest.
The grain and the chaff dropped into the large bin below, and I was able to easily scoop
out any seed heads that did pass through and run them over the sieve again.
I then winnowed the seed, by repeatedly pouring the from one bucket to another, in the wind,
with the heavier seed dropping into the bucket, and the lighter chaff and pieces of straw
blowing away.
This wasn’t a perfect system, especially with the gusty winds, but by doing it in the
hen run, meant that any seed I did lose was quickly picked up and eaten by the hens.
This was all quite labour intensive, and it was hard to get the seed perfectly clean,
I think a few of the wheat varieties in the mix may not let go of their seeds so easily.
But this was good enough for my purposes, and for the scale of the batch that I grew,
but I’d want to develop some more efficient processes if I was growing at a larger scale.
In the end, I harvested 5.8 kg of wheat from the 20 m2 growing space, not counting what
was lost in winnowing, and a few bundles that I saved as they were just so beautiful.
So, I started out with 400 grammes that I planted, and ended up with 5.8 kg of seed,
so each seed produced roughly 15 additional seeds.
This works out to about 300g per square meter, which is substantially less than the yield
that industrial farmers, with highly refined varieties and processes would achieve in Ireland.
Looking at this another way, this small plot of ground produced enough wheat to make about
10 loaves of bread, after setting aside enough seed to replant next season.
So, with this kind of yields, if you wanted to produce one loaf of bread a week for an
entire year, you would need about a hundred square meters of growing space, or 200 square
meters of growing space would produce enough wheat to be able to make about two loaves
of bread a week for an entire year.
From the perspective of scale, this seems reasonable, but the amount of work that it
would take to produce this amount of grain would be quite substantial.
Growing your own vegetables on a small scale can be really cost effective, but with grain
it’s much less as it really hard to compete with the efficiency of large scale mechanised farms.
But cost isn’t the only factor, and there’s a lot of different reasons to want to grow
your own grain, it you’ve got the space and the time.
So, I now have almost 6 kilograms of wheat seed, which is really cool.
I’m going to give some of it to my baker friend to experiment with , and it will be
really interesting what kind of quality of flour this mix of wheat varieties produces.
I’m also going to bake a few batches of my own bread, which I’m really looking forward
to, and the rest of the seed I’m going to set aside for replanting next year.
Before planting, I will mix the seed that I grew this year in with the remains of the
seed that I was originally given.
This is part of the process of creating a diverse mix of varieties, that will hopefully
over many years of planting and seed saving, produce a mix of wheat varieties that do quite
well in this context, and with the diversity of different weather conditions that we can
get during our growing seasons.
This is quite a different process than the work you’d do to save seed from an existing
variety, or even breeding a new refined variety, and it will be really interesting to see
how it all evolves.
For now, I need to decide how much I’m going to grow next year, how much space in the gardens
I’m going to set aside for growing wheat.
Part of this is making sure that I have enough space to dry the grain, especially if we have
a wet summer, and the amount of work that it will take to thresh and clean all of this
grain for use.
And then I should really start baking more of my own bread.
Every time I make a video there’s always a number of things that I leave out.
Most of the time this is just to make the video a little bit shorter, but sometimes
the topic is a little bit outside of the realm of what I’m really trying to focus on, and
would be better to leave to another video.
One of the key issues that I left out of this video was the fact that I buried old stale
bread in trenches in the soil, underneath where this wheat crop had grown.
This is an interesting example of trench composting, and is something that I want to make a video
about in the near future.
So, if you’re new to this channel, make sure you you subscribe so that you don’t miss that.
And I’d really appreciate it if you’d also check out my Patreon Page, linked here
or in the description below, as this is the main way that I’m able to fund this
RED Gardens Project that I’m working on, and to continue to make videos like this in the future.
But most importantly, thanks for watching.