Wheat

I am planning on growing my own wheat.  In a nut shell, here are the pros and cons for us to do that:

This beautiful painting can be found here.

Pros:


For 6lbs of wheat seeds we should harvest about 50lbs (according to this article in Mother Earth News) to be turned into 50lbs flour.

We'll be eating very, very healthy home made bread year round with those kind of stores.

We get to experience first hand, every year, a wheat harvest to make those biblical parables all the more impactfull.

We can use the chaff/stocks/leftovers as straw bedding for both chickens and rabbits.

We get to use a sickle!  Well, maybe not for such a small amount, but it'd still be pretty awesome.

Stored wheat berries last for a very, very long time.

Cons:


The wheat berries (pre-ground flour) need to be stored in a dry (no problem in the desert), air tight container that will keep out bugs, vermin and mold.

50lbs of wheat berries, need a bit of space (not just a little left over kitchen cabinet space), so we may need to wait until our Mercantile shed is built to store this stuff.

It is suggested that you grind the amount of flour you will use for one week and store that flour in your fridge.  With that in mind, we'll need a nice grinder as the hand grinders can aparently take FOREVER to yield just a small amount of flour (and, the article states, using a regular blender will leave you with pretty coarsely ground flour, making your breads/bisquits/whatever pretty darn grainy).

I fear that the wheat may take a lot of water to thrive in such a dry climate.  I think I'm going to have to find that out for myself though.

The big con is money - money for the storage space, storage containers and money for the grinder.  Once those are handled, we should be good to go.

By the way - I love that painting.  Anyone want to find me a print ;)

Blessings,

Heather