Dreaming of Spring (Wheat)

The garden is deceptively quiet this time of year – the slow growing cover crops, winter grains, and garlic seem almost dormant. However, thanks to our fertile soil, the weeds gladly fill the vacuum whenever and wherever an opportunity presents itself! We are also staying busy inside: Rachid is installing new drying racks and streamlining our grain processing setup; Ellen and Fernanda have been working hard to preserve the summer’s harvest of apples, pears, and garlic; Randy has been organizing our impressive repository of seeds; and we all have been threshing, winnowing and saving seeds and grains from this year’s harvest and catching up on some from past years. Our barn is looking better than ever.

While garden work may be slow right now, the next significant task is just around the corner: planting spring grains. The end of January will find us busy flatting spring grains (and spacing the flatting days apart so we won’t find ourselves with too many ready-to-transplant grains at one time).

This year we have some exciting varieties of spring wheat that we are growing for the first time at Golden Rule. After perusing the Kusa Seeds catalogue, we settled on the “Embassy Wheat Suite” collection of seven different spring wheats. Taken directly from the Kusa Seed catalogue, here are the names and descriptions of the seven we are going to grow this year:

BAART EARLY

Baart Early is a spring growth-habit wheat (Triticum vulgare) with large, semi-hard, white-color kernels and white glumes. It reached heights of up to 48” in the Kusa Seed organization grow-outs. Baart Early was imported into Australia from South Africa in 1880 and came to the United States in 1900. It became well established in Arizona, then spread to the Pacific Coast states. About 500,000 acres were grown in 1919, while the 1939 records show 890,000 acres grown on the dry and irrigated lands of the West. A widely-grown, pre-modern bread wheat.

GLOBE WHEAT STRAIN 1506

Globe Wheat (Triticum sphaerococcum) is a spring growth-habit wheat with small, spherical (round) kernels. The shape of the kernels is quite distinctive and memorable. The stems are very stiff on 24-inch plants whose leaves are all stiffly erect. The seeds have fast germination and emergence. Globe wheat filled the bread basket of pre-industrial colonial India where grain from the plants furnished the flour for the delicious native chapatis and countless other wheaten foods, probably for many long centuries. This crop tillers vigorously even when crowded and has an excellent agronomic appearance by “modern” plant-architecture standards. All heads have short awns. Start with a few seeds and get to 80-pounds with the third-generation harvest. The harvest from the 80-pounds will produce enough grain to feed a whole village.

HURON

Huron is a spring growth-habit wheat grown commercially as a bread wheat in the United States about 100 years ago. Huron was selected in Canada about 1888. Height ranges from 44-62”. Huron was exposed in the field in Ojai, California to multiple nights of 16° F. temperatures at 50 days of age without harm.

MAURI BLACK-AWNED

This is a landrace wheat from ancient Afghanistan (Triticum turgidum). This race of wheat acquired the common names “Cone” and “Rivet” wheat in England, when they were “somewhat widely” grown in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. This is a spring growth habit wheat with its own way of going about the business of “growing up” (have you ever had teenagers living at your place?). Cone and Rivet wheats are best if planted in the autumn, in regions with temperate winters. When sown in the spring, they ripen very late and the kernels struggle to properly mature. According to Percival (an authority on ancient wheats), this is the tallest of all the wheats and in the Kusa Seed organization’s grow-outs, Mauri Black-Awned reached heights of seven-feet. The plants have very attractive, erect leaves and the appearance is one of a very successful and productive-looking crop. Stem strength is modest; the grower should support the plot to prevent lodging. This is an ancient wheat of remarkable beauty. “The productive power of most varieties of Triticum turgidum is greater than that of any other race of wheat when the soil is suitable and the climate allows for a long growing period for the crop” wrote Percival in his monograph The Wheat Plant (1920). This wheat has black awns and white glumes and nice hollow stems (drinking straws).

MILAGRE

This is a landrace wheat of spring growth-habit (Triticum polonicum) from Portugal. Milagre has very distinctive, long glumes and long, narrow kernels. Milagre belongs to one of the tallest races of wheat. In the Kusa Seed organization grow-outs, Milagre reached heights of 7’ (84”). Milagre has very large grain heads and broad, droopy leaves. This wheat has nice hollow stems, used for drinking straws in the old days. This wheat pre-dates the industrial revolution and is highly scenic. Anticipate possible lodging by furnishing support. A most esteemed faculty member with a historic portfolio.

MIRABELLA

This is a landrace wheat of spring growth-habit (Triticum polonicum) from ancient Italy. Mirabella has “elephantic” length glumes and tremendous height potential. In Kusa Seed grow-outs, height varied from 30-84” with some stiff stems exhibited at times. The height expression depends on the soil, climate, growing-term, and other factors (how it likes your place; the local hospitality factor). Once you meet Mirabella, you’ll want to squire her, no doubt. A real, honest-to-goodness beauty queen with a clean and decent soul. Be sure and have your camera on hand when you grow Mirabella, and plenty of film or memory. You likely have never seen anything so fetching before. This is real grain. Nice hollow stems.

