This is an account of our family’s experience and learning while experimenting with growing oats and wheat in a garden setting. Storing food and preps are important; but, for us, the primary role of food storage is for the immediate emergency or to get us through the first year of a serious crisis. What then? No one can store sufficient food for a serious, long-term disaster.
The Key Is Growing and Gathering Your Own
The key is growing and gathering your own, and our favorite staples to grow are potatoes and corn. Living on the “wet” side of Oregon we got to wondering how feasible it would be to grow our own grains, oats and wheat in particular, on a small scale.
Great Fun and Valuable Lessons Learned
We had great fun and learned some valuable lessons in the exercise of growing our own grains that I’ll try to pass along. I’ve included some video of our methods and tools to better share our experience.
Two Sites Chosen
We chose two sites to grow in– pasture land and in an unused chicken coop. We cut and then rototilled a 25×25 foot area of pasture adjacent to our existing garden. This plot had never been intentionally fertilized. We wanted to see how well grain would do competing in grass land in the first year of planting. The 10×10 foot plot in the chicken coop was well fertilized and protected by fence for a more “ideal” growing situation. Both sites were roughly tilled and raked, and then they were planted by hand. Seeds were simply scattered and then lightly raked. We did plant several rows in each plot, seeding the rows more heavily and then covering the seeds with about half of an inch of soil.
Continue reading“Our Family’s Garden Grain Experiment- Part 1, by Wild BillB of OR”
