No seriously, you can grow wheat in your average sized garden. Just a 4' x 4' plot is enough to give you wheat cred. I know this because I grow wheat in my community garden. Sad you didn't plant any? Don't worry. You have 2 times to plant wheat every year. Once in the early spring, and once in late summer/fall.
I've grown wheat, I loved growing wheat and now I'm going to show you how to grow wheat because I can't teach you how to grow your own toilet paper.
I am currently on the last steps of my wheat harvest this year which is the "threshing" step. I cut my fall planted wheat last week (end of July) and it's currently sitting in a burlap bag on my front porch waiting to be threshed.
Wheat. You picture it blowing in the wind on acres of rolling land, a white speck of a farmhouse sits off in the distance with the music of John Denver floating on the breeze. Sure, that's one way to grow wheat but what do the rest of us do? What about those of us who don't have gravel driveways and relatives named Remington or Jeb? What do WE do?
We plant it just like we plant anything else; anywhere we can.
I've been doing it for a few years now and it's consistently a lot of work, but also consistently successful.
Table of Contents
Growing Wheat
(on a super-small scale like in your front or backyard.)
If the thought of growing your own wheat intimidates you, or you don't think you have anywhere to put it, think of it as an ornamental grass.
Wheat grows to be 3-4 feet tall.
It isn't overly huge, is beautiful, AND you can harvest it and turn it into flour in the fall or - use it for fall decoration like making your own wheat wreath.
To plant it all you need are wheat berries. Wheat berries = wheat seeds.
I made the mistake of buying a very small packet of wheat seed from a seed supplier for $3. I got about 15 seeds which is plenty to make enough flour for a birthday cake if the birthday cake is for a rather underweight mouse.
You can buy a whole big bag of wheat berries meant for cooking or grinding into flour and use these for seed. That's what I eventually did. I got mine from 1847, a local source for flour and wheat berries. I recommend you try to find a local source as well, because that means you're getting wheat that's meant to be grown in your area.
How to Grow It
Wheat falls into 2 categories, spring wheat or winter wheat.
Winter wheat is planted in the fall for a summer harvest, Spring wheat is planted in the spring for a fall harvest. Spring wheat can be planted "as soon as the ground can be worked", which really doesn't mean anything to me even after decades of vegetable gardening. So to me, "when the ground can be worked" generally means when I can go out and garden without swearing about how awful it is outside. So mid to late spring.
How Long Does It Take To Grow?
Wheat likes to germinate in cooler soil. That means it will be happy germinating in soil that's 10C (50F). If you're late planting, don't get too worked up. It will germinate if the soil is warmer too.
Under normal spring conditions (10C or so) wheat will sprout in about 7 days. By 2-3 weeks it'll be big enough to impress the cast of Hee Haw.
Wheat planted in the spring will be ready to harvest after about 4 months from planting.
If it's planted in the fall it will be ready to harvest about 8 months after planting (because so much of its time is spent dormant in the winter).
Wheat at 2 weeks looks like long grass.
Wheat can be planted with 25 and 32 wheat seeds per square foot.
I planted an area that was around 2' x 15' which got me almost 2 cups of wheat berries, or almost a pound.
1 pound of wheat berries = 1 pound of unsifted flour
1 pound of flour = 3.5 cups.
The graphic below shows what I was HOPING to get, and what can be achieved.
My haul was half of what I was hoping for and predicting. However it is possible to produce 3 lbs of wheat in a 30 square foot area if you can get your wheat to produce tillers.
What are Wheat Tillers?
Wheat grows like a grass with one main stem. At the top of this stem is where the fluffy thing you recognize as wheat will grow.
If it's grown in the right conditions, wheat will "tiller" which means more stems will develop off of the main wheat shoot. More stems means more wheat.
Each spring planted wheat berry has the potential to grow the main shoot, plus that main shoot can develop 3 tillers. (winter wheat can grow up to 7 tillers)
The more tillers you have, the more wheat growing at the tips of your plant you'll get.
So without any tillering wheat will produce one head of wheat. With tillering it can produce 3 times as much.
HOW TO IMPROVE TILLERING?
Tillers in spring sown wheat form 2-3 weeks after germination. Any conditions that the wheat is pissed at during this time will stop tillering. To keep your wheat happy:
- Prior to planting make sure you amend your soil with fertilizer or compost.
- Make sure your soil is friable (not compacted like cement).
- Don't plant your seeds too deep.
- Don't stress the plants by letting them dry out.
- Plant at least 25 seeds per square foot.
- Tillering can also be reduced if the weather is too warm.
