Permaculture stories…
Wheat
A mystery crop emerges from the mulch.
IT WAS an accidental crop, our wheat. We had cleared the garden bed of the residue of the vegetables that had grown there and forked it to open the soil to water and nutrients. Add some dynamic lifter and blood and bone fertiliser and we were ready to go. All that needed doing now was to spread the straw mulch.
A visit to the local nursery revealed that they were out of the pea straw we were after. None until January, the manager said… but we have oat straw. No choice, then, oat straw it is I said to Fiona as we heaved the bails into the van. Spread over the garden bed, we intended to leave it for a time before we planted into it.
A few weeks go by. But, what’s this? Green straplike leaves are growing out of the mulch. A lot of them. What could it be? Some kind of weed?
Looks like there are seeds in the mulch, said Fiona. So we are going to get a crop of oats, are we, I asked. We should pull it out, she said. No, let’s wait and see what it is, I replied. It took a lot of talking to convince her to leave it so we could see what it was. Doing that wasn’t easy as her approach to gardening is, shall we say, a lot less experimental (ie. haphazard) than mine.
We watched the mysterious crop grow taller and taller as we moved into the warm season. Then it started to set seed. Being unfamiliar with grain growing I took a picture and posted it online. Yes, maybe oats came some responses. No, it’s wheat came others.
And so the mystery crop grew and as we moved into summer it started to dry. And, yes, it was wheat. We harvested the grain and Fiona looked online about how to thresh it to recover the seed.
What to do?
That is as far as it has gone at the moment. The stalks with their grain heads I bundled into my hoochie and now they wait under the house for our next step.
We’re leaving the roots of the wheat in the garden where they will breakdown into organic matter. Fiona says we might take the cultivator over the bed to break up the roots and loosen the soil, then plant vegetables.
The question we are yet to face is what to do with the wheat. We don’t have a grain mill so we can’t turn it into flour. Maybe we will give it to our neighbours for their chooks.
An experiment and a surprise
Well, it was a bit of an experiment as well as a surprise, this wheat growing. Would I plant wheat or any similar grain in our home garden? Other than corn, I don’t think so. It takes away space from the vegetables, and vegetables are what we mostly eat.
I come from the school of thinking that says let’s stand back and see what happens. Fiona does not. She’s a detail and planning sort of person. Together we achieve a rough balance in what we do, an example of the harmony of opposites, I suppose. In the case of the spontaneous wheat crop my ‘let’s see what comes up’ approach prevailed, but Fiona’s more-considered approach is the one that will see any future grain crop that grows from the mulch removed immediately.
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