On Farming and Foraging

It’s a really good thing I’m not a farmer.

If I were, I’d starve.  

However, I do dabble a bit in gardening, and I love experimenting. So a few years ago, I decided to grow wheat. After all, I bake all my own bread from scratch. Why not try to make a loaf really from scratch–starting with wheat seeds? 

Besides the appeal of trying something new, I had acquired a small packet, about a tablespoon, of einkorn wheat seeds from a gardening program I attended. Einkorn is an ancient grain, thus even more appealing to my sense of food adventure. I couldn’t let such bounty go to waste.

The first step, preparing the ground and planting the seeds was fairly easy. I took out all the weeds and grass shoots from a 6 x10’ patch of ground in our garden, and placed the seeds neatly in 3 rows. The planting instructions said this was winter wheat, so I planted in the fall, and let it rest over winter. I have to admit I wondered if mice, rabbits, or birds would find all the seeds before they were covered in snow, but I needn’t have worried. 

Come spring, tiny green shoots poked up through the dirt in all my rows. Though heartening, this was the beginning of my trouble. Not only did shoots pop up in the rows, but all over the entire patch. At that point, I realized I didn’t actually know what wheat looks like while growing. My knowledge of wheat stemmed mostly from childhood. We had a slender grass-like weed in the backyard in California. This weed developed a lovely, pale green head of seed kernels. My sisters and I called it miniature wheat, because it grew only about 8 “ high. We loved to harvest it and feed it to our dolls and Breyer model horses.( Once, we even tried cooking and eating it ourselves, but that was not worth trying a second time.) In any case, I knew enough to recognize my memories of miniature wheat weren’t an adequate guide. I looked up wheat pictures on the internet, but only found mature wheat. Since I couldn’t tell what was weed and what was wheat among the shoots, I didn’t pull up anything. By the time I actually could tell what was wheat and what wasn’t, the weeds were nearly as tall as the wheat. I worried that I would pull up the wheat along with the weeds. I did the best I could, and the wheat did the best it could under the circumstances.

Eventually, I could see it was getting close to harvest time. The wheat was starting to look rather golden, like the pictures of wheat fields I’d seen. I figured I’d gather it in just a few more days.

Unfortunately, the local birds knew more about wheat than I did. They did their own harvesting before I got there. I did manage to glean a bit of wheat from what the birds left behind. My total harvest: about 2 tablespoons of wheat, perhaps twice the amount that I had sown.  

Obviously this wasn’t enough to make a loaf of bread, but I’m stubborn. I wanted to make at least a little flour. However,  that presented another challenge. I don’t have a threshing floor or a flail to beat the wheat and remove the hulls. I tried crushing it with a mortar and pestle, without success. The seeds just rolled around. Finally, I tried a rolling pin. That worked nicely to crush the hull, but it also crushed the kernel.  I feared winnowing it in a traditional way (tossing the threshed grain into the air and letting the chaff blow away) would lose everything. Instead I sifted the crushed wheat. The result was just over a teaspoon of very fine flour. (No need to grind this wheat- the rolling pin took care of that.)

What to do with one teaspoon of flour? Well, this spring we found only one morel mushroom. There was just enough flour to sprinkle on the mushroom and fry it. My husband and I each had two delicious bites. 

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Maybe I should leave both the farming and the foraging to those who know how to do it.