I thought I did these things last year but ... maybe not. I'll pay more attention this year especially during the critical first two weeks after germination.
But I DID grow enough wheat in my 2' x 15' plot to make bread, pizza dough and buns all winter by grinding it into flour in my Vitamix. I'm not sure if I'm ready to graduate to one of these beautiful wood flour mills.
O.K., now that I've got you all worked up over the thought of basically growing your own buns, how do you plant wheat and harvest it?
How to Plant and Harvest Wheat
(even if you only have a pathetically tiny space)
- It all starts with the wheat berry. In spring plant between 25 - 30 seeds per square foot into well amended (fertilized) moist, loose soil. Water the soil before planting if you have to to guarantee germination. Plant wheat seeds at a depth of 1".
2. Watch for germination in the first week. Once it has sprouted KEEP THE WHEAT STRESS FREE by keeping the area weeded and watered (which is hard to do because weedy grasses look very much like growing wheat.)
3. After a couple of months the wheat will grow and tiller and produce wheat heads. Once this happens the plants will slowly start to dry out.
4. To test whether your wheat is ready to harvest pull a few grains out of the wheat head and pop them in your mouth. Ready to harvest wheat berries should be hard, not chewy. If they're chewy, they aren't ready to harvest yet. The majority of the plant will be dried, the tops completely golden with no green and the heads will be bending down slightly, not standing straight up.
5. Cut your wheat when it's ready and further dry it by hanging it upside down somewhere with air circulation where it's protected from rain. This ensures all the wheat is completely dry if you had to harvest when some heads still had a tinge of green. I hang my wheat on my front porch under the vintage looking onion drying rack I made. Let it further dry until no trace of green remains on the heads.
If you're further drying your wheat outside, protect it from critters that might take advantage. Keeping a paper yard bag around it will catch any berries that fall and keep pests away from it.
6. Thresh the wheat. Threshing wheat is bashing it around to release the grain from the chaff and seed head.
How to Thresh Wheat
I put my wheat stalks in a linen bag and then bash the bag against my house to thresh it. Other people put the wheat in a rubber bin and stomp on the heads.
Wheat that's been threshed in a linen bag.
7. After threshing you need to winnow the wheat. Winnowing is removing the chaff, the lightweight skin that protects the wheat berry.
Winnowing can be done in a few ways but they all use moving air. You can stand outside with your grain on a sheet between two people and bounce the wheat up in the air on a windy day. The wind carries away the chaff as it rises into the air, while the heavier grain falls back down onto the sheet.
You will feel very much like a prairie woman in the 1800s if you do it this way.
I winnowed by spilling my wheat and chaff onto a linen sheet and then moved a small fan over it by hand which blew away the chaff.
After a mere 4 months and a hellofalotta work, I now had my own wheat to be turned into flour. Like I said, about 2 cups worth of wheat berries.
After harvesting and cleaning the wheat you can store it in a moisture proof container. If you're afraid of bugs in your grain, you can heat your wheat berries on a baking sheet in the oven at 130-140F for 30 minutes to an hour. You could also use a dehydrator (I use an Excalibur dehydrator) at that temperature to do the same thing.
How to Grow Wheat on a Small Scale.
How to grow, harvest, thresh and winnow wheat on a small scale.
Materials
- Wheat Berries
- Garden
Instructions
- Water your soil prior to planting if it isn't moist already. Plant 25 – 30 seeds per square foot at a depth of 1" for spring wheat.
- Watch for germination in the first week. Once it has sprouted KEEP THE WHEAT STRESS FREE by keeping the area weeded and watered.
- After a couple of months the wheat will grow and tiller and produce wheat heads. Once this happens the plants will slowly start to dry out.
- To test whether your wheat is ready to harvest pull a few grains out of the wheat head and pop them in your mouth. Ready to harvest wheat berries should be hard, not chewy.
- Harvest when your wheat is dry and hard but if there are traces of green still after you harvest it, dry it further dry until no trace of green remains on the heads.
- Thresh the dry wheat by placing bundles in a cotton bag or pillow case and bashing it around to release the grain from the chaff.
- Winnow the wheat (removing the chaff from the grain) by blowing a small fan on it to blow the chaff away while the heavier grain stays where it is.
- Store in a moisture proof container.
Notes
The better your soil is the better your harvest will be. Make sure it's amended with compost or fertilizer, is nice and loose and remains watered (but not overwatered).
Doing this increases your chances of good "tillering" a process that happens within the wheat berry causing more than one stem to grow from the wheat, and therefore more wheat heads.
