Farming for Self-Sufficiency

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If you are going to feed it in the sheaf I suggest you harvest it early, when the straw is just beginning to yellow, because at this time the straw itself, which the cattle will eat, is highly nutritious. If it is the threshed grain you are after then you should cut it when the straw has gone completely yellow but before the grain is so ripe that it sheds easily when you pull it about. Oats need more drying than wheat or barley, and the old saying is that it should be 'churched' in the stook three times. That means that after it has been stooked it should see three Sundays in the stook before it is carted and put in the rick. But if you put it up in mows for a month or two you don't need to leave it in the stook (where it is more vulnerable to rain) for so long.

Oat straw, by the way, is by far the most nutritious of the straws in the British Isles, and good oat straw is better than indifferent hay. Wheat straw is very poor for feeding, although good for litter or for thatching. Barley straw is better for feeding than wheat straw and worse for thatching or litter.

RYE

Rye is little grown in the British Isles, but will grow and makes good bread (if you like rye bread). In North America it appears to make good whisky—if you like rye whisky. What rye is superb for is planting in the autumn with the intention of feeding it off to your cattle very early in the spring (during the 'hungry-gap') as a green fodder crop. If you feed it off hard, behind an electric fence or with tethered cattle, it Will give the cattle some green stuff just when they need it most, and if you spare it thereafter it will grow again for another 'bite', or even for a harvested grain crop in the autumn. The straw is good for thatching, and for making corn dollies.

MAIZE

The other corn crop occasionally grown in Britain but very extensively grown in America and Africa is maize. Maize, planted just after the last frosts of the year on good, deeply cultivated, well-manured land will give you an enormous crop of green fodder for your cows just when you don't want it because there's plenty of grass. Actually this is a simplification, because there is a slackening off in the nutritive value of the grass in late July and August when you might want to feed the maize. But if you make silage then maize is an excellent crop. As a crop to ripen and harvest the grain of it is a doubtful starter in Britain, but has been grown for this successfully. As a vegetable we will deal with it later, under ,sweet corn'.

POTATO

And so we come to the almighty potato. Anybody can grow potatoes. But to grow a good crop of clean potatoes your land must be in very good heart. You can put up to twenty tons of muck (farmyard manure) on an acre and plant the tubers straight into the muck in the furrows, and you must cultivate them properly and keep the weeds down. If you have a ridging plough, either a horse-drawn single-furrow one or a tractor-drawn three-furrow one, draw out your furrows, chuck as much muck as you can get hold of in the bottom of the furrows (in the old horse days in England the furrows were of such a width that the wheels of the dung-cart would comfortably run in them and thus not break down the ridges, and the muck was scraped straight out of the back of the dung cart into the furrows with a croom, which is like a long, strong, four-tined rake), then sow your seed potatoes (really tubers—you sow the actual potato itself of course) on top of the muck, then split the ridges into the furrows with your ridging plough again. As weeds grow run your ridging plough through again sometimes. At least once, before the potatoes get too big, hand-hoe by pulling the ridges in which the potatoes are down into the furrows (without actually disturbing the growing potato plants). Then, a few days after, ridge them up again with the plough. When the potato plants get really big and meet each other then they will suppress the weeds to some extent themselves. But weeds grow like mad in the well-manured potato field, and if you don't look out you'll have a huge crop of weeds, a miserable one of potatoes, and a legacy of foul land for the next year.

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