Have you ever grown wheat?
Like many grains, you can grow wheat in your garden!
H
ere’s a chance to take your gardening prowess one step closer to farming: grow your own wheat. Wheat is surprisingly easy to grow and not too difficult for the novice to harvest and get ready to store. Read that again: not too difficult. You will have to learn a couple of new skills. Wheat is also beautiful. If you like ornamental grasses, you’ll love wheat. And you can grow just a few for ornamentation in your perennial bed. Or you can grow it in pots. The reason it’s not normally grown in pots is that it’s farmed in huge fields, but the
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roots don’t go very deep and it will be happy in a container. If you’d like to grow wheat for milling into flour, you won’t need to grow as much as you might think. A couple of 15-foot rows will get you two or three pounds of flour, which is enough to bake three to five loaves of bread. That’s not enough to give up your Costco membership, but it’s enough to give you bragging rights. If you find you enjoy growing wheat and you have the space, a 1,000-square-foot space will yield about 60 pounds of grain, which would give you 90 loaves of bread. Issue 4
But if you’ve never done it before, start out small and see if you like it. Growing wheat gets easier after you’ve done it. Your first choice is between two types of wheat: winter and spring. Winter wheat is sown in the fall and the seedlings survive under the snow, which gives it a head start. If you look online, sources will tell you that winter wheat cannot be grown below Zone 3, which is just not true. Those sources are mostly American. You can sow winter wheat in stubble, which will hold onto snow and keep your winter seedlings toasty. As a home localgardener.net