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Joan Woodrooffe
We grew our own wheat last year - we milled it into flour that I use when baking my sourdough bread. It was so successful we're doing it again this year! - We use red fife spring wheat and buy organic berries from a small organic farm about an hour from our home - 25 kg. The hardest part is cleaning the berries before milling - I know you'll come up with an ingenious method to make it easier - I'll keep watching! Very fun thing to do.
Wendy
Oh, what kind of flowers do you plant in your community garden? I started a whole bunch of nasturtiums indoors, and I tried my hand at Ranunculus but out of nine tubers only two germinated. I’m also trying to start Chinese lanterns from seed but I’ve been watering them faithfully and there isn’t anything showing, so they might be duds. Half of my garden plot is ever berries strawberries, and I’ve got all the veggies needed to make salsa starting from seed indoors now. Hopefully I have enough space in my community garden for all the seeds I want to plant.
Sherrill
Don’t mean to poo poo your idea. Sure growing grain is somewhat of a romantic idea. I think you will be wasting valuable garden space if you grow wheat. That’s just me. I know you will still go through with it and good for you. I bet you won’t do it again next year. But I’m sorry, I’m starting to sound like my father. Sorry, you go girl!
Karen
Yup. You're sounding very much like a father, lol. I can't listen to what other people think I should or shouldn't grow. If I did I wouldn't grow anything. My garden neighbour thinks I'm nuts for growing carrots and thinks you should just buy them. Another gardener feels squash are a waste of space. Someone else down the row thinks I'm wasting space by putting in so many flowers. You get the idea. ;) ~ karen!
SuzNKton
Red Fife wheat. The one public school lesson that comes back to me....mostly because a) I lived in Saskatchewan for four years ( at the time, they primarily used red fife because it had the shortest germination period) and b) my dad*people* come from Peterborough area (where red fife was developed). All that to say....how can you separate the chaff if you are using a vitamix? Might be better to go ahead and get that grain mill!
Karen
Oh, well wheat berries come with the chaff removed already. And I'd remove the chaff as well after drying the wheat. :) Countertop grain mills don't remove it either. They just grind the berries into wheat. The Vitamix actually does a great job of it too, but technically I should be using a different Vitamix container and blade. It moves in the reverse direction of the blender blade and won't heat up the flour as it's pulverizing it. ~ karen!
linda in illinois
Great idea.. wheat grown on my mini farm.. i love that idea.. i will try to find some here in Illinois. Never grown it before, will enjoy the adventure.
thanks Karen, always my inspiration.
Idaho Girl
This has been a really long week, so your little bit of crazy made for a welcome laugh! When I was in high school, I drove a grain truck to get that wheat in the field from the combine to the warehouse, so I'm used to seeing acres and acres of the stuff waving in the wind. I look forward to hearing how this experiment goes.
Meg
NEAT! I love your gardening-->cooking adventures. How does grinding your own wheat work, is it good, what's the flour like? Is it that much better? Does it gunk up your blender? I suppose once it's flour you just kinda store it like any other dry goods... We're gonna need the full vicarious wheat experience here!
Kristina
I know someone named Remington. She used to raise show pigs, but then she went off to NYU film school and now is a rather good young documentarian. (All of the farmers in our family seem to be called Ralph or Richard.) You should do well growing that wheat. We grow wheat hay as a cover crop for our walnuts (while the trees are young, before the orchard gets too shady). It's not hard. Seeds, sun, water.
Deirdre Fowler
So.... does that mean $17 of wheat seed = 6 cups of flour? Or did I get lost somewhere?
brenda
I think initially some were used to impress the cast of Hee Haw (no small feat) ... then there's the bunch that will be pizza ... with enough leftover wheatberries to grind into several more cups of flour (probably for more pizza) and then there'll be that bowl of cooked wheatberries (probably for breakfast) + I think now some will most likely be skimmed off the top to make wheatberry gum.
I once grew 10 flax seeds in my Toronto allotment garden - only 3 survived by the end of the season. What an exercise in futility - I didn't even bother to google how to turn them into a fitted linen sheet when all was said and done.
Jackie
Hi there! No relatives named Remington, but I’m a bonafid 4th generation wheat farmer 👋 My husband and I also grow flax, canola, durum, yellow peas, and lentils! Trying to grow salad greens indoors this year as we just bought our first hone and we have been so busy in the field (and it keeps snowing 🙄) so I won’t get my garden filled until June.
Beckie
I am also trying wheat! But I only want enough to make a few decorations with. I do not have nearly enough space to grow enough for even a birthday cake's worth of flour.