SIN EL PHEEL

This is a landrace wheat (Triticum polonicum) of spring growth-habit from ancient Iraq. What a faculty member to have on staff! Huge heads of grain; “elephant size.” Moderately stiff stems. A magnificent specimen of ancient wheat. If the neighbors see it, you’ll have to put up a fence with a strong padlock on the gate. Good for pasta, bread, other culinary items and curative for the “wimp factor” that car-driving and web-surfing inescapably thrust upon us. Height in the Kusa Seed organization grow-outs ranged from 30-84”. Imagine a giant towering over you; that’s Sin El Pheel at its best form. Nature has some surprise secrets to share with you and this faculty member comes with a briefcase full of them.

The Kusa Seed Society endeavors to increase public knowledge and understanding of the important relationship between humanity and edible seedcrops. They have a unique selection of not just spring wheats, but also winter wheats and barleys. If you are interested in growing grains at all, then you definitely will enjoy visiting their website.

May 2012 bring you closer to your friends and family, contentment in your work, and a fruitful harvest.

Happy Flatting, Planting, Dreaming...Happy New Year!

Fall 2011 Update (Part2)

After a rather extended period of dormancy, The Golden Rule Garden Blog is once again in production. Our Garden Manager, Ellen, has written an update of this year's activities in the garden, which will be presented in two parts. The first is a brief overview of our work, philosophy and challenges in the garden. The second part details a few specific crop production statistics.

Within our garden we have a section called the 40 Bed Unit. This is our experimental area that represents all the food, compost crops, etc. grown to sustain one person. This is the area where Randy and most of the interns have grown their experimental beds. Within these beds we have grown 740 square feet of potatoes. All of our potatoes have exceeded or almost equaled the national average. Our average Yukon Gold yield was 83 lbs/ 100 sq. ft.; Yellow Finn was 92 lbs/100 sq. ft; Rio Grande russets was 95 lbs/100 sq. ft; and Colorado Rose was 112 lbs/100 sq. ft. Our seed potatoes came from Sanhedrin Nursery in Willits and they’re a wonderful organic seed potato from White Mountain Farms in southern Colorado.

The other crop that we have some data on at this time is our quinoa. We have 200 square feet (out of more than 500 sq. ft.) threshed and winnowed. The variety we have grown this year is Colorado 407D. This is the third year we have grown this variety in our garden. It is extremely beautiful and grows quickly and quite well in our shorter growing season. Quinoa, in general, likes cooler drier weather. Some of the quinoa that was planted at the end of April and the first part of May was smaller and more affected by fungus because of the wet weather. While it still grew, the yields were decreased somewhat from what we were used to producing. We have an average, at this point, of 8.3 lbs/100 sq. ft. with a biomass yield of 7-8 lbs/100 sq. ft. In past years, with this variety, we have achieved 10-11 lbs/100 sq. ft with a biomass yield of 8-9 lbs/100 sq. ft. We expect that the quinoa that is not yet threshed will exceed our existing average. Those that were planted at a later, warmer and drier time didn’t develop the fungus that seemed to affect the growth of the earlier quinoa.

We have had great success in past years growing this particular variety of quinoa as a catch crop. Catch crops are crops that you plant after over-wintering or early spring planted crops come out of the garden beds in late June or July, like cereal grains or garlic. Catch crops are quick growing plants that will produce food or biomass for compost before it is time to plant the cover crops for over winter. We were able to grow a crop of quinoa that produced well from early July to early October.

We are growing a beautiful variety of purple amaranth that we found last year from Canada. It is a combination of many colors and shapes that are quite vibrant and white-seeded. We have been able to grow seed from the amaranth as a catch crop this year, and the biomass from the amaranth is quite a bit larger and fuller than the amaranth that we transplanted in the cooler, wetter months. Amaranth is a heat-loving crop and is quite beautiful in your garden.

Two other catch crops that have produced well this year are pearl millet and Dale sorghum. These crops were planted after cereal grains were harvested and are now producing. The pearl millet has tall stalks and is now producing seed and the Dale sorghum is getting tall enough to press for sorghum syrup.

This is How we Roll

I have long been wanting to get to this subject - the processing of grain directly before eating. There is one grain so soft that you don't have to boil or grind it to make it edible, and that is the oat. And our past garden manager at Ecology Action has the perfect oat tool: a roller.

