Grow it! Grain
(Page 9 of 11)
November/December 1973
By the Mother Earth News editors
ADAPTATION
RELATED CONTENT
Buckwheat is easy to grow and a great source of high-quality protein, including who has the varieti...
Healthy, sweet and savory: Recipe for whole-wheat apricot sage breadsticks...
THE HEALTHY PLATE: Recipe for Pumpkin-Cranberry Spice Cake...
In a recent study on the quality of organic wheat vs. conventional wheat, Swiss and Austrian scient...
for 2? fancy January/February 1971 HOW I FEED MY TRIBE OF FIVE A "STICK-TO-YOUR-RIBS" BREAKFAST FOR...
Sunflowers grow almost anywhere in the United States. They are particularly useful for "grain" production in high-altitude regions where low growing-season temperatures tend to give poor corn or sorghum yields. Sunflowers are also more resistant to frost, making them useful in areas of short growing seasons. They thrive on good soil, but can also be grown on poorer ones. Highly variable in yield, with a range of anywhere from ten to eighty bushels per acre.
TYPES
Almost all sunflowers grown in the United States are of the Mammoth Russian variety.
SEEDING
Plant sunflowers one week before the average last frost. Use rows thirty-six inches apart if you're drilling, with six to seven pounds per acre at a depth of one to two inches. A corn planter or a grain drill with the holes blocked to give enough spacing between the rows can be used. For small lots, broadcasting will suffice, if you can get an even spread. Don't try to increase the seed quantity much above eight pounds per acre. Give them room, lots of room. Sunflowers are particularly sensitive plants when it comes to crowding and competition. Cultivation is important for the same reason; weeds will do your "turn-to-the-suns" no good.
HARVESTING
Sunflowers are harvested rather like corn. Wait till the yellow rays have about half fallen off the flower head. Lob off the tops with about a foot of stem and haul them in from the field in your wagon. Hang them by their stems, tied in bundles. When the flower heads are dry, rub them back and forth over some one-inch mesh screening fastened atop a barrel to collect the seeds.
WHEAT
The cultivation of wheat is older than history. Even in the Stone Age it was being grown by the lake dwellers of Switzerland. Nothing about its origin is certain except that it was not indigenous to the Western hemisphere.
For the bread-maker, a bushel of good wheat weighs a minimum of sixty pounds. You should get at least fifteen to twenty bushels per acre...that's a lot of bread. But you don't have to eat it all; the grain is excellent for livestock and the straw makes good bedding as well.
ADAPTATION
Wheat grows in the wide band from sixty degrees north latitude to forty degrees south latitude, doing best with a cool, moist growing season followed by a warm, dry period for ripening. There are two groups: winter and spring. Spring wheat is grown in the more northern regions of the United States, winter wheat, sown in fall, not winter, in the South.
TYPES
Hard Red Winter. A hard, high-protein wheat grown in the Great Plains area. Good for making bread flour.
Soft Red Winter. Grown in areas of higher rainfall, milder winters. Produces a soft, lower-protein flour usually reserved for sweet pastries, cookies, cakes, etc. Predominantly grown in the Midwest...Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana.
Hard Red Spring. The highest-protein wheat for bread flour. Grown mostly in the north-central states where the cold winters preclude the growing of winter wheat. Can do with less rainfall than the winter wheats. White. Another pastry-flour wheat, this is grown in the far western states...California, Idaho, and Oregon.
Durum. The wheat with the hardest kernels. As such, its primary use is for pastas, such as macaroni and spaghetti. A spring wheat grown chiefly in the north-central area.
The growing areas and uses of a particular wheat are not rigidly fixed. But if you can grow, say, durum and hard red spring in your region, you'd be better off with hard red spring for your bread flour. Within the main classifications of wheat, just given, there are almost 250 varieties presently being grown. Local availability and planting conditions should guide you in your choice.
Page:
<< Previous 1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 | 9 |
10 |
11 |
Next >>
