How much space do I need to grow my own grains?
We certainly aren't
going to jump to the level of growing all of our own grains
immediately, but I wanted to crunch the numbers and see if that would
even be feasible. The first step is to figure out how much of
each type of grain we eat. That part was pretty simple since we started buying our
flour in bulk last
year, and thus know that we go through about 100 pounds of wheat flour,
5 pounds of cornmeal, and 25 pounds of oats in a year. Here's my
estimate of how many pecks of whole grain those pounds of flour and
rolled oats are equivalent to:
| Logsdon's
suggestions for a typical family (pecks) |
How much we
currently eat per year (pecks) |
Square
feet needed to grow 1 peck |
|
| Wheat |
4 |
10 |
272 |
| Corn (for
meal) |
2 |
0.5 |
74 |
| Popcorn |
2 |
0 |
? |
| Soybeans |
4 |
0 |
183 |
| Grain sorghum |
2 |
0 |
78 |
| Buckwheat |
1 |
0 |
348 |
| Oats |
1 |
2.5 |
166 |
| Triticale or
rye or barley |
1 |
0 |
348 (rye), 122 (barley) |
| Soup beans |
2 |
less than we should... |
? |
| Alfalfa for
sprouting |
1 to 2 quarts |
less than we should... |
? |
As you build your own estimate of how many pecks of grain you eat per year, you might find the following conversions useful:
- 1 cup of
wheat converts into just a little more than a cup of whole wheat flour,
and that weighs about a quarter of a pound --- this might help you
convert from the five or fifty pound bags of flour you buy to
cups.
- A peck is equivalent to about 37 cups (and is also a quarter of a bushel.) So if you go through one five pound bag of cornmeal each year, like we do, you're probably eating 0.5 pecks of corn, very roughly.
| This post is part of our Backyard Grain Growing lunchtime series.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Wow, a fourteenth of an acre? I could feed an army here on my three level acres then. I really should be growing some oats or wheat here just for the experience. I just built a couple of new tomato/pepper/whatever planters over the weekend. 2'x12' of cypress planters filled with medium quality soil... I intend to build a few more in the coming weeks. Maybe as I build more planters I can experiment with grains in parts of the garden that get replaced by them.
-Shannon
I'm sorry anna for the constant replies, i'm just trying to suck in all the information i can.
I was under the impression to grow grians, either you do it in a tilled system or in beds. You say a fertile, irrigated soil so i'm assuming you are using a tilled system for grains? Because wheat or other grains wouldn't just grow in hard clay with a top dressing of compost would they?
Don't apologize for questions --- I'll just stop answering if I ever get sick of them.
High quality no-till systems, like mine, create soil conditions as good as or better than tilled soil. The distinction I was making wasn't between till and no-till (both of which work fine for grain), but between soil low in organic matter and nitrogen (like your clay will be the first year you work it, unless you add a whole lot of compost) and soil high in organic matter and nitrogen, and again between watering and not watering. This difference is often described as intensive vs. extensive gardening. Both styles have pros and cons, but you'll need to allow more space if you use extensive gardening. We generally garden intensively.
To answer your specific question about whether wheat would grow in hard clay with a top dressing of compost --- it would probably depend on how much compost you added and when you added it. If you add compost to the soil now, worms will do a lot of work mixing it into the soil before spring, so the hard clay won't be so hard.