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Reasons and Resources for Growing Your Own Grains at Home

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Gardening, Resources
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The world’s smallest patch of Sonora wheat

Reasons to grow grain
Why grow some of your own grain? I can think of a bunch of reasons:

  • You can plant unusual varieties
  • The large amount of biomass for your compost pile
  • Forage for livestock
  • Easy to grow and maintain
  • Part of a rotational strategy for maintaining healthy, disease free soil
  • Know that your grain is not contaminated with pesticides

    How to grow grain 
    Growing grain is pretty much the same as growing a lawn (most grains are grasses, after all). The main problem, as with a lawn, is dealing with weeds. I can weed by hand the ridiculously small Sonora wheat patch I planted in January. When dealing with a bigger piece of land, the traditional, organic approach is to grow some sort of weed choking, nitrogen fixing plant such as cowpeas the season before planting grain. In Southern California, wheat is planted in January, as far as I can tell. In most other places it is planted in the fall.

    Resources
    I looked through a couple of books for growing grain at home and the best I could find is Small-Scale Grain Raising: An Organic Guide to Growing, Processing, and Using Nutritious Whole Grains, for Home Gardeners and Local Farmers by Gene Logsdon, originally published in 1977 but recently updated and re-released. Logsdon covers the full spectrum of grains as well as legumes. Included are instructions for harvesting, threshing and winnowing by hand. Logsdon is an entertaining and engaging writer who calls small backyard grain fields “pancake patches”. My pancake patch will probably yield exactly one pancake, but I’m looking forward to the result. Logsdon was my guide.

    How to winnow and thresh by hand
    At a Grow Biointensive workshop in Willits last year they taught us how to thresh and winnow wheat with just hardware cloth and an electric fan:

    Using your feet you rub the seed heads against a piece of 1/2 inch hardware cloth attached to a board. You then lift off the hardware cloth and sweep the grain into a kitchen trash can.

    Then you dump the grain in front of a fan to separate the wheat from the chaff. Several passes are necessary.

    An optional last step is to pass the grain through special seed cleaning screens. It works great, but the screens are expensive.The alternative is more passes in front of the fan. I’ve done this process with flax and it worked just fine.

    If you’ve grown grain tell us how it went by leaving a comment!

    On Monday the final post of Root Simple’s grain week in which we will tackle why eating grains and other carbohydrates are so unpopular in the past decade.

    CoEvolution Quarterly Online

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    Appropriate Technology, Gardening, Resources
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    While hunting down old appropriate technology resources on the Internet, I was delighted to find the winter 1978 issue of CoEvolution Quarterly, put out by the folks behind the Whole Earth Catalog. This issue of CoEvolution profiled Robert Kourik (which CoEvolution spells “Kourick”) who practiced permaculture before Bill Mollison gave it a name:

    [Kourick] is developing methods of growing edible and ornamental plants together for maximum beauty, minimum upkeep, and a self-sustaining yield of food.

    He does it by concentrating on growing perennials that do not need to be replanted each year and annuals that reseed themselves spontaneously. He uses ground cover plants that fertilize other plants, such as the beautiful pastel-flowering lupin which puts nitrogen in the soil. . . Kourick’s goal is to develop what he calls a “self-reliant” garden that produces all of the nutritional needs of each plant. “The gardener,” he says, “can then supply his own nutritional needs by adapting his diet to the garden’s produce.”

    Amen is all I can say to that. A garden that requires fewer inputs is exactly what I’m working on right now.

    In the same article Kourik mentions incorporating fruit trees, kept pruned small, into his gardens,

    Robert Kourick believes that tree crops can be a mainstay of any garden, and he has discovered a plant breeder in Modesto, whom he calls the “new” Luther Burbank. This man is Floyd Zaeger [I think that should be “Zaiger”] who has developed genetic dwarf fruit trees that are strong on adaptive qualities and perfect for Kourick’s garden.

    Floyd Zaiger, incidentally, is the person who developed several of the fruit varieties I mentioned in yesterday’s blog post including the pluot, the aprium and the necta-plum. He developed these varieties through a herculean breeding program involving hand pollinating something like 150,000 trees.

    Robert Kourik went on to write an excellent series of books, Drip Irrigation for Every Landscape, Roots Demystified, and Designing and Maintaining Your Edible Landscape Naturally

    You can read CoEvolution Quarterly and the Whole Earth Catalog for free on the Interwebs at wholeearth.com or download individual pdfs for $2. One of these days I’ll put up a separate page of links to more free appropriate tech and prepping resources when I get the time.

    Free Postmortem Exams for Backyard Flocks in California

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    Animals, Chickens, Resources
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    It’s too late for us now, but if I had another two chickens die in close succession, I’d consider rushing the bodies off to one of the California Animal Health and Food Safety’s labs run by the University of California Davis’ School of Veterinary Medicine.

    A Root Simple reader who is a veterinarian tipped us off to this service. You don’t need a veterinarian (though you might need one to help interpret the results) and the service is free to those with less than 1,000 birds. All you need to do is get the body, as soon as possible, to one of four labs in either Davis, Turlock, Tulare or San Bernardino.

    The backyard flock submission form is available at: http://www.cahfs.ucdavis.edu/submission_forms/index.cfm. The addresses of the labs are on the form. I’m sure that many other states offer similar services. Call your local Extension Service for details and leave a comment if you know about your state’s testing programs.