Our Wheat Takes Us Back (to the good old days)
This Wisconsin family satisfies nostalgic desires by eating healthy whole-grain foods.
Nearly everyone, it seems, now wants to recapture some of
the joys and values of "the food old days". Here's how one
Wisconsin family satisfies that desire.
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by BARBARA HOUGHTON
I grew up on a 127-acre farm and, for that reason, the
little 1/7-acre field next to our house sometimes seems
pathetically small to me. Even though it is tiny, however,
that plot of earth plays an important role in my family's
life. For it's there that we (my husband, myself, and our
three children) raise our year's supply of wheat!
The ritual begins at the end of each summer when we haul
buckets and barrow loads of manure from the neighboring cow
pasture to our mini-field. Along with some old henhouse
bedding (generously donated by a nearby chicken farmer), we
spread the fertilizer on the ground . . . and then wait
eight or nine months for the rich nutrients to percolate
down into the soil. By the following May, we're ready to
sow wheat.
The first time we planted, we did it by hand . . . which
meant throwing out big, sweeping fistfuls of grain (and
trying afterwards—with little success—to even
up the seeds' distribution with a rake). Since then, we've
mechanized. Now-with the aid of a wooden, hand-operated
broadcaster—one of us can simply walk back and forth
across the field and (by turning a crank) scatter seeds
evenly on its surface.
And that's the signal for the beginning of a race between
us and the birds: We must cover the little grains of wheat
before the feathered robbers can eat them! (To speed this
part of the job we do use a rototiller but, no matter how
mechanized we get, we'll never resort to chemical
fertilizers, pesticides, or herbicides.)
Next comes the hard part. The three months of waiting . . .
and waiting. We cast an expectant eye at the field each
time we walk by on the way to the mailbox or the school
bus. We peer at that seemingly lifeless soil. We
squint and we stare at that dirt. And then—at
last—the Big Day arrives when one of us announces,
"The wheat is up!"
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