Realizations from the reading

So I’ve been reading the two books I mentioned last time. Grow Your Own Grains is not much of a book, it’s a self-described white paper. But it has some very useful information, especially the large table in the back that lists the properties of some 20 or so different grains, including planting times, growing times, how much to plant, yields, and that sort of thing.

One of the interesting things I got out of that was that it suggested planting 6 1/3 Tablespoons of wheat per 100 square feet of garden space. At first consideration, that didn’t seem too bad. Tablespoons are pretty small, right?

Small Scale Grain Raising is a pretty neat book too, although it’s a bit . . . larger scale than I thought it would be. It’s written by a farmer with a great deal of experience doing commercial farming. It gives good advice, but to find it you have to read around all of the instructions about how to use tractors, combines, seed drills and the like. The book is written very casually and has a very unintimidating style (except when talking about big machines). It’s full of anecdotes and asides, as well as recipes for the produce of the various crops.

It too, makes recommendations for broadcasting wheat seeds -- 1-2 bushels per acre. That requires a little math.

• There are 43,560 square feet in an acre
• There are 2,383 tablespoons in a bushel (isn’t the internet wonderful?)
• So, 2 bushels is 4766 T over 43,560 sq. ft is 10.95 T per 100 square feet.

Well, that’s in the same neighborhood, 5.5 T to 11 T. But I started thinking: Especially if I err on the high side and plant 11 T per 100 sq. ft, I’m going to plant 750 sq. feet, which would be 82.5 T . . . which is . . . just over 5 cups. (Who would have thought there was this much math in agriculture?)

Hmm. My harvest from last year was only 5.5 oz. Did I even have 5 cups? So I went and measured -- it was only 7 Tablespoons.

This was a huge surprise. So I had planted 115 sq. feet and only gotten 7 T? But, I knew I had harvested much more than I had planted. But I had only harvested as much as I should have planted. That meant that I didn’t plant nearly enough last spring.

As you can read here, I planted 2 little envelopes of spring wheat in 2009. The package said that it was more than enough for that amount of space . . . if you started them inside and transplanted them when they were 5” tall. Oh. At the time I hadn’t thought it would really matter, but obviously it does.

So I didn’t have enough seed. I needed more and I wanted it fast, because I was nearly done with my stupid, @#$% double digging. After trying and failing at two local coops, I found Howe Seeds online and ordered 6 lbs. of Spring Wheat. I paid by Paypal and they shipped within 12 hours.