Growing Grains

I'll start off with the big caveat that I'm down on the coast where it's hot and dry during the day & usually rains every evening. I repeat, HOT DRY DAYS, moderate rain at night. That said....

I successfully grew (and ate) small test plots of spring wheat, dragon millet, quinoa, buckwheat, sunflower and amaranth this year. My oats and barley didn't do squat, but I plan to try them again. I have seed for triticale, flax and teff , but haven't grown them yet. My wee little sesame starts died while I was on the mainland.

I have rice growing at the moment - it was a royal pain in the rump to get started (6 failed attempts) but now it's strong and 3' tall. Time will tell if the rice will produce grain tho! As far as rice goes, I've been trying ANY rice I stumble upon that is unhulled and unpolished. I usually look for brown rice, wild rice, black rice or red rice. Always ORGANIC. I take them home & see if I can get them to sprout. I'd guess that of the 13 varieties I've brought home, only 2 were sterile (or processed). At first I tried making a pseudo-rice paddy with a 5 gallon bucket, but further research revealed that wasn't needed. The water in rice paddies is mostly there to control weeds! Once I switched to 'dry' rice farming, my rice took off.

The quinoa, brown rice, seseame and amaranth seed came from the natural food store bulk bins. Come to think of it, that's how I got edible peanut, 12 varieties of beans, 3 types of lentils, etc.... if it's in the bin, organic and unprocessed, I am game to try it :D

I'm growing sunflower for oil, attracting bees & to feed my future chickens. If you need bees, plant sunflower - I was floored how many bees arrived & my pollenation rate in the veggie garden tripled. I'm fairly certain that the bees made a hive & stuck around because I always have bees now! Before the sunflowers bloomed, I had seen 2 bees in 4 months of gardening. Now I see at least 2 every day. When the sunflowers were in bloom, each sunflower had at least 6 bees working on every bloom. The difference is staggering.

The spring wheat, dragon millet, buckwheat, millet, oats, barley & triticale came from a nice gentleman in Canada at Prarie Garden Seeds. The sunflowers are Mammoth variety from Seeds of Change, though I think every seed company on the planet sells Mammoth. The Teff, triticale, flax and buckwheat came from Bountiful Gardens.

Don't bother with winter wheat unless you want to put your starts in the fridge (at least that's what I'm told) because winter wheat needs chill hours we simply don't have. I grew Ladoga Spring Wheat this year just fine. I think it prefers hawaii 'wintertime' to grow, since it sat most of the summer looking anemic... then suddenly shot up once we got cold (high 60's) weather! I'm going to replant in a few weeks to see how spring wheat handles our hot summer weather too.

If you haven't eaten quinoa, give it a shot. It grows gangbusters for me, all year round, without fail. It threshes SO easily and is super nutritious. It likes dry, but honestly, if I lived somewhere wet I would set aside room in my house or a greenhouse to grow it. I DO think it's that valuable of a crop. Quinoa grain has saponin on it, which is SOAP. It tastes like ass if you forget to rinse your grain before you cook it. However, that also means a lot of pests don't want to eat it either. Of all my grains, quinoa is the ONLY one I haven't found any pest damage on.

My first choice is to buy grain seeds from Prarie Garden Seeds or Bountiful Gardens, then Seeds of Change, then the bulk food bins at a Natural Food store.

General rule if you're scrounging seed from the natural food market bins....it must be unprocessed. Stuff that is husked, hulled, roasted, polished, pearled will NOT work, don't bother with them. The 'live' part of the seed has been cooked or ground off. Most white rice won't work because they have been hulled and polished. Brown rice works GREAT though.

If you are not sure if a seed/grain/bean/whatever from the bins will grow, buy a small amount & try to sprout it at home. If you can get it to sprout, you know that you have a viable seed. There's no guarantee it'll produce, but at least you know it's viable, which is half the battle. You will still have to wait for harvest to see if it was not sterile & you get grain. Then you have to try to sprout THAT offspring to make sure the seed wasn't single-harvest sterile or a hybrid that reverts to something unsavory. Thus, it's often more cost/time effective to buy non-gmo, non-hybrid, organic, heirloom, open pollenating seeds from a reputable source...you KNOW they will produce over and over. They cost more, but you know you have good seed from the get-go.

*Growing* your grain is only a small part of the effort. Once you get the grain to set, you still have to harvest, THRESH and WINNOW the grain. This is no small task. You just have to figure out how to do it - you will get better at it the more you practice. Now that I've harvested small quantities of each grain, I know what IS worth the trouble & what is NOT.

Amaranth was easy to thresh if you do it at the right time. Once, I did it right, once I did not & wound up with handfuls of very painful stickers in my fingers. You can eat amaranth greens, by the way & they are very good for you.

If the rice produces, I am going to focus on quinoa, millet & rice as my grain crops. I'll continue to do test plots of all the other grains to see how they do, or if there is something I can change to make them yield.

If I had to choose just one grain to grow, I would always grow Quinoa. It is an unfussy grower, pest-resistant, drought tolerant, cold tolerant, SUPER easy to thresh, dries fast, highly nutritious. I think with Quinoa & Kale, you could stay pretty damn healthy. Once I add in hawaiian-crops, I'd say my bare-bones nutritional dream garden would be taro, sweet potato, kale, quinoa, banana, garlic, peanut, coconut & avocado. This is just my opinion of course, using items I know I can grow :D

You may ask what on earth I am going to do with grains, nuts and seeds once they are harvested. Well, I have a Country Living manual grain mill and a Piteba manual oil press. If it's not totally obvious by now, I'm planning for food-supply Armageddon... must be the latent Mormon on my mom's side of the family.

Oh, and I planted six dwarf apple bananas yesterday - woo! And the banana bloom that came up is throwing off red hands - so i guess i have a red banana plant, well 10, to be precise, when you include its keiki. Hopefully it's not an ornamental!