Bountifulness

Hummus might not be what most people want for Sunday dinner, but I didn't have enough energy after a full day moving greenhouses, etc. to make falafel, my orginal plan (I'm haven't got a good recipe or techinque, but I keep trying). But to go along with it I made a salad, a kind of spring-variant greek salad, and it was something special about going out and harvesting for this.

There's fresh garlic (chinese pink, a very early garlic) for the hummus, but most of the rest of that was purchased. I did soak the chickpeas and cook them in the sun oven.

For the salad, I picked snap peas, broccoli, a few carrots, a walla walla onion and some romaine type lettuce. It was a special pleasure to walk around the garden and put this and that into the harvest bucket! After so long when it seems like more goes in than comes out... although we did just eat the last of last year's potatoes for lunch today, so I guess I shouldn't complain. For the salad, the harder vegetables got steamed a bit, and then some cider vinger and olive oil. We stuffed all in homemade pitas, and the flavors really were wonderful.

There's bounty all year in the garden or from the garden, if you plan ahead and accept the differences that the seasons bring. There's a special sense of bountifulness in fall, when the vegetables are root cellared, or dried, frozen, canned; or waiting patiently in the garden for harvest. And even in early spring, the bounty of salad greens and delectable green shoots and leaves. But the bounty of summer, the abunance of plants growing passionately with the all the different varieties of textures and flavors and shapes, well, it's hard to beat. For me as well, this is a time where the abundance does not come with directly-related pressure. We eat peas, broccoli, and sweet onions only fresh, lettuce we don't save, and carrots and garlic can wait much longer before being dealt with - there's no looming chore of putting-by, just picking and eating.

Not that I'm not hugely busy - trying to save the squash and beans from the quintuple threat of striped cucumber beetles, earwigs, slugs, spotted cucumber beetles and squash bugs. But more on that later.

Wheat

I usually grow a little plot of wheat. You can get 10# of wheat berries from a 5x20 plot, it's not enough to live on, but that is a few loaves of bread, and it's quite fulfilling. I also try different kinds of wheat (winter wheat, spring wheat, kamut, stone age, etc.) and different ways of growing it (plug trays, broadcast).

The kinds I grow are fairly easy to tresh and winnow, although it's hard to get all the bits of stem out of the grain. I suppose it adds fiber... We use an electric grain mill to make flour and from that bake bread. It's perfectly nice bread, perhaps a bit dark and heavy, even using 100% home grown wheat. But we like dark interesting breads.


Tall, non-awned wheat

I believe it is SS 791 from Bountiful Gardens. This from saved seed that I grew out from 2005-2006 (I think). It germinated slower than the other.



And this is the shorter, awned wheat. This, I believe, Hard Red Winter from Bountiful Gardens. (I could have these backwards).
You can see a little of the tall wheat to the left.

The last time I grew these varities, I don't remember a differnence in the plots, but the non-awned was a little easier to thresh, the grains were a little larger, but the yield was a little less than the awned.

This year, the difference is dramatic. Both were planted in the same bed, same number of plants (transplanted from 244-plug trays), at the same time with the same spacing, and treated the same (i.e. ignored). The awned wheat is been yellow and unhappy, while the non-awned grows tall and green. I counted tillers (stalks with seed heads) on a particularly healthy looking plant of each; the non-awned one had about 20 tillers, while the anwed one had almost 80! If I'd heavily fertilized the awned wheat, it could have really gone to town with production.

I think this is the heart of the "green revolution", both the good and the bad. Yes, the right variety when treated optimally will give you a much better yield. But equally, if you can't give it all the fertilizer it craves and demands, perhaps the old traditional varieties have a use. It's too soon to see how they will yield.

And I would never have though two types of winter wheat would be so different. I wonder if they taste different?