Industrially speaking, there are vast machines that do this task, putting millions of round cardboard tubes full of stale rolled oats in thousands of grocery stores, but this is different. It fits on your countertop and can be put away in a drawer or cabinet when you are done. It doesn't take a mechanic to service it, and doesn't require anything but your own arms to power it. And it allows you to have fresh rolled oats every day.
For a house-warming gift when we moved to the Golden Rule, Carol got us one, and we have been loving it. It works like this: You pour some oats in the hopper, turn the crank, and the oats get squished by two rollers, landing in the hopper below. When you finish, you brush the rollers off and put it away. Simple and effective.
Of course, it doesn't have to stop there. Margo, being the adventurous spirit she is, postulated that, by soaking other grains we might make them soft enough to roll. So we tried it with barley, triticale, rye, and probably wheat. As you see from the photos, we made it quite a process of soaking and laying out to dry a little, then rolling. All that we eventually found was necessary was putting them in a jar with water at the rate of ¾ cups grain to 1 tablespoon water. Letting them sit over night will soften them sufficiently to roll, then you go for it!
Where does one get this magic tool? The same place we get many other great magic tools: the Lehman's Catalog. It's where you can find the next topic of conversation, too.
Not long after arriving at Ecology Action my attention was drawn to the funny contraption in the corner of the cooking area. White enamel, a pedestal, a wheel and a crank. A hand-powered grain mill, specifically the Country Living Grain Mill, which makes all dreams come true. Soon after uncovering it we were grinding all of our grains fresh for bread, biscuits, tortillas, cookies, cakes, polenta, all that stuff. It takes elbow grease, it's true, but after a few months of using that every time you need flour, it gets much easier. For three loaves of bread I would grind 16 cups of flour once a week or so. We'd put it through twice for a finer grind, and that would mean 40 minutes of work, which I could do continuously by the time we left.
Upon moving down here we started using the available mill, which is called the "Magic Mill". For pictures and a great explanation you can check out this blog on food storage. The long and short is that it takes half the time and infinitely less physical work, but the stones don't get as close so you don't have as fine a flour (unless you sift it). Plus you don't have the satisfaction of doing it yourself. And no, I'm not being sarcastic.
I came up with a few methods of making the hand-mill easier, which ended up being a lot more work to figure out and much less helpful than just buckling down and doing it - one involved taking a hacksaw to a child's bicycle. I bet it would have been better if I knew how to weld...
One might ask, why bother when you can buy flour at the store? The short answer is that we like bothering. The longer answer, from which I will not spare you, involves simple seed anatomy. All seeds, grain included, come with a fibery husk, which surrounds and protects a big starchy endosperm and a small germ. The germ is the embryo of the plant, and the starch is the energy to help that plant develop. Which part is most devoid of vitamins and minerals, do you suppose? Now hold that thought.
The germ contains, among other things, oils, and oils that are stored correctly keep from going rancid. One of the incorrect ways of storing oils is mixing them up in flour and putting them on a shelf for weeks, months, or years. On the other hand, that is a great way to get rancid oil that makes your flour taste bad.
In the early half of the 1900's industry came up with the roller mill, which enabled them to pulverize the endosperm while sifting out the husk (bran) and the germ. Also known as the fiber and the minerals. The end result is a beautiful but nutritionally bereft white powder, which is then further bleached and then enriched. All the oils (in the germ) have been removed, and can be sold separately, like the bran, to consumers. Nice for the seller, and convenient for the buyer. But not good for the buyer, since the bread now lacks all that fiber (as well as its indigenous vitamins and minerals). Sound like colon trouble?
So we cut to the chase, growing some grain and buying the rest bulk in 25 or 50 pound bags from the local health food store. That gives us the nutrition in an easily stored form, and saves us a lot of money. It has been an educational and satisfying transition.

A Couple of Friends (Part 2)

Our relationship with sourdough has been going on a bit longer. While at our first agricultural experience, an internship with the eminent Steve Moore, his wife Carol passed on the wisdom of fermentation in many ways. By far the most regularly used by us is sourdough starter, which leavens our bread nowadays. Some of you may be aware that sourdough is a popular style of bread, especially just south of here in San Francisco. What you may not know is that often commercial sourdough bread uses a starter for flavor plus yeast for leavening. That's because you have to wait 6 hours or more for your bread to rise with the starter, compared with less than two hours for the yeast.

For those who are all about fermentation, adding yeast to do the job faster cuts out the most important step. Since starter is a symbiosis of yeast and bacteria it does not only consume sugars to create bubbles, it also breaks down proteins. The most obvious results are a sour taste (from the acids released) and a denser loaf (because some of the gluten is broken down). Less overt is the combined effect of the disintegration of proteins, which is that the resulting bread is easier to digest. I make no claims, but I have been told by folks who have wheat allergies that the sourdough I have made didn't cause them reactions. At any rate, I make the same statement on sourdough that I make for Kombucha: it may be very healthy, but I like it because it tastes good (and because I made it myself).
The latter of which under-girds many of the skills I have cultivated. I am a little uncomfortable relying on products and processes that I don't know how to repair or replicate, from food to tools to structures. Since I don't know how to culture and maintain pure yeasts, and don't know how to make baking soda, the bread style I have adopted is sourdough. If I could only figure out how to make glazed donuts with it...
The process is very simple, and very natural. You create your own starter by fermenting a mixture of rye flour and water, which harnesses local yeast and bacteria populations. Then you keep using this same starter over and over again by feeding it before every breadmaking. I have had my current one for about three years, and have talked to folks who've had theirs for fifteen.
Here's the recipe for the starter: in a bowl, mix two cups of rye flour with two cups of water. Keep it covered with something breathable. The next day move it to a clean bowl and add one cup of rye flour and one cup of water, mixing well. Continue in this way for five more days, and you end with a big batch of healthy starter. Advice: don't use metal bowls. You will have a big batch of dead starter. I learned the hard way, though I understand it is common knowledge that fermentation and metal don't mix.
Use as much of that initial batch as you want, but make sure you have at least a cup of starter left after any baking adventure. That will go in the fridge for next time.
The bread recipe is just as simple. Start by taking the starter out of the fridge and feeding it. Two loaves of bread require a combined 3 cups of starter, and I want at least one cup left over. So if I have 2 cups in the fridge from last time, I'll feed it an additional 2 cups of rye flour and 2 cups of water (and stir it well) for a total of a little more than 4 cups.
Each loaf of bread calls for 1½ cups of starter, 1 cup of water, 1 tablespoon salt and about 6 cups of flour. Mix the first three well, then add flour till the whole mass gets too tough to stir. Turn it onto a surface and knead for about 10 minutes. It should feel like any other bread. Put it in a bowl, coat lightly with oil and cover, putting it somewhere it can rise for six or more hours. When convenient, punch it down, form loaves, and let them sit 1 more hour. Bake at 450°F for 15 minutes, then turn down to 400°F for 30 minutes. I butter my bread pans first, then brush butter on the tops of the loaves when they come out. Yum!
An upcoming post will discuss the flour we use, and whence it cometh.

