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, 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 it. 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 is 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, will 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 inground 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 crop's a dud, planted in dust and your
grain silo will bust". Some old farmers' 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 clear 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've 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. 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 probably have 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've got three cubic feet of
it. It's from Espoma 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 is 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 and 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, wheat
grass 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 I don't
really need to do much the soil. I think I could have broken
the 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
water and 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 close-up of
what's going on at this phase of growth. So here's an area that did germinate. You can 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,
then 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 I'll leave it 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, will
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 sort of pop out. It would actually crack
under the pressure. But we need to harvest and I
have the perfect tool for it. Ah, the hand sickle. So this hand sickle 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 pop
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 hand sickle. 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 gonna 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
as 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 the
individual seeds out of the seed head. And so 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
gotta beat your wheat guys. You just gotta 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 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. There it is, my friends, the
first wheat I've ever grown. There's still a little bit of
chunks to pull out of there, but for the most part,
this is what we have. I set the exact same container
on the food scale, tare 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 home-grown sourdough bread that I've ever produced
here at the garden on 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.
