Farming for self sufficiency

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So we will begin with wheat. Before you begin growing wheat remember what has to be done to it. It must be harvested, dried, threshed, winnowed, cleaned, ground, and baked before you can eat it. You can do all these things by hand, but they can be done very much less laboriously by machine. Maybe you would be advised to trade some other product that you can produce more easily with the rest of the world for flour? To buy bread from the bakers is absolute nonsense: you are paying through the nose for something you can quite easily make yourself (just don't believe the people who tell you it's as cheap to buy bread as to bake it—they just don't know what they are talking about). But you can easily buy flour and bake your own bread. Better still, far better in fact in every way, is to buy your wheat, straight from a farmer if you can get it, store it in ordinary gunny bags, turning the bags every so often and keeping them on wood—not on cold concrete, but in a nice dry place—and grind your own flour in the sort of small mill that we shall discuss later.

But we have grown our own wheat on a garden scale, quite successfully, threshed the corn by bashing it on the back of a chair, winnowed it by tossing it up in the wind, and ground it, God help us, in a coffee grinder. And it has made the most excellent bread: no better than other good bread made from English or Welsh wheat but not a whit worse. For communities of any size it would be most sensible and economical to grow your own bread wheat. We will discuss the possible ways of harvesting, etc., when we come to them.

A word first of all about the often misunderstood business of 'strong' wheat and 'weak' wheat, or 'hard' and 'soft', and the widely held superstition that wheat grown in the British Isles is 'weak' or 'soft' and therefore incapable of being turned into good bread. Well, the battles of Agincourt and Crecy were won by men reared up on bread made from English wheat, whether it was 'soft' or 'hard', and 'hard' wheat was never heard of in the British Isles, one supposes, until the opening up of North America as a wheat-exporting country in the nineteenth century. The fact is that commercial bakers prefer 'hard' wheat because it yields the largest number of loaves per sack of flour. For that reason and for that reason only. And the reason why 'hard' wheat yields more loaves per sack is that the more tenuous gluten of hard wheat is capable of with standing greater pressure of gas (bread is 'leavened' by carbonic acid gas produced by the yeast organism) and therefore the bread contains larger holes; also flour made from hard wheat can absorb more water. Bread made from soft wheat may have 40 per cent of its weight in water; bread made from hard wheat up to 75 per cent. Water and gas cost the baker very little, if indeed anything at all, and so if he can sell water and gas for the same price as flour (which costs him quite a lot) he is on to a good thing. Therefore bakers shy away from English wheat. Now Sally has baked our bread for the last eighteen years always using English wheat, and I'll warrant that there is no other bread in the world better than it. She uses whole meal because we happen to like whole meal (not because we have any dietetic theories about it—although it may not be a coincidence that when our family of six goes to the dentist on its annual visit—there is never anything for the dentist to do) but when we compare her whole meal loaves with any bought whole meal loaves we can get hers are always superior. But her loaves are closer textured than bought loaves, because the flour that she uses being of 'soft' English wheat, the dough will not retain so much gas in it. In other words, we don't have to eat so much hole. Also her bread contains less water per pound of loaf. One requires far less of bread made from soft wheat than one does of bread made from hard wheat: the former is more 'filling' and certainly far more nutritious measured pound for pound—simply because there is nothing very nutritious about carbon dioxide and water. The miller also can make more money out of foreign hard wheat than he can out of home-grown soft, simply because with modern methods of milling separation of the endosperm from the rest of the grain is easier with hard wheat than it is with soft. With whole meal milling this does not matter, but for the production of white flour it does. The baker and the miller can both make more money if they use imported hard wheats and not home-grown soft ones. But for the self-supporter there is no advantage in using hard wheat. He is not out to make money out of anybody. I can't compare bread made from soft wheat with bread made from hard because we never have made any from hard wheat flour and really you can't call the wrapped pap one buys from the shops bread at all. But we will discuss the flour and bread aspects of wheat when we get to them. For the moment we will discuss the growing of the stuff.

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