Preaching the Good Word

That would be "grains".

September has brought with it two things of note. First, that crisp, cool, beautiful weather I connect with Autumn. Second, the beginning of our Fall spate of teaching.

We kicked it off last Saturday at Common Ground, the garden supply store and education center in Palo Alto. As a part of their outreach, Common Ground offers all kinds of great classes on the basic theme of gardening. Because of their relationship with Ecology Action, a number of these classes are related to Grow Biointensive, and because of our work with Ecology Action we teach some of the classes. This is all to say that we presented two segments on grains to a wonderful group of enthusiastic gardeners on Saturday.
In two weeks we will go back down to present an Introduction to Grow Biointensive class and a class on composting. The following Monday I will give a presentation to the Ukiah Garden Club on seed saving, and the Sunday following that I will give a similar class at the Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens. Two weeks after that we will be back at Common Ground to present on the Master Charts in How to Grow More Vegetables and on seed saving once more. Then, in early November, we will assist in Ecology Action's 3-Day Workshop. Lots of teaching!
Which leads to another fascinating realization: we know things that other people don't. As a dutiful product of a traditional public education, I still carry with me the idea that adults know everything and I have no meaningful knowledge whatsoever. Even though I have been an adult for a while now.
But this is all beside the point, which is that we had a wonderful time teaching on Saturday. Fifteen established or budding grain enthusiasts came and participated, hearing all we had to say and sharing some of their own wisdom on the topic. We talked about anatomy, characteristics, and how to grow, harvest, thresh, clean and cook common (and many uncommon) grains.
And the icing on the cake was that Margo and I spent about 5 hours the day before that grinding and making into biscuits wheat, rye, barley, triticale, oats, amaranth, corn, millet, quinoa, rice, sorghum, teff and buckwheat. We wanted everyone to get a feel for the distinctive taste of each grain. And we realized, as we were tasting them in class, that 13 biscuits are a lot to eat all in a little span of time. (We had a good bit left over).
What follows is one of the recipes that folks in the class were really interested in. More will probably come in subsequent posts...

Creeping Crust Cobbler (from Margo's mom)
Melt in 10' baking dish:

• ¼ c butter

Mix:

• 1 c barley flour (or whole wheat)
• ½ c sugar (can be reduced)
• 1 T baking powder

Mix in and then spoon over melted butter:

• ½ c milk or buttermilk

Heat and pour over dough:

• 3 c raspberries (or fruit of choice)
• ½ c or less sugar (or ¼ c honey)

Bake for 30 minutes at 350°F

With the Grain

When this book was first published in 1977 I suspected, but could not know for sure, that a day would come when increasing populations and increasing costs of producing and transporting food with fossil fuel, fossil fertilizers, and genetic manipulation would cause food prices to rise so high that more traditional production methods- organic, natural, low-labor and local - would begin to rule the economy. Thirty years later, that is exactly what is happening.

Gene Logsdon, Small Scale Grain Raising

Around about the time we were finishing up our grain harvest, midway through July, we had a visit from a fellow Grow Biointensive practitioner down in San Luis Obispo. John DeRosier has a firm grasp of the benefits of the method, having attended Ecology Action's 3-Day Workshop a number of times, and put to use what he has learned. His current passion, though, leads him in a slightly different direction.

Like certain others (myself included) John has been parasitized by the grain bug; the compulsion to cultivate all manner of the edible seeds courses through his system. The difference is that I want to eat my grains and share my enthusiasm while he wants to share the actual grains. I can meet my need by growing my own grain and telling people about it, which is easy enough. But John's calling involves a much larger proposition: growing as much grain as he can.





