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Post by steev on Jun 11, 2011 8:34:00 GMT -5
Counting seeds doesn't surprise me at all. When I'm first multiplying seed, I'm out searching the plants every possible opportunity to see what's coming, looking forward to when I'll have enough to pour from one hand to the other.
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Jun 11, 2011 10:50:18 GMT -5
Say, do you know if that wheat can be classified as hard or soft? What are you going to do with it after harvest? They are definitely hard. Technically, I don't even know that they are wheat... I don't know enough botany to be able to distinguish between wheat, or rye, or spelt, or triticale, or wheat-like grasses, or whatever... But I know enough botany to say that they are not barley, or oats (There was also feral barley and oats growing where I collected this seed, but I am not interested in grains that have to be dehulled by machine before being palatable to humans.) I intend to sell one bag of seed at the farmer's market. That will fulfill a portion of my "Food Security Challenge". I intend to maintain an open pollinated genetically diverse land-race of wheat-like grain that is well adapted to my soil, pests, and climate; and that is easy to harvest and thresh using hand held tools. That will fulfill another portion of my "Food Security Challenge". I intend to share seed with others. That will fulfill my desire to be respected by those around me. (At least by those who appreciate the value of land-races.) And finally, since it sucks being a farmer that buys dinner from Walmart on the way home from working the fields, I intend to make a loaf of bread!
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Post by mnjrutherford on Jun 12, 2011 7:38:42 GMT -5
Don't suppose you would be willing to sell me the bag of seed? I'll hold some back for sowing and grind the rest for bread and maybe some pasta.
I can also send you some good starter if you are interested in having a new pet. I'm learning some more interesting things about bread and starters. I haven't used purchased yeast in a while now.
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Post by bunkie on Jun 12, 2011 10:18:04 GMT -5
i'd be interested in some of that seed to grow too joseph, to mingle with my perennial wheat. i think your idea of a wheat landrace sounds great! the pics of your wheat starting out looks just like my perennial does. they start in a clump and then get tall...they are amazing to watch grow. i posted some of my pics here... alanbishop.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=market&action=display&thread=1287&page=1i hope you post more pics as it grows. this year i think i wil plant the perennial weat from tim peters in order to so some selection, if it survive my drougt summer and resprouts...its a winner and i wil continue to sow and replant it in larger ammount and also share seeds, i've gived away the perennial rice seeds to a friends that wil tryal it ! cortona, if you ever get ahold of some of that perennial rice, i'd like to trade for some seed. i've never heard of it being perennial before. A couple years ago I accessed a large variety of Iraqi wheats. The very stuff human civilation was founded upon, grown in the fertile crescent for a few thousand years before we decided to rape Iraq (and the Abu Ghrab seed bank) and burn the seed. I picked most of it up through Gatersleben and some through friends stationed in Iraq (not that I'd get lucky enough to have a friend in Afganistan willing to send some Kush seed, not for smoking, I don't do that anymore, just wish they would make it legal so I could do some crosses). I grew it last year and while it didn't thrive in Indiana it gave foundation seed. This year it didn't make it into the ground, but next year it will be increased for distribution. I bulked the seeds together and didn't isolate "varities" as in the fertile crescent whet is almost always grown as a landrace or admixture of types, the diversity was astonishing, even in a small patch. Those were spring sown/summer varieties. This fall (well, preparing to plant this week) I'll be putting the winter Iraq landrace in the ground. Same story, it will once again be increased and offered to the public. Summer = Enlil, Winter= Innana While wheat doesn't necesarily interest me the way corn does, because of my inability to harvest and process enough of it for any meaningful use, in time I hope to coerce myself into studying it a bit more and learning to use/process it in more efficient manners. Eventually I would like to repatriate some of this seed to farmers in Iraq. alan, don't forget me when you have seed!
