Design

Thanks to a comment by Commonweeder, I checked out her supplier of locally grown wheat .   Wow. It's encouraging to have small farmers reclaim growing grains locally.  The economics favor the mass producers in the midwest, where efficiency and soils are definitely advantageous.  But isn't it important to encourage locally grown grain, too, whether it's wheat, oats, corn, or barley?  In North Carolina, there's a bread flour project, supporting growers of organic wheat, to serve (artisan) bakers in the region. Rarefied, maybe, but local production may be the future of sustainable agriculture. Potatoes are apparently the most efficient carbohydrate-rich crop, though, if times really get tough. But I'd love to be able to buy regional grains (or flour) to make my own bread.  I'm a bread maker already, and buy flour from a nationally-distributed source of North American flour from an employee-owned company ( King Arthur ) at my local grocery. This makes sense to me.

At the Organic Grower's School in Asheville last weekend, a speaker suggested that we could grow enough wheat to bake a loaf of bread each week on a 30 ft. X 10 ft. plot. Hmm, that's 300 sq. ft. -- a nice sized space, and larger than I'd devote to grains in my vegetable gardens, but it still didn't seem possible to me, but what do I know about wheat growing?  Not much, to be sure.  But, poking around, I found information on breadinfo.com about how a 10 X 10 ft. plot would yield enough wheat to yield between 10-25 loaves of bread, so maybe the speaker wasn't so far off. But, of course, the grain needs to be threshed (freed of chaff) and then ground, before one makes it into bread.  So it's not a simple process or particularly easy. It was an interesting revelation.  My gardening companion and I probably eat a loaf and a half of bread a week, more or less, although now I'll think I'll need to keep track, depending on how much extra from dinner goes into lu...