John's 40 beds of veggies surrounded by a field of grain

Of course, it gets more complicated. Being a proponent of the Grow Biointensive method, he is interested in sustainability. This means turning his back on the world of giant machines and petrochemicals, and working instead on a scale based on human limitations and regeneration of soil. The good news is that operating expenses are minimal: hand tools, a few irrigation supplies, water, and seeds saved from the year before. That is as opposed to tractors, implements, combines, and bills for seed, fertilizer, pesticides, fungicides and herbicides. Find the right market, as in the Community Supported Agriculture format, and you can make a lot of money on a little acreage.
The challenge is that, while everyone was growing grains by hand or by horse 100 years ago, virtually no one in this country is doing it now. So John, through his creativity and drive, is discovering through trial and error the best way to make small-scale grain raising work, physically and economically, in his climate.
To go into the details that John presented to us would be excessive in this post, but the summary is the same as for all farming enterprises: bring creativity, a solution-based mindset, and a love of your land. Add to those a desire to benefit your community, a head full of ideas, and willingness to put the work in and you have a recipe for success on multiple levels. From calculations based on his own experience of time spent per task and yields harvested, he can easily make enough money to support his family and have extra to invest in community grain-processing resources. Because of the smaller scale he can grow an incredible number of varieties of grains, thereby encouraging an appreciation of diversity of grains.
So, to make a long story short, John DeRosier's ideas are an inspiration, and I look forward to seeing the example he is setting for the rest of us aspiring grain-producers. Through his website, WithTheGrain.org, he hopes to post the ongoing process of learning, teaching, failures and successes of his enterprise. (John stands with his millet on the right.)


The quote that begins this post is from the introduction to the second edition of Small-Scale Grain Raising, by Gene Logsdon. I can't stress enough the usefulness of this resource, and we were delighted to find the second edition newly released this year by Chelsea Green Publishing.

Grain Propagation 101

If you can start anything from seed, grains are easy. If you have never started anything from seed, grains are a great place to break in! We start ours in 3" deep flats with a flat soil mix (I'll get to that in the next post). We broadcast them into the flat and keep it moist, well-ventilated, and protected until they are of a size to transplant. How do you determine what that size is? Well here is Goldilocks' assortment for us: much too small, much too big, and juuuuust right. You want to make sure everything that is going to germinate has, but you also don't want to worry about how big the roots are or how developed the plant. The plants in the flat on the right have germinated as fully as they will, and the roots have hopefully not hit the bottom of the flat yet. These look about 2 inches tall, and it takes them somewhere between 7-10 days to get there. By the way, if you are into wheat grass juice it is as simple as this. Get your flat, fill it with mix, broadcast the wheat berries that you got at the co-op or wherever on top, water and wait. When it looks like you want it to look, cut it!

But if you are trying to grow more grains, transplant them into a well-prepared bed. Maybe this means single dug, maybe double dug, maybe just weeded with some compost on top...
Here are our tools of the transplanting trade: a digging board, which distributes your weight on the bed; a trowel to open a hole; a hand fork to help you remove seedlings from the flat and to loosen the soil when the digging board is moved; a spacing stick, to help you put the plants on proper spacing (5" in the case of cold-weather grains); and your flat of grains. What I have here is Schrene Barley, which we all love.
Now we dive in! We lay our digging board a reachable distance from the end of the bed, and start transplanting. Each grain plant goes five inches from every other grain plant. Why? We have determined, in Willits' climate, that the best yields are achieved from that distance.
Most important is that each seedling receives its own space. As to the grains in question, they work best with 2.5" on every side, or a circle with a 5" diameter. Two plants put side-by-side must each get their 2.5" distance, so they turn out to be 5" apart. A seedling on the edge of the bed still only needs its 2.5" to grow happily, so it will be 2.5" from the edge.
A look at the picture will explain two of the terms we use to describe the spacing in Grow Biointensive: offset spacing, and hexagonal spacing. Offset, because rows are staggered, and hexagonal because each plant is surrounded by six others. We also refer to it simply as "close plant spacing", because they are closer together than those planted rows apart. I'll go into the intimate details of why in another post sometime.
This was all to say that, when we start at the end of the bed, the first plant will go half the prescribed distance from the edges of the bed. The whole first row of grains will be 2.5" from the end of the bed. Once you're moving, though, it will all be 5" except for the edges. I think we have all earned another picture. I usually only use one spacing stick at a time, but for the sake of an image I pulled all the stops.
The act of transplanting is simple and repetitive. Make certain of your distance, make a hole with the trowel, pull back and insert seedling (roots down, please), and fill the hole. Leave the grain upright and the seed buried. Water what you have planted every once in a while, especially when it is sunny, warm, breezy, dry, etc. Cover and defend as much as necessary.
I've been talking grains in this post, but the pattern holds for almost everything else we cultivate. The main difference is in the centers. For example, flour corn is planted on 15" centers, lettuce on 8" centers, cardoon on 36" centers, all depending on the space the mature plant will need. Exceptions to this process are the two crops we direct sow or broadcast (radish and buckwheat) and those root cuttings (like potatoes) that get buried entirely.
So happy gardening - It's that time of year!

