Grow it! Grain
(Page 10 of 11)
November/December 1973
By the Mother Earth News editors
SEEDING
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With all seeds, quality pays. Wheat is self-fertilizing, and once you raise a crop, you'll have your own seeds for the next year's planting. You'll have to cull the batch you plan to sow, picking out any weed seeds and trash that might have been collated in with it during harvesting, but the wheat seeds themselves will be of the quality of their parents.
Your first year, start with a variety of wheat that has already shown its adaptability to your region. Seed at the rate of four to six pecks an acre. If you sow late, add an extra peck or so. Drilling makes for better germination than broadcasting and is used almost exclusively on large farms. However, until you get a grain drill, broadcasting will probably give you fine results. Seed the deepest on sandy and other loose soils, the shallowest on clay soil. The range of soil cover is one to three inches, the average two.
Winter wheat should be sown about the time of the average first frost. Seeding too early increases the likelihood of lodging and of destruction of the crop by Hessian fly. But the wheat should be given enough of a chance to get started before winter sets in…underground, that is, you don't want it to start sending up surface shoots, or it will be winter-killed.
Whereas winter wheat is generally seeded on the late side, spring wheat should be sown as early as possible. Again, the date is gauged by frost time; plant at the time of the average last killing frost. Late planting by only two weeks can cut the yield of a wheat crop by a fourth.
HARVESTING
WWheat, like oats and rye, is harvested when it's in the dough stage. This doesn't mean instant bread. You still have to cut, bind, shock, thresh, winnow, and grind it. Harvest when the straw is just beginning to turn yellow and a kernel is soft enough to dent with your thumbnail, not soft enough to squash like a bug.
First the wheat is cut. You can do a passable job with a sickle on a small field an acre or less in size. A scythe with a grain cradle saves a lot of work and will handle up to ten acres of any small grain such as rye, oats, or wheat, if you're in shape. Anything over ten and you'd better look around for a custom man with a combine.
After cutting, the wheat is bound in bundles about eight to ten inches in diameter, and the bundles clustered in shocks to cure. Fieldcuring wheat takes about ten days.
There's a lot to be said for the old hand-harvesting and threshing tradition in terms of really feeling like you're living with the land, but if what looked at first like a manageable crop to harvest by yourself seems to be taking you forever, remember it takes time to learn new skills. Remember that too when you first size up the field. A combine run by a neighbor or custom man, cutting and threshing the wheat in a once-over operation, reduces harvesting time to a tenth of what it would be otherwise. And that saved time may be more needed elsewhere on your farm. Balance things out before you tackle the big jobs singlehanded.
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