How to Grow Wheat (From Seed to Harvest) 🌾

In this video we're going to take this bare patch of dirt behind me and we are going to try and grow our own bread. Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening where it's my goal to help you grow a greener thumb. And in my quest to grow everything that a human can grow, we've grown shower sponges, we've grown a hundred pounds of potatoes, we've grown all sorts of weird things. We are going to try to grow our own bread, but this is the final product. We need the precursor, which of course is wheat. So in this video, that's exactly what we're going to do. Cultivate that Like button and I will bless you with bountiful bread baskets full of delicious, delicious bread. Like this sourdough that my garden manager Jacques actually baked. So let's give this a taste test real quick. It just tastes like success. If the bread that we grow tastes anywhere near this good, I'm going to be very pleased. All right, enough of that. Let's get into the video. The first thing to talk about is the fact that you can even grow wheat and what type of wheat should you buy? Because I know a lot of us haven't grown wheat before. It's kind of an unusual crop to think about. You probably just go to the store and buy some flour and you're good to go. So what I have here is spring wheat. You have two major types of wheat. You have your spring wheat, then you have your winter wheat. As the name would imply, spring, planted in spring, harvested in the fall. Winter wheat, which is a little bit trickier, is planted in the fall and then harvested in the spring or the summer, depending on where you live. So it's spring right now. I'm growing spring wheat. This is Bolles OG, B-O-L-L-E-S-O-G out of Johnny's seeds. So that's what I've got. I encourage you very, very highly to go Google around for your particular zone because there's different types of wheat and you really should customize it to your zone. So don't just grow the one I'm growing just because you saw it here. But we need to now talk about the site prep. So here we are in the mini wheat patch in the backyard garden here. And what I've done is I've positioned this to the north of everything else that I'm trying to grow. Many of you know, I've got some garlic, some potatoes, just some things that I don't want blocked. Remember wheat's going to get pretty tall. And so by placing it on the north side, that means that that south sun is going to come in here. We'll throw a shadow this way where it's really not going to block too much. So that's the first thing on site prep. I'm sitting in maybe about a four by eight foot bed. It's an in-ground bed, nothing fancy. This is just the native soil. We didn't even build it up at all. Just cleared this area out with a scuffle hoe, made sure that there's no weeds. What's nice about wheat is it will out-compete almost all weeds once it's established. And there's actually a funny little slogan where you don't need a lot of fertilizer. You don't really need to moisten the soil too much. The phrase is something like planted in mud and your crops are dud, planted in dust and your grain silo will bust. Some old farmer slogan like that. And so, you know what? I'm not going to mess around with the old farmers. I will heed their wisdom and let's go ahead and get to preparing the soil just by grabbing a bow rake. And I want to level it out just a little bit and scuffle it up so that that wheat seed has something to stick into. So again, all I'm doing here is just making sure, I cleared this of weeds, but it's not quite level. So I'm going to level it out just a little bit with the bow rake. And instead of having this nice smooth flat surface, I'm actually going to scuff it up a little bit so that we get nice adhesion of the seed. It seems like that's important for the germination of the wheat seed is to actually have it connect with the soil. And we'll do something closer towards the end of the video to really make sure that happens. I got to say these bow rakes make leveling and clearing stuff just so simple. One of my absolute favorite tools in the garden. Another thing that you can do with the bow rake when you're preparing for the wheat is to just take the tines and just slam them down a little bit. So when we broadcast the seed, there's a little bit of a pocket for it to sit into. It's really that simple for the site prep. So let's now talk about the broadcasting of these spring wheat seeds. But first let's look at them close up. In my hand here we have the magical wheat seed. A lot of us have seen this before, but we've probably seen it ground up. This is about as many as you'd want to broadcast per square foot. It seems like about 40 is the recommendation, but I'm going to be a little bit more liberal and we'll just use up all our seed. I feel like I'm feeding the birds here, but I will be feeding myself with some Epic bread pretty soon, which I'm just so excited about. So here we go. Probably have about a pound here, which is quite a bit for this little patch. But I'm just going to sprinkle. And what we want to do next is, like I said, we want to make sure that these adhere really nicely to the soil. And I'm kind of a little bit afraid of birds or something like that coming through. And so what I'll do is I will add a little bit of this mushroom compost on top. So I got three cubic feet of it. It's from Osmoma Organic who are longtime partners of the Epic Gardening Channel and are sponsors of this video. So we'll cover with a little bit of that mushroom compost. And then the final