How to grow your own wheat Monday, 10 March 2008, 10:43 GMT
Your garden will probably not look like this
By Finlo Rohrer BBC News Magazine
Global stocks of wheat are plummeting and people are starting to worry about the price of staples like bread. But can you beat the commodity market by growing your own?
Look out your back window. How's the grass?
If you've got a garden at all, it might be that the grass is an unloved scrub as sparse as Elton John's hair used to be. Or it could be a lush strip of glorious verdure.
HOW TO GROW WHEAT
Prepare the ground by finely raking the soil as you would to plant grass. infographic
Scatter the wheat seed evenly by hand and rake over. Consider a bird-scaring device. infographic
Harvest with sickle or scythe. Leave 2-3 inches of stubble. Tie stalks into sheaves. infographic
Thresh by placing sheaves into pillow cases and hitting against brick wall. infographic
Winnow by throwing wheat and chaff up into breeze from fan. Chaff should blow away. BACK NEXT 1 of 5
Either way, the odds are you're not getting much use out of it. Wouldn't it be great if you could improve your health, help the environment and at the same time do your part to fight inflation?
The world is running dangerously low on wheat, one of civilisation's original staple foods. Drought in Australia and China and a switch to meat in the newly prosperous parts of the world are putting the squeeze on wheat. Prices are at a record high.
Baker and organic food campaigner Andrew Whitley believes the answer lies in your back garden and that it's time, as he puts it, to "bake your lawn". He is launching the Real Bread Campaign.
"If wheat makes bread why not grow bread just like you grow vegetables. We think of it as being a massive prairie-style enterprise but it is just a plant like anything else. It's like grass.
"There are few things that give greater satisfaction than being able to grow something and harvest it and share it with friends and family."
Wholewheat approach
In the UK, we eat a lot less bread than we did in the 1950s. But it's still a fair bit. In 2000, we ate 720g per person per week, the equivalent of just under one large loaf.
From this Whitley has worked out how much garden we would need to put over to wheat production to cater for all our own bread needs. Assuming each 720g loaf of bread uses about 432 grams of flour, that's 22.5kg of flour per year just for our bread needs. With a family of four you get a total of 90kg of flour.
Combine harvester You will not be able to fit this in your garden
A conservative yield estimate of three tonnes of wheat per organically-cultivated hectare is reasonable, Whitley suggests. Assuming you're going for an extremely wholewheat approach - using the whole grain, including bran and germ - each tonne of flour pretty much equates to a tonne of wheat (in British commercial milling 4.5 million tonnes of flour is made from 5.5 million tonnes of wheat every year), then you need 297 square metres of wheat to provide your family with bread.
And there's the rub. According to Garden Organic, the organic growing charity, the average British garden size as of 2006 was about 90 square metres.
Furthermore, Whitley strongly advises you only use a quarter of your garden at any one time to produce wheat. A "monoculture" of wheat year in year out would exhaust the soil and allow the spread of disease. Using your 22.5 square metres of land would only provide 6.8kg of flour. And while those in the south-east and east of the UK are in wheat territory, those in the rainy west may find they struggle.
Andrew Whitley sows seeds using a fiddle drill in Cumbria in the 1970s Many people see this as a terrible, ghastly, pathetic throwback to an era of grinding toil Andrew Whitley
But Whitley knows most people will not be able to grow all their own wheat and suggests even producing a couple of loaves-worth a year would be a triumph.
Those in the wheat industry are a little sceptical to say the least. Martin Caunce, owner of Brow Farm in west Lancashire, sells milling wheat and hand-operated mills so people can produce their own flour, but suggests most people will not want to take the final step and grow their own wheat.
"It is more feasible to grow your vegetables and buy your bread," he says. "It takes too much space. You just couldn't make it pay."
Lot of bother
The argument is that you could save a great deal more money by following the example of Tom and Barbara in The Good Life and focusing a bit more on vegetables.
Sally Smith, an adviser at Garden Organic agrees, suggesting: "It's a lot of bother for very little return. You would need a smallholding really."
Women talk over a fence 'How yours coming on?'... 'Lovely'
But assuming you do want to grow your own, Whitley recommends turning over the soil and finely raking it. Your wheat seeds should be of a long straw variety and you should scatter evenly before raking over them.
Undersowing the crop with grass and clover might help with weeds, nutrient balance and avoiding bare earth after the harvest.
Planting might take place in late March or April and harvest might typically be in August, stretching into September if the crop has had a bad year.
You could follow the ancient test and bite down on a grain to see if it's ready to harvest, Whitley suggests. If it's hard, it's ready. If it's squishy, it's not.
Winnow or bust
Use a sickle or scythe to harvest the wheat, leaving at least two or three inches of stubble. The stalks should be bound into sheaves and then threshed. Whitley advises putting the ears into a pillow case with the stalks poking out the bottom and then whacking them on a brick wall.
You must then winnow the wheat. Traditionally this was done by throwing the wheat up into a breeze. The heavy grain would fall back to the floor, while the wind blew the chaff away.
WHY IS WHEAT EXPENSIVE? Drought in China/Australia Export curbs More meat being eaten Biofuel production Commodity speculators
Q: Wheat prices
Milling can be done in a specialist hand mill, or even in a hand cranked coffee grinder, Whitley suggests.
To some it may all sound like rather too much effort, but Whitley, who first grew wheat on four square metres of his allotment in Stoke Newington in 1974, disagrees.
"Many people see this as a terrible, ghastly, pathetic throwback to an era of grinding toil.
"[But] it is a great way of getting control over what goes into your bread, to make sure no nasties get in."
In the end most of us do not have the gardens to conjure up the wheaty romance from the end of movies like Gladiator or Witness.
But to look out over the kitchen sink at even a couple of square metres of gently oscillating wheat would be an achievement.
And, as Whitley notes, there is one fringe benefit - you can have your own crop circles.
