November/December 1973
By the Mother Earth News editors
SPECIAL NOTE: GROW IT! is a big book and even if a
chunk this size were to be run in issue after issue after
issue of MOTHER, it would take over two years to put the
complete volume in your hands. If you haven't got two years
to play around with, we recommend that you truck on down to
your nearest book store and shell out $8.95 for your
very own copy of GROW IT! That way, Richard Langer will
be happy, Saturday Review Press will be happy...and we're
betting that you'll be happy too. It's a darn good book.
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EXTRA SPECIAL NOTE: All material here printed from GROW IT! Copyright©1972
by Richard W. Langer
At last! For the first time since the HAVE-MORE Plan was published way back in the 1940's, a fellow named Richard W. Langer has come up with a 365-page book that really introduces a beginner to small-scale farming. Wanna raise your own fruit, nuts, berries, vegetables, grain, chickens, pigs, ducks, geese and honeybees? GROW IT! tells you how to get started, we like it, and here's another chapter from the book.
A police state finds it cannot command the grain to grow. - JOHN F. KENNEDY
The rolling fields of golden wheat that you think of when you hear the word "grain" are basic to any agricultural venture. But they come in small, easy-to-care-for homestead sizes as well as in the huge horizonless acreage of the plains. And you should have a few such fields if your farm is to be in any way self-sufficient. For it is these field crops, cultivated for their seeds, that supply our bread, and much of the food for our livestock. Without the cereals and related field crops, civilization - perhaps even language - might never have developed. It is the field crops that persuaded man to settle down and take up the plow.
Today's cereals are products of domestication as much as the cow or the dog. They bear little resemblance to their ancestors. Wild corn, whose seed served only the natural function of reproducing the species, may have yielded no more than a quarter of a bushel of small, hard kernels per acre. Today's cultivated corn has been known to yield over 150 bushels of large plump seeds per acre.
The beauty of it is that for the most part this domestication has been a natural process. Somewhere, sometime, someone found an ear of wild corn that was a little bigger, a little juicier or sweeter than the rest. Instead of eating it right away, he thought maybe if he planted it the new corn would be a little better too. It probably wasn't...not all of it, at least. But a few plants, maybe even a quarter or half of them, were. He saved the best of these for seed again...and so on for generations. In recent times hybridization, still a natural process of selection but guided directly by man, speeded up the results. The development of modern cereals, for all its lack of publicity, far outshadows that of the hydrogen bomb. Without these grains the world could not possibly be fed any longer, whereas it could still be destroyed quite effectively without the aid of the H-bomb. Of course, you're not going to save the world with your small field of grain. But choose your seed carefully, as the farmer with a reverence for nature has done since he first tilled the soil, sow, cultivate, harvest it
well...and your bread will be wholesome and good, the feed for your animals nutritious, your farm a small but indisputable proof of better things to come.
Fine, you say, but where do I start? Well, you'll want wheat, and maybe buckwheat and rye, for your bread, oats and corn for your animals, and no doubt a few ears of sweet corn for yourself. The amount of land needed for this is surprisingly small. Just a half-acre of wheat and one acre of corn will take care not only of your bread box, but a small, healthy flock of chickens as well. An additional three or four acres of corn, oats, and a hay mix that grows well in your region will round out your grainery enough to feed some pigs and goats. A two-acre pasture will take care of them through the summer. If you happen to be a brown-rice addict, incidentally, consider cultivating a taste for the other grains...a rice paddy in this country is not something for the apprentice farmer to tackle.
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