step will be to really make sure that we get good germ. So you'll see that in just a second. So this is the general process. You're just going to kind of sprinkle like this, broadcast it, and move on. Now this mushroom compost, it's not really because it needs the extra fertility. It can do well in unimproved soil. It's just sort of a nice little mulch layer to keep the moisture in because they do need water at the beginning of their life to germinate. But after that, you really don't have to water them too much. This is going to be the only time we give them a really solid water is this germination phase. So I'm going to hit them with this bad boy. We'll give them a nice soak and then we'll do our final step. Our final step is to go on over to the cardboard graveyard. We're going to get just a piece of cardboard so that we can walk on this and really depress all of that grain onto the surface of the soil. We're just going to kind of walk around, do a little shimmy here. Much like we did, or at least Charles did in the no-dig bed video that we did a long time ago here on the channel. You're just trying to get good soil connection to these grains so that we get good germination, the roots actually go in the direction we want them to go. And we'll be off to the races growing our bread here. Well, step one of wheat growing is done. We're going to wait a couple of days, see how germination goes. So I'll see you here in just a little bit. It's been about 10 or 14 days since we sowed our wheat, since we started the journey of growing our own bread. And as you can see, it basically just looks like I have a lawn here. It's funny. Someone messaged me and said, Oh, wheatgrass is just wheat that's younger. And that is true. That's what you're looking at right here. I could cut all this up and juice it right now if I wanted to, but I'm not going to do that because I want an epic loaf of bread. And so what I'm doing now, as far as care goes, is I'm just hitting it with water every so often. It's been a little hot here, but apparently as the wheat establishes itself, number one, it'll out-compete weeds, which is great. And number two, it doesn't really need much in the way of water. As far as my research shows, it's pretty drought tolerant, which in San Diego, that's great. I don't need to water this as much as I might need to water some other stuff here in the garden. So right now I think we're just sitting here waiting for it to grow. So it's a waiting game. I'll be back to you when there's something to report. We're back over here in the wheat patch. A lot has actually happened and simultaneously not much has happened at all. I haven't done much to this patch. I think that's why it grows in relatively unimproved soil with not much fertility. Kind of like a weed almost. But in fact, this is wheat. So some things that I noticed over the course of this growing phase, first of all, we actually do have some seed heads starting to develop. They're not ready to harvest. I'll show you those in a second. But earlier on I had said, don't really need to do much to the soil. I think I could have broken this soil up just a little bit. I did put some compost on the top, but we ran into some issues. There's some dead patches here. And I think it was mostly just because the initial roots after germination really couldn't get into the subsoil. So that was a potential problem. I might loosen that soil up a little bit if I was you. And I also was trying to conserve on watering, not water it too, too much. And again, we ran into a little bit of a drying out issue. I soaked this patch not four or five days ago and the wheat has really responded to that nice, beautiful green. So let's just get a little closeup of what's going on at this phase of growth. So here's an area that did germinate. You could see it actually sprouted, but it didn't really thrive. And this was just a high patch in the dirt, didn't get a lot of water and just absolutely fried. Here, however, we actually have some seed heads. I don't think they're quite at the point that we want to be harvesting them. Again, like I said, you want to wait until the stalk starts to slightly go brown, but it is really encouraging. It seems like on this outside edge, Ooh, that's satisfying to do. On the outside edge, you have a lot of the wheat. In the middle, it's a little bit slower, but nevertheless it's still coming up. So like I said, I didn't do too much in the way of care. I didn't fertilize this at all. I kept it relatively well watered. What I found worked really well for me was a deep soak and then not a whole lot. And then a deep soak and not a whole lot, kind of like you might water a tomato. That's what worked for me. It's still coming up. We'll see you back in a little bit when it's ready to actually harvest and go through that whole process of actually turning this into flour. It's been a few more weeks. The wheat is looking much more yellow, which is exactly why we need to talk about harvesting it now. But there are a decent amount of things you need to know about the timing of harvesting wheat. So let's take a look close up and I'll show you what to look for. Right here we have the seed head of wheat. And so let's take a look really quickly. What we're looking for is the quality of the berry itself. So let's grab this one right here. So there we go. This is what we're dealing with. And you have two stages. You have the soft dough stage and the hard dough stage. We're trying to get it at the hard dough stage. So let's go ahead and give this a squeeze. If I