I also have wallflowers started. I tried stock last year, but they weren't overall pretty, just up close pretty. Kind of like statice.
Good luck with your wheat!
Karen
Yes, I grew statice last year and was underwhelmed. ~ karen!
Pat Dejean
I'm happy to see you supporting our local Fergus wheat farmer and grinder. 1847 Stone Milling. They have the best flours! I give bags as gifts to foodie friends, make pancake mixes for gifts, make wooden boxes with jars with different varieties as gifts...In fact, ti think I give more away than I eat!
Now, I need to go make pancakes.
Ramona
So here is the flip-side... I have 10 raised beds. I took a gardening class in Jan:the first thing the instructor says is “If your soil is naked, cover it with SOMETHING immediately!” So I buy a bale of straw and cover all 10. Flash forward to straw removal in April and every bed is completely covered in wheat! (Apparently, there was quite a bit of hay in the straw.) I’ve spent hours getting it OUT! It’s thick, the roots are deep, and it’s invasive. Next winter, sticking with ground cover and local seaweed. Lesson learned.
Karen
I'm not sure why your gardening instructor said to cover your soil immediately? Interesting. And yes, lol. Straw sprouts! ~ karen
Catherine Naulin
LOL, same thing happened to me. I should have known that picking left over straw (gleaning) from neighbouring wheat fields might produce something :) AND IT DID! But I didn't wait to harvest, then dry the wheat, then make flour. That seems like so much work for one small birthday cake for a tiny mouse, no? I like the seaweed idea!
Stephanie Jewett
I spread a bale of straw in the chickens' run, and it sprouted and they ate all the sprouts and pooped all over it and broke it up, and now, THAT's what I'm spreading on my garden beds!! Yours just needed a little more processing, that's all.
I don't know anyone named Remington, but I am moving in a couple of weeks to a place with a long gravel driveway, and now I need to learn how to garden in zone 4- I hope I can still grow tomatoes and squash!
Anita Beletic
no Remington, but I have an uncle Remigo
Karen
I'm not sure that counts, lol. Very close ... O.K. I'll count it. 😂~ karen!
Elizabeth Kays
This is also how you can make wheatgrass juice, which by the way, is gluten free and very good for you—intense green and a bit spicy. Although I sprout wheatberries in a dish with no soil after they are sprouted in a jar. When the grass is as tall as your pictures show, just trim it and juice it!
leo muzzin
I am going to the Bulk Barn in late May and buying a scoop of a variety of stuff like mungo beans, alfalfa, etc and even wheat or rye if they have it just to plant and add some adventure to the garden!!
Karen
I didn't even check Bulk Barn to see if they had wheat berries! They probably do. (I did want this specific variety .. but still). ~ karen!
Grammy
My grandfather was a farmer. His name was Frank. That’s also the name of my dog. I look forward to seeing your home-grown pizza.
Karen
Frank?! No. I don't think he was a farmer. Are you sure he wasn't a cobbler? I'm pretty sure that's a cobbler's name. ~ karen!
Luanne
I think you should make friends with someone named Remington. Then you can both set out to find actual farmers, who are more likely named Jeff, or Kevin, or Steve, and see if they might let you have an ice cream bucket of wheat. :)
And want a fun trick to try? Take a tablespoon of those wheat berries and chew it up until it becomes a weird gum. Not exactly tasty, but kind of fascinating to experience. :)
Yours truly, a farmer's daughter.
Karen
Wheat gum, lol? K. I'll give it a shot. ~ karen!
SuzNKton
Every school trip to a farm! Lol!
Catherine Naulin
Hi Luanne,
My grand parents (in France) had a small farm and every summer we would help with the harvest of wheat. I too loved "stealing" handful of wheat berries to chew until I had some chewing gum. Turns out I now know that it's just wheat gluten. But then, I thought it was the greatest. Now I want to try out planting wheat. It's pretty, and who knows, I might start a trend in downtown Montreal?
Karen you ALWAYS make me laugh. Coming from France, no Remingtons in my family, except for my father's fancy electric shaver.
Alisa
My grandmother's maiden name was Remington.
Karen
And did she grow wheat? ;) ~ karen!
John
Hi. Fun post, I was think of doing wheat too. Mostly I have tomatoes, kale, lettuce, and cucumbers. And they attract the local deer herd. So, we bring Remington, the puppy we fostered and our neighbors adopted. Here he is with his new two legged sister.
Cheers
John
Cheverly
What CUTIES!!
Karen
Cute. LOL! :) ~ karen
Diane H.
I LOVE this post!