GROWING GRAINS By: John Vivian

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The best rule is to put grain into land that has been cultivated for at least a year. One solution is to plant your grain in an established garden plot and put your vegetables into new ground that will be worked constantly through the growing season.

Or plow new ground in late summer when plant growth has slowed. Disc or till it several times to kill sod and weeds and plan to use it as next season's vegetable garden.

In early fall, plant to winter wheat, rye or oats. The grain will sprout and make strong root growth over fall and winter. Next spring, the hardy grass will sprout and outgrow what weeds remain. You can treat it as green manure and plow it in early, then plant your sweet peas. Or let it mature and, following early summer grain harvest, till in roots and straw. Then set in tomato plants and plant the beans and sweet corn. Plant last year's garden plot to a warm-weather grain such as field corn.

Grain land will appreciate all the compost you can give it. Apply organic concentrate fertilizer if you can afford it; follow directions for growing lawn grass.

A better solution all around is to rotate your land among three or four crops, including nitrogen-fixing legumes and green manures, each of which replenishes nutrients used by the others. Corn, for example, is an extra-heavy nitrogen feeder (but it produces three times the nutrients of a small grain: 90-plus bu/acre as opposed to 30-plus bu/acre of wheat). I have always grown garden-sized to quarter-acre plots of field corn within a three or more year rotation. The corn is followed by a green manure legume such as alfalfa or field peas, followed by a small grain or mixed vegetables. If time and space permit, I continue with buckwheat or other green manure, followed by a fallow year or two in which nature plants what the soil needs.

In soybean country, farmers rotate corn, soybeans, wheat and hay. In the Northeast, a mix of corn, oats and hay/fallow is popular. In the western wheat lands, corn, wheat, clover and grass/fallow are rotated. On irrigated western land, three years of alfalfa are often followed by potatoes, fertilized sugar beets and oats. In cotton country, corn and cotton are alternated with a legume such as alfalfa hay, cowpeas or soybeans.

See your County Agent (or County Extension Office) for a good schedule for your area and land, and substitute a fallow year or a legume for commercial crops such as cotton or sugar beets. You can substitute mixed garden crops for hay or grass any year.

Planting
Local feed stores will carry varieties of cereal grain seed that are best suited to your soil and climate. Most will be high yielding, soil-depleting, but delicate hybrids. Old-fashioned open-pollinated varieties can be found in garden seed catalogs and from seed savers.

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