Have you ever grown wheat?

Here’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 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. 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

gardener, you probably aren’t planting wheat into a field of stubble, so we recommend growing spring wheat.

Seeds

You can buy seeds to plant at a number of seed catalogues in Canada. Salt Spring Seeds, West Coast Seeds and Richters Herbs are three places I found after a brief search. Consider asking at a farm store near you to get a variety that is good for your locale. Don’t worry about buying too much; store what you don’t plant in an airtight container in the fridge and it will keep for a long time.

Planting

Plant wheat when the ground can be worked. You can rake and broadcast the seeds, then rake them in some more, in an attempt to get the seed 1.5 to 3 inches down. Or you can mimic no-till seed drilling by using a garden fork to poke holes in the ground and place seeds in the holes, then cover the holes with soil. Water the area well. Consider putting a row cover over the area if birds show interest in the newly planted seeds. You should see the seedlings coming up within 10 days.

Weeding

Wheat is a grass. It was born to outcompete weeds. You have to give it a start, though, and that means pulling out weeds that emerge before the wheat is growing strong. You can disrupt the weedlings with a long-handled hoe if you don’t mind disrupting the soil. If you’d rather not disrupt the soil, you’ll have to get into your wheat crop and bend down to pull the little invaders. Or you can leave the weeds and expect a smaller—and possibly no—harvest.

Feeding and watering

Don’t feed your wheat. It doesn’t need it. Overfeeding wheat and overwatering lead to lodging, where the wheat doesn’t stand up straight. If it’s bent low to the ground it will be hard to harvest and it can contract diseases from the soil.

Pests and diseases

There is one very serious disease that sometimes affects wheat: ergot. Ergot is a fungus that turns some of the grains black and elongates them. Poisoning from this is serious and any grain infected should not be consumed by people or animals.

Harvesting

Now the hard work comes.

Your wheat has grown all summer and the green stalks have turned golden. One sign that it’s time to harvest is the grain heads nodding down. Pull off a grain or two and bite into it. If you’ve broken a tooth, it’s time to cut them down. If the grain is chewy, they aren’t ready yet.

How do you cut the wheat down? If you have a scythe or a sickle and a strong back, that is one way. A gaspowered or electric weed snipper is another way. Still another way is a sharp pair of scissors and a lot of time.

Most people cut the stalks down near the bottom and tie them together in stooks to dry them out in a garage, attic or barn. A few cut just the heads off and lay them out to dry, dealing with the straw separately. Either way, let them dry for about two weeks.

Threshing

Threshing is getting the wheatberries off of the stalks. There are a few ways to do this. Try them all. 1. Beat the stalks with a stick. 2. Put the stalks into a bag and bang it against the wall. 3. Rub the stalks over a metal screen.

Winnowing

Now you have wheatberries and a bunch of chaff. Fortunately, chaff is light and wheat is heavy. You get rid of the chaff by pouring it from one bowl, at a height, to another in the cross draft of wind. You can do it outside on a breezy day or inside in front of a fan. Do it again and again and again and eventually… you have clean wheatberries. Huzzah!

Milling

If you want flour from your wheat, you’ll have to grind it. There are several devices on the retail market for grinding wheat either by hand cranking or by electricity. If you don’t have access to one, you can mill wheat in a high-powered blender like a Vitamix, Foodtec or Ninja.

One grain in this head has ergot, which can be deadly.