Grow your own Grains

Growing your own grains to bake breads, make muesli, porridge, flakes and pasta is the next step in self-sufficiency for many gardeners. Once you have mastered growing the potatoes and the vegetables, living from your produce year-round, planted the fruit trees and started on baking bread, the thought
arises to actually grow these grains yourself.

Great - you are to embark on a very special journey, as growing grains is very different from growing veges. First you need more space than just a couple of raised beds and you also need the grains to start up with. In addition you need to know if what you are going to sow is a winter wheat or a summer wheat variety,
so you know when to sow it.

Growing grains also means that you are well on the way to survive any problems the supermarket (or your Organic supplier) is going to have in obtaining grains in the near future due to droughts in Australia, floods in the US or competition from other countries on the world market.

Many people do not realise how many calories a person working in the garden and fields (and walking or cycling instead of driving) actually needs - and that these will not be met with green salads from the vegie patch. So growing starchy crops is one of the main aims of self-sufficiency, as these will actually give you
the food for your muscles to perform what you would like them to do.

The different "grains" in more detail:

1. The easiest grains to grow AND harvest and store is corn/maize. Not very useful for baking "real" fluffy bread, but the right varieties can be ground into a flour to mix with wheat for baking flat breads and cakes. Te dried corn kernels can also be prepared and ground for tortillas (this is a quite involved process
though - you do not just grind the dried corn).
The corn meal (ground dried kernels) can be used for porridge, polenta and soups and flat breads, or the kernels can be soaked and cooked and added to soups and stews or used like rice or made into fritters or patties.
It is important to note here, that the modern corn varieties are low in Lysine, one of the essential amino acids, and therefore a vegetarian diet high in corn needs dried beans eaten during the same meal to counteract this problem. Hence the "locals" in South America eating tortillas filled with beans. Or you can eat small amounts of meat with your corn.

2. The next easiest grain to grow is wheat - and rye - (the traditional bread baking grains). A bit labour intensive to harvest with a scythe or sickle, not very easy for us up North to get dry enough to thresh and store - if not dry enough the grains go moldy. The main problems with wheat and rye on a small scale are the birds! They can harvest 100% of your crop if not deterred.

3. Also easy to grow is oats and barley, harvesting, threshing and drying as in No2. However these grains will not fall free of the husks when threshed and will need dehusking before you can grind or cook them.
You can try dehusking by putting the grinding stones of your flour mill at a distance a fraction of a millimeter closer than the grains are thick, so the husks will be broken off. With homegrown, ungraded grains, quite a challenge, as the smaller ones will slip through and be not de-husked (the same goes for rice).

If this sounds too difficult - and most people will give up at some stage when they had a few too many husks in the porridge and feed the remaining grains to the chooks - you can try the "naked" varieties. These seem to be not completely selected yet and you still get quite a percentage of "normal" grains as well (even
if you buy them from the organic outlets), so there is your chance to keep selecting over the years until you have a good strain in your backyard.

4. Rice doesn't need a rice paddy, it can be grown as dry (upland) rice just like barley and has the same de-husking problems, so may also not be the grain of choice for the beginner and on a small scale.
There have been several small scale attempts to grow rice in NZ. Some here in Northland as well. It would be well worth investigating once the de-husking and bird problems can be solved.

5. Buckwheat is not a grass like the above grains and grows very easily, sprawling on the ground. While excellent in a chicken foraging area, it is not so easy to harvest by hand for human consumption. It also needs de-husking and to aid that it can be sprouted, de-husked and then cooked like rice. Other attempts
to de-husk it have not been very successful on a small scale.

6.The most easy to grow of all is Quinoa and Amaranth (also not grasses), they are basically weeds. Harvesting is a little nightmare, as the whole heads need to be harvested and dried for the tiny seeds to fall out. Luckily the birds do such a good job on harvesting every little grain first so that you may decide not to bother with the left-overs.

In addition the Quinoa often starts sprouting on the plant if you get some nice warm humid autumn days. You will get a very small amount of Edibles from a huge area and of all grains I feel these will never be the mainstay starch crop for a self-sufficent grower (especially not if the supermarket closes), but rather a novelty one tries out for fun.

To sum this up:
I would recommend to grow corn and pumpkins if you'd like a lot of food-calories from a small area. In the North you can add yams to that (the real ones not the little oxalis tubers that can be bought at the supermarket under the name of "NZ Yams") and of course taro and sweet potato.

To rely entirely on potatoes as a starchy mainstay can lead to great famines
when the crop fails due to blight, so some storable dry grains are very desirable.

Try growing some wheat - even if its only a square meter or two in your garden beds and harvest, thresh, winnow and grind it, so you can see how it works. Your own freshly baked bread from your own wheat crop will be such a tasty achievement - you might do a bigger patch next year!