squeeze this, you can kind of see that milky sort of creamy paste that comes out. This is closer towards the hard dough. If it was soft dough, it would just sort of squirt out like a liquid. But this sort of texture is kind of what we're looking for. Maybe even a little bit more past that. So just to reiterate, you've got the formation of the seed head. Then you have pollination. The seeds actually start to get formed. Then you have the soft dough stage where the stalks should still look pretty green. Then as they start to yellow, and they might even get a little bit floppy, you're going to move into the hard dough stage. That is really just the moisture content. It's anywhere from 25 to 35% for hard dough. If you're a home grower like myself, that's totally fine. You can harvest it at this stage, which is what we're about to do. And I've got a funny tool to do it with. Commercial growers, just for the curiosity, we'll wait until it gets below 16%. At that point, that berry that we just sort of squeezed, what you should see it do is actually crack. So we'd squeeze, nothing would kind of pop out. It would actually crack under the pressure. But we need to harvest, and I have the perfect tool for it. The handsickle. So this handsickle has become my favorite tool in the garden for a lot of different reasons. I could prune this off right now, for example. I won't. I still want those tomatoes. But for harvesting wheat, you can do it like this. You come down and actually chop off about, I don't know, three or four inches above the surface of the soil and then bundle it up, which is the way I'm going to do it. But as a home grower, you could just let it be and just top the seed heads off when it's fully dry. Some people say that the quality of the wheat isn't as good if you do it that way. Although it is a lot easier to separate it from the straw. But I want to have some fun with the handsickle. So I'm going to come down and mow this crop down with the sickle. The nice thing about this one is it has serrated edges. So last time I just tried to chop it like that. I think this time I'm going to grab a handful of it and just come through and saw it off like that, which works really, really well. Here are the fruits of my labor so far. We have these little bundles of wheat that I've created, maybe six inches or so. Nothing too crazy. What I'm going to do now is let these sun dry for three weeks. I'm going to put them over on my seedling table. So I'll see you back here in almost a month. Well, it's been well more than a couple of weeks. I kind of let this project sit on the back burner, but the wheat is drying. I lost a little bit of it in the rain and I have some burlap sacks here cause I'm going to try threshing the wheat. I've never grown wheat before. I certainly haven't tried to process it into my own grain. So I have some burlap sacks here just picked up from a coffee shop near me. Actually a really great way to get free ground cover, go and hit up a coffee shop. They'll give you extra grounds, but they'll also just give you these burlap sacks, which are completely decomposable. So you can throw them in compost, whatever. Lots of uses in the garden. But what we're doing here is just taking our bundles here and I'm going to slide it into the burlap sack, carefully as I can here. And the seed heads basically have to separate from the rest of the stalk as well as you have to get this individual seeds out of the seed head. And so that's, that'd be really tedious to do if you did that by hand. And so I'm just testing kind of an old school technique here where you basically just beat the stalk. So you put it in here and you give it a big whack and hopefully you've captured the seed heads in here as well as the seeds. And then what you'll have to do after this is winnow. But let's get to threshing this wheat. You know, sometimes you just got to beat your wheat guys. You just got to beat your wheat. Let's go. Now we are at the more fun part, which is the winnowing part. So I'm going to use just winnowing by the wind, but I have a little fan here, the Vornado. And we're going to go ahead and just turn this on. The idea here is simple. The wheat berries are heavier than the other stuff. And so all I'm going to do is just pick it up and just slowly let it go. And you want to try to get a wind setting that won't blow the berries out of the wheelbarrow, the wheat, but it will blow everything else. So I'm just going to kind of test here. I can actually hear the wheat hitting the ground and the rest is blowing away. So this is a, this is a great way to do it. It's a little time consuming, like most of this stuff is. But on the plus side, I'm kind of mulching my yard right now at the same time. So I'm just going to keep on going through this process here. So here it is, my friends, the first wheat I've ever grown. Still a little bit of chunks to pull out of there, but for the most part, this is what we have. I've set the exact same container on the food scale, tear it out. Do that right now. See what we have in grams. 256 grams of wheat. I have to say, I'm super excited about this. I have enough to make a half loaf of sourdough. So over on the Epic Homesteading channel, Jacques and I are going to be turning this into the very first fully homegrown sourdough bread that I've ever produced here at the garden in the homestead. So flip on over to that channel if you want to. But I'm going to be doing more with wheat and some more involved gardening projects in 2022. So stay tuned, good luck in the garden and keep on growing.