One Big Week, part I

Last week was a doozy, a confluence of events that would slide right off our backs in the middle of summer, but which, coming out of the winter season of sluggishness, caught us off guard. Of course, being as well organized as we are, we saw it coming. We just didn't realize it was actually 2009 already, that the Super Bowl was almost here, and that it was simultaneously time for planting Spring Grains, the week my sister would be visiting, and the weekend we would be teaching two days of classes.

First things first: having my sister here was great. Good conversation about lifestyle and lots of game-playing, plus she brought work with her to do. This meant that, since Margo and I really needed to work on our classes coming up, we could all procrastinate happily together in solidarity.
Next comes the planting of Spring Grains, justifiably capitalized because they are an annual point of reference. It marks the first time of the year that beds are cultivated and planted, and also, since these grains all go 5" apart, becomes a somewhat tedious two weeks. Almost all of the crops we grow are first planted in flats, then transplanted into the ground. This may sound ridiculous to a seasoned tractor farmer, but with the scale on which we work the time and care taken pays off big in yields.
First of all we have the bed: in this case 40-Bed Unit 3 North, or 40BU3N. There's a great gardening song I could quote from the Beetless' Gardening Book (filled with gardening-based parodies of Beatles songs - I recommend it). Called "One After West Twenty-Nine" it mocks the best efforts of gardeners everywhere who try to organize their beds by logical means. I understand it completely now.
Anyway, we started by clearing it. Here Margo is removing the cover crop we planted in late fall to 1) keep the soil covered and 2) grow some compost material. We don't leave any beds fallow. The beds in the 40BU are all four feet wide, which works well for me.
Next I double-dug it. This involves digging one trench about 12" deep and wide across the end of the bed (you stand on a board so the bed doesn't get as compacted from your weight). Next you use a digging fork to loosen the soil in the lower 12". This way you end up creating pore space about 24" down. Pull your board back about 12", dig another trench next to the first by moving that soil into the first trench, and fork that one. Repeat until you have the bed done!
This next photo shows how strong my chi is: having pulled up the fork after one go, there was something stuck on it. Potato, maybe? No - I speared this rock! I'm definitely keeping that one for posterity...
At this point it is important to mention that the soil structure is so good in the Golden Rule garden that double-digging is rarely necessary. The lower trench is usually very loose. Grains are the one exception to our non-double-digging, because they respond so well. To prove this to ourselves, 110 square feet of this bed will be an experiment. We'll plant 55 square feet of Red Fife wheat in d-dug soil and 55 sq ft in single-dug soil (only loosening the top 12" with the digging fork) . The rest of the bed will be Jet barley and the already-present alfalfa.
No photos of the planting for now, 'cause I left the camera inside. When we finished planting we covered the bed. This part always makes me grumpy. Up at the EA garden birds and rodents are a problem, but nothing like here. Up there a shade net on short sticks, drooping to the ground, is usually enough. Not here. Here we have fencing cut in small sections so that it bows over the bed, and then bird-netting is draped over that, tucked under the little wire prongs on the edge of the fence, and weighed down with rocks, sticks, rebar, or whatever else can be found. The bird netting sticks to everything, including your knuckles, so it is a big pain. The bows of fencing like to pull in towards each other, dragging tiny seedlings with them... It is not a smiley activity.
And now I can tell you that it gets worse. If I thought it was bad putting it down I didn't imagine what would happen if we left a little corner unsecured. Yesterday a brief glance showed that something had gotten in. A closer look showed that a mouse, bird, or maybe both had gotten in and eaten too many plants to simply write off. We ended up removing the whole contraption, replacing the plants, then putting the thing back on. This time we both walked around the assembly adding rocks and other objects, making very sure it was secure. Whew.
Poor Ellen's section was a little worse off. A heap of feathers showed that a bird had gotten in, eaten a bunch of grains, and then gotten attacked by one of the cats. Did the cat also get in, or kill the bird through the netting? Hard to tell, but it was a mess, and the head of the bird remained to look at us accusingly, as if it were our fault. I'm leaving that picture out, too.

I'm not a Coward

In my reply to Jay's comment on the last post you'll notice he asked how people dehulled back in the day and, more notably, I gave suggestions that I had never tried and asked him to let me know if he learned anything. This was cowardly, which I realized shortly after posting it. I'll seek to redeem myself with this post, after a day of experimentation.

In her invaluable book on homesteading skills, The Encyclopedia of Country Living (which I would recommend to anyone who wasn't alive during the depression), Carla Emery talks about hulling wild rice. She quotes a description by the USDA in 1885 on the "parching" process Native Americans used to loosen hulls: "It [the grain] is laid on scaffolds about four feet high, eight wide, and twenty to fifty long, covered with reeds and grass, and a slow fire is maintained beneath for thirty-six hours, so as to parch slightly the hull, that it may be removed easily." Wow. Then they would put it in a skin-lined hole in the ground and stomp on it. Commercially wild rice is parched in bushel quantities in big metal cylinders over a fire.

