A great reason to grow a bigger garden this year:

[bhikkhu]

"AAM Concerned with CCC Inventories"


“According to the May 1, 2008 CCC inventory report there are o­nly 24.1 million bushels of wheat in inventory, so after this sale there will be o­nly 2.7 million bushels of wheat left the entire CCC inventory,” warned Matlack. “Our concern is not that we are using the remainder of our strategic grain reserves for humanitarian relief. AAM fully supports the action and all humanitarian food relief. Our concern is that the U.S. has nothing else in our emergency food pantry. There is no cheese, no butter, no dry milk powder, no grains or anything else left in reserve. The o­nly thing left in the entire CCC inventory will be 2.7 million bushels of wheat which is about enough wheat to make ½ of a loaf of bread for each of the 300 million people in America."

http://www.tristateobserver.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=10121

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Not to be alarmist, but...I was already growing more because of the high prices at the store. It looks like there may be real shortages, however, in the rest of the world if not here. The world needs a bumper crop of the staples this year - corn, wheat and rice, but the projections don't look good so far.

[bvar22]

1. Our garden got bigger this year.

It tripled.

I think everybody in this forum expanded their garden this year. I can't recall anyone downsizing.
We are also planning on a seasonal expansion by planting a cold weather Fall/Winter crop this year.

A sign of hard times:
Many of the homes in the nearest small town have new veggie gardens....way more than last year.

[Lisa0825]

2. Being a total gardening novice, I looked up how much effort it takes to harvest wheat...

and it looks extremely difficult. I guess if we have shortages, I'll do without bread!

http://waltonfeed.com/old/wheat.html

[bhikkhu]

3. I looked into growing wheat too...

But the figures are: an acre sown in wheat might on average yield 2,500 lbs of grain. An acre is 43,560 sq. ft., so thats .057 lbs per foot square. To produce a ten pound bag of flour then would take about 175 square feet. I suppose it could be worthwhile given enough land and inexpensive water, and a lot of time to spend on getting it from garden to table, but I still prefer to grow the really good and easy stuff in my limited space. Wheat is definitely not one of those you can pick, rinse and snack on while weeding or puttering around the garden.

[asdjrocky]

4. My first garden ever this year.

And it just keeps getting bigger and bigger. I have tomatoes, summer squash, jalapeno, red and golden peppers, six kinds of lettuce, lot's and lot's of corn, soy bean, two kinds of cucumbers, and three kinds of mellon. And oh yeah, carrots, green beans and radishes.

Did I mention that I have a compulsive personality?

[bhikkhu]

6. That's ambitious! The trick is how to use and store things.

I tend to grow reasonable amounts of what I know I will use fresh, and then large amounts of what I know I can store. Such as green beans - easily canned, cukes and peppers - easily pickled, leeks and potatoes - made into soup and frozen. It takes awhile to get the hangs of it, but its fine too to have a bunch of unplanned extras to enrich friends and neighbors, or the local food pantry.

Good luck!

[bvar22]

5. "Countryside & Small Stock Journal" magazine....

...has a good article on drying corn (and fruits and veggies) this month (July/August).
After drying, the corn corn can be ground into cornmeal for cornbread.
Sounds good, and we are going to try it.

We are looking for an EZ way to grow and harvest a grain crop, but everything looks impractical at this point.

BTW: This is a wonderful magazine.
http://www.countrysidemag.com/

[RedLetterRev]

7. Have you thought about

planting amaranth? Just a thought. It takes an awfully lot of wheat to make enough grain to be worth grinding for flour. Amaranth is a pretty plant and can be grown for greens or for the seeds which can be ground into a flour. It's an ayurvedic food, grows pretty easily, doesn't seem to be terribly fussy. You can plant it sort of thick and it doesn't seem to mind. I've got three 80' rows of blackberry plants with a fairly wide aisle between the top two rows. I tilled one long stripe with the tiller and plan to sow it this weekend. I had sown a load of four o'clocks in that space, hoping they'd help with the Japanese beetle population, but they didn't come up. Yeah, I know it's really late, but in NC we've got a nice, really long growing season, so there's still plenty of time. No sense in wasting the tillage...

[bhikkhu]

8. some things about Amaranth - AKA "we have money left over for fish"

While Amaranth is no longer a staple food, it is still grown and sold as a health food. Amaranth species are also cultivated and consumed as a leaf vegetable in many parts of the world.

