Grow it! Grain
(Page 7 of 11)
November/December 1973
By the Mother Earth News editors
As is true of most grain crops, drilling will give bigger yields with less seed than broadcasting. Plant your oats in drills four inches apart and cover with two inches of soil. Broadcasting might yield only twenty-five to thirty bushels of oats an acre as opposed to the forty or fifty obtainable from the same field drilled. Then again, you're not really out to set world records, If you can't get someone to give you a hand with his grain drill in exchange for part of your crop, just increase the size of your planting a little.
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HARVESTING
A crop of oats is harvested when the kernels are in the dough stage...not soft enough to squash between your fingers like a bug, yet soft enough to be dented by your thumbnail. The heads will be yellow, about half the leaves still green. If a combine-thresher is used, harvesting is done
about a week later, when the oats are fully ripe. But with hand-harvested oats, it's better to harvest a little early than a little late. Cut with a scythe and grain cradle. Windrow it, that is, rake it into long, narrow rows, up and down the field, with about eight to ten feet between the rows so the wind can dry it out. Let the windrows lie for a day, then bind into bundles eight to twelve inches in diameter. Lean several bundles together so they stand upright. The oats should field-cure for about two weeks, then be threshed like wheat. Feed the whole oats to the livestock, or grind for oatmeal.
RYE
Being a rye bread nut myself, I can't recommend too highly growing this one. Besides, rye is easier to grow than wheat, if not as high-yielding, and makes excellent green manure. Rye is one of the more recent cereals to come under cultivation. It is hypothesized that it grew only in the wild state as late as twenty-two hundred years ago. Even so, its new-found popularity is already declining. Today it is grown more for green manure than for flour; barely a fourth of it is harvested for grain. People seem to prefer the white chemical cotton that passes for bread these days to a solid, dark, peasant loaf that is naturally wholesome. Another possible reason for the decline of rye as anything but a green manure crop may be that the main use for rye straw used to be in making horse collars.
To give you an idea of what you can expect if you decide to grow rye for flour, rye weighs fifty to sixty pounds a bushel and you can expect to harvest twelve to eighteen bushels an acre.
ADAPTATION
Rye will grow in almost any soil, including sandy, acid stuff that will not carry most other grain plants. It is this ability to thrive on relatively infertile soils that makes it such a valuable green manure crop. It requires less moisture than wheat and much less than oats, but will also grow well with more. Rye can be planted in any state in the United States. Over 50 percent of the commercial rye crop in the United States comes from the northern Great Plains states, where the limited rainfall makes it an ideal crop.
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