Under hulling in other grain sections she refers to this parching procedure and recommends following this with a once-through in a grinder set at 1/16 of an inch. Garden Manager Ellen says she has often put it through our electric grinder, set wide-open.

This is all I knew this morning.
I started with a very small quantity (~4 ounces) of Perfectly Awnless (but obviously not hull-less) Wheat, and divided it in half. One half I ran through the grinder, set wide open. The other half I parched in a cast-iron skillet over a gas stove, stopping as some of the hulls started to seem scorched and some of the grains started popping. This I followed by putting it in a box with hardware cloth on the bottom and grinding it with my foot. I can say, from trying both, that the grinder worked fine, though it broke many of the grains and ground some flour even though it was set to its widest. The parching went well, and clearly loosened up the hulls, which allowed the grains to leave very easily. I secretly decided right then that I preferred the parching method because, though it required flipping grains smallish amounts at a time, things come out tidier and whole. The fact that the grinder produced flour, cracked grains and whole grains all at the same time seemed a bit sloppy.
This was educational, but it was on too tiny a scale to mimic even the small amounts of grain that we grow, let alone the amount someone would grow for sustenance. So I went a step further. I had a bag of Farro wheat, which has tenacious hulls paired with nasty awns, those pin-like things sticking out of picturesque wheat heads. It was about 24 ounces of material, so I divided it in half and went at it.
Notes:
First of all, each half had a number of grains that had come out during threshing, so I tried to remove as many of those as I could before proceeding. I set them aside (after weighing) as the seed stock to plant next year.
Grinding was frustrating for a couple of reasons. The awns did a good job of blocking the hole, so I had to keep poking at it. Once through the grinder I took the results outside, sifted the flour, then winnowed the chaff. I was left with plenty of broken grain of different sizes, some whole grains, some still in hulls, and a bunch of awns that were too aerodynamic to blow away. After spending a lot of time separating the remaining hulled grain out, I ran it through the grinder again. And then separated it out again. A point about growing your own food: you will never get all the dirt off, and you will consume a few more bugs and a little more fiber than store-bought stuff. I'm ok with that. I'm not sure about 1.5" awns in my flour, but maybe that's good for me too. The thing that would have made this a better possibility is using a hand-powered grinder, since then you can feel the resistance and work with the grain better. Being able to open the stones wider than our grinder permits would have been nice, too.
Parching was not as smooth as with the Awnless, probably because there was more of it. After trying to toast the whole thing at once I divided the batch into two, and it was still a lot. I am not sure I toasted it enough, as it was. When it came to the crushing with my foot many grains came out easily, but some were persistent. I parched these once more and they became easier. The nice thing about the parching vs. grinding was that after parching the awns all broke off completely and became a non-issue. Hooray! The resulting grain looked a lot nicer, because it was mostly clean and completely whole. The parching process took a lot longer than the grinding, but that was because This American Life came on in the middle, and I had to listen intermittently. It would have taken a little less time than grinding, I think, because I didn't need to spend as much time sorting it.
Starting out with 12 ounces of each I ended up with 7 ounces of "grinder-hulled" and 7.5 ounces of "parching-hulled." Not sure what that means.
Conclusion
It seems like it takes a long time to process a little grain this way. I'd imagine that practice and a perfected process would help some, but it is not a speedy thing. Something else to note is that hulled grains store much better in their hulls, so you might do this kind of procedure on demand. Maybe set all those farm kids on it. Also keep in mind that both processes affect the viability of the grains (they won't germinate after being cracked or heated up in a skillet) and the grain will germinate straight out of the hull when planted, so there is no need to hull the seed you want to grow out.
Why bother with hulled varieties, then, if they are such a pain? Because they are pretty and we love them. Also because you'll lose much fewer mature grains to birds, wind, and whatever else, since they are locked in. The last reason was mentioned in the last post, too, which is that some of the hulled varieties have nutritional benefits not available in hull-less varieties.
Whew. I think I'll take a break on grains for a while. They wore me out today! So let it not be said that I shied away from a challenge. I may be silly, but I'm not a fraidy-cat.

You Must Thresh It

A request was put in for me to hit on the topic of grain threshing by some fellow agricultural enthusiasts on the other coast, Ryanne and Jay, who, much more tech-savvy than I, have a website (RyanIsHungry.com) on the theme of sustainability and survival. They came out to a 3-Day Workshop a bit ago. Check out their site and, especially pertaining to our work here, Ryanne's post on their garden. This gardening stuff is addictive and contagious.

Having just put together my class on grains (Amaranth to Wheat, and all points between) and presented it to the folks up at Ecology Action I am both primed full of grainy information and in possession of time to write all about it. While I am now hyped to write a fiery treatise on the transformational power of growing one's own grains I'm going to save that for another time, when my head is clearer of self-righteous grain-cultivating fervor.

Let's talk about threshing instead! Threshing is technically the act of removing seed from its stalk, though it gets more complicated with some grains. The trouble comes with the hull, a protective layer around the seed that, in the case of a few wheats, most barleys, and all oats and buckwheat, is a particular pain. These few grains, once threshed, remain in the iron grip of their hulls.