* In Indonesia and Malaysia, leaf amaranth is called bayam, while in the Philippines it is known as kulitis.
* In India the leaf is added in preparation of a popular dal called thotakura pappu.
* In China, the leaves and stems are used as a stir-fry vegetable.
* In Congo, it is known as lenga lenga or biteku teku. The leaves are also used in a Caribbean soup called callaloo.
* In East Africa amaranth leaf is known as mchicha – “a vegetable for all”.
* In Nigeria, it is known as efo tete or arowo jeja – “We have money left over for fish”. It is a very common vegetable, and it goes with all Nigerian carbohydrate dishes.


http://www.copperwiki.org/index.php/Amaranth

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yield is about half that of wheat per area sown, but it seems to be a more versatile plant. I had read about it here and there before, but hadn't seriously considered growing it. Perhaps I will, next year.

[RedLetterRev]

9. Ah!

Thanks for the added info. Apparently, it has caught on around here. I bought my seed at the local Amish grocery. Personally, I'm a greens kind of guy (mustards, collards, creecies (sp?)) and the idea of having more fresh greens really appealed to me. I'm building a wedding garden at one end of the property and thought to sow some as contrast color (the coat-of-many-colors or Jacob's coat variety is especially showy, but I don't know what food value that cultivar has). I've got about 2 acres total of yard space (7 acres of woods I'm loathe to cut into) to work with, so I'm looking for things that will both look nice, aren't hybrids, and might have food value all at once.

Not so easy a chore. In town, my veggie garden was 6 15' rows done above-ground, constructed as a low-resource, low-impact, high-yield project. That worked out pretty well for a tiny, in-town project. (I'll be glad to share my specs and experiences if there's interest for a thread.) Out here in the boonies, my 2 acres of yard is broken up by the house and the zones around it. That still left me with a 65'x65' square in the back yard to put my traditional veggies (corn, okra, potatoes, several kinds of beans). Since we've got deer, I'm constructing a 10' fence around that. I've got several kiwi vines to climb up one side, hops to cover the back side (close to the woods where the little marauders come up from) and haven't finished the other two sides yet. I've got 4 80' rows of blackberries (Doyle and Triple Crown cultivars, no thorns!) which will produce 40-60 gallons of berries per plant starting next year or the year after. (I should have about 100 gallons total this year... a mere drop in the bucket to what's coming.) Oh, yeah, and the raspberries, which are 6 lone clumps right now, but will be a 50' hedge when they spread out. Then there's the mini-orchard with a few peach and cherry trees. I'm hoping to get some heirloom cherry saplings by the end of summer, a variety that a local family has passed down since Rev War times. That really kinda fills up the space, all told. Then there's the "for pretty" plants around the wedding garden (which I hope to have done for next spring).

As for watering, I'm very fortunate to have an artesian spring that starts at the bottom of the hill and flows into the creek. I have some rubble left over from foundation repair and at the end of summer I'll use that to make a weir. I've ordered a solar-powered pump and panels with enough "oomph" to lift to the top of the hill (a 60' rise over ~350') to a 1550g storage tank. The pump only supplies about 2-3gpm, but with three sunny days, I can about fill the tank, certainly enough to supply all I need. It doesn't have to pump at night, and that's good with me. Any water I don't catch will just spill over the weir and go into the creek as it always did. The spring-bed is about 3' deep and 50' long, so it can build up overnight and I'll use what I need during daylight. Win-win-win.

The only problem is I'm going to have to wait until frost to start that project cuz I'll have to start with some serious bush-hogging. I won't even go into the ticks and chiggers ugh! (The woods are in awful shape from a clear-cutting about 20 years ago :argh: I've planted a couple of nodes of Moso (Japanese timber) bamboo to help take it back from the poison ivy, honeysuckle and other vile stuff out there. Lucky for me, there's a bamboo flooring plant opening up about 25 miles from me who will probably like to have a local supplier of timber. The nice thing about giant bamboo is that it is entirely self-renewing. My property is bounded by creeks, so there's little chance of it escaping (it doesn't like wet feet).

I've been keeping a blog on the projects, but it's a bit behind (I've been Mr Yard Dude for the last year, taking the yard back from the wild mess it was when I bought the place). Guess I'd best catch it up. I'll take some pics this weekend and if anyone is interested, I'll be happy to post a linkie.