But let's leave this unhappy bit for a while to dwell simply on threshing.

Violence is the only answer when threshing. I don't know about Dr. Martin Luther King, jr., but I think Ghandi and Jesus would be with me on this one - they were in touch with their agricultural roots. Back in the day grain stalks were tossed on the threshing floor and beaten thoroughly with flails. It is energy intensive, but it works. The importance of this technique is shown by the fact that one of the pharaohs' symbols of leadership was the flail. At this point there are as many ways to thresh as there are grain growing inventors, and since Ancient Egypt people have developed many machines and techniques to achieve one simple result. I am expert in none of them except the marvelous device we use here in the Golden Rule garden. Before we delve into that one, though, I'll mention the other equipment I have used - two small-scale threshing machines. One is foot powered (with a treadle), a simple metal box holding a cylinder which spins on a horizontal axis. The cylinder has metal projections, which do the work of threshing. You get it going and, holding onto the stalks, put the heads against the spinning cylinder. The grain and chaff are, together, knocked out the open back unless you rig up something to catch it.

The other machine is similar in function, except that there is an electric motor to power the cylinder and a fan that blows away the chaff, and there is a chute to collect the grain in one place.

Both machines are produced by CeCoCO, a Japanese company, and must be purchased through an importer. The company is kind of hard to figure anything out about, so if anyone reading this does, let me know. I am told the machines cost around $2,000 and $5,000, respectively. They both look very nice and work well, but I wouldn't buy one because I am cheap. Also because I am completely happy with the setup we have here which is cheap, good and with more tweaking could be even better.

Our thresher was envisioned by a past intern, Tom, and constructed by Garden Manager Ellen and her husband. Patent pending, I'm sure :)

They started with a 4x8' plywood board, 3/4" I think, nailing it to a frame of 2x4's laid flat to make the whole assembly around 2" tall. In each end are pounded two big fat nails, about 1' from the corners.

Next they took a 4x8' piece of hardware cloth with 1/2" squares and sandwiched each end with two pieces of 3/4" plywood, 2"x4'. Finally, they drilled two holes in each end of the sandwich to correspond with the "big fat nails" in the platform. Hopefully the photos will be helpful.

What you end up with is a platform with hardware cloth stretched across and held in place, a state-of-the-art foot-powered threshing device. Spread your grains, imagine playing Dance Dance Revolution, and thresh away! When you are finished, take one end of the hardware cloth off the nails and pick it up to clear off the bigger material, sweep off the grains and chaff underneath, and winnow it to reap the cleaned grains.

Here are a couple of pictures from when friends Shawn and Ryan visited. They were, understandably, excited about grains and threshing. You'll see the feet of Shawn and me threshing Jet Barley and then of Ryan winnowing the chaff from another grain in front of a box fan.

So an ordinary person, especially one who has threshed with a machine, might say "well, that looks fun for a while, but generally is an inefficient use of time and energy." To which I would ask "Where are you getting the energy to power your machine, and what better do you have to do than spend some quality time creating your own fresh food?" But only if I was in a feisty mood. More likely I would say "In my experience, this technique can be almost as fast as one of the machines, when assisted by a couple of friends, and is so much cheaper it's almost funny. Almost."

If I may stand on my soapbox for a moment: Agriculture was never meant to be done individually, and suffers from being done in the fastest way possible. We're talking about food, here. It is work, yes, but can be a joy when done with others. Agriculturally there is nothing more important than creating the highest quality stuff possible. It is not about fast, and when you get stuck in that rut farming becomes a ball and chain.

Whew, I feel better now!

Ok, so now we have hulling, which I have put off to last because I have no easy answers. Similar to threshing the answers all involve either lots of time, money, or ingenuity. Probably a combination of all three. Here is a photo of one of the older varieties of wheat which, though they have less of the protein that causes wheat allergies, also have some wicked hulls. As I said, many varieties of barley are thus cursed, as are all oats and buckwheat. Mind you, all grains have hulls, some are just not as persistent. There are "hull-less" varieties of oats, which are simply a little less difficult to extract from their hulls.

How do we remove the hulls? Often by hand, though not by peeling them. That would be waaaaay too tedious, even for me. Rolling them between your hands can work, rubbing them between pieces of rubber can, too. I have seen some pretty cool hulling machines that have two big rubber-coated cylinders that spin against each other. That's all I know about that, except that you shouldn't try hulling oats with the above-mentioned hardware cloth thresher. They are soft enough that they get ground to a pulp. Very difficult to separate from the chaff...

Sorry about that lack of answer. I have bags of Early Stone Age wheat, Farro wheat, and two varieties of oats that I have threshed but not hulled, saving them for last because I'm not sure what to do with them. I'll let you know when I do.

One last little bit - that grain seed I had in jars? I checked the silica gel three days later, and it had already turned pink. Now I'm changing it out every couple of days until it remains blue and dry.

August 2011 Update:
Ecology Action has begun to put up a series of Self-Teaching videos on Youtube, and the one on harvesting shows the process I use above. The link to that video is here.