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Jul 28, 2011 0:09:18 GMT -5
I picked half of my feral wheat-like grain patch today. I ended up dividing it into two landraces: The first to dry down grew about 5 to 6 feet tall, and contained heads that looked like this: Notice there is a horse in the photos for scale. The seed heads on one of the plants had disintegrated, and a few of the heads were loosing seeds from falling out due to drooping, so I harvested the tall plants. They were quite dry. I estimate that I will pick the other half of the crop in a week. The part of the crop that I didn't harvest, because it was not dried down as much as I would have liked grew about 3 feet tall and looked like this: The seeds were still very moist and doughy inside. Edit... After harvesting and threshing, I decided that the tall plants were rye, and the shorter plants are red wheat.
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Post by 12540dumont on Jul 28, 2011 0:16:08 GMT -5
Joseph, you are amazing.
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Post by blueadzuki on May 31, 2012 16:42:46 GMT -5
Feral Wheat update
There is a LOT of feral wheat around this year falling into roughly two groups
1. There is some sort of feral wheat sprinkled all along the edge of one of the highways for a length of about 1/2 a mile. I'd say it all came out of one planting (the straw from some road work?) as it all lookes (as far as I can tell looking out of the passenger side of a car) like it of the same type (medium tall, longish ears very short awns (may in fact be awnless)
2. There is also a single small patch (probably one plant with a lot of tillers) at the entrace to my neighborhood. That one is more like an "old wheat" it is slimmer and fully bearded (maybe a descendent of a seed from the Restoration 1/4 or so down the road). Assuming it stays there to maturity, that one I can probably collect, as it is in walking distance.
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Post by blueadzuki on Jun 19, 2012 11:43:58 GMT -5
Update to the update I finally collected one of the feral wheat patches (the smaller one) yesterday If I'd had my druthers I'd have given it a bit more time (you can see it still is quite green) In fact, had it show up on my own property, I'd probably have gone out with scissors and harvested each ear individually as it came to peak. But is wasn't I couldn't and it appeared that waiti9ng any longer was going to risk losing it all as 1. that area would have been mowed or weeded very soon anyway and 2. the first grains were about to fall out (it may be hard to see in the picture, but the grains on this one are so big they are actually pushing the glumes apart.) To My surpise, I'm fairly sure this is actually bread wheat (most of the wheat grown around here is hard wheat) since the spikelets go the whole way round (as opposed to the "boxy" shape most of the wheat strains around here still have) And the grains (that's something else I found out when I was collecting it, there are two plants, not one) probably DIDN'T come from the Colonial Restoration (which I though was a possibility, given its only maybe a quarter of a mile, directly down the highway. I know from when I volunteered there they rarely grow wheat (most years, they do winter rye, and get the wheat and corn for the grist mill brought in. And when they do grow wheat it's a hard winter red that doesn't look like this. This one is red (I can see that through the glumes) but thiers is, again "boxy". As a bonus, as soon as I happen to be going by when it isn't rush hour, I will be able to,pull into the highway's breakdown lane, take a sample of the other one.
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jim
grub
Posts: 75
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Post by jim on Jul 8, 2012 19:37:25 GMT -5
Pro-TeKt is a supplement used to provide silicon in systems where silicon is limiting...hydroponics and peat based soilless mixes, for example. I have used it on potted plants-orchids- and I did notice a difference, but it did throw off the pH of my water. Jim
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Post by blueadzuki on Jun 13, 2013 15:19:39 GMT -5
Annual Feral Wheat Update 2013
1. The Giant Highway Patch is still there, but it shrunk a lot. Last year, as I said the patch was running basically along the whole highway between two exits. However most of that is gone, and the wheat is now restricated to one little spot; near where the road curves a bit and forms a sort of "pocket" meadow. The good news is that off all the places the wheat was that's probably the best place for it to be now, as it is likey the easiest to get to to collect some. That particular highway doesn't really have much of a breakdown lane (and a guardrail that is pretty close to the edge of the road), so trying to pull off and park there is a logistical nightmare (or why I wasn't able to get any last year). However, about 50 feet or so up the road from where the patch is now, there is one of those little pull off picnic spots. My plan is, when the wheat is ripe I'll simply pick a safe day, one where the highway patrol isn't using that bank as a place for a speed trap (I don't think havesting feral wheat from the side of the road is illegal, but would prefer not to have police literally there anyway) park there, walk to the patch, take my wheat and walk back. And since this is second year, at least I know it's well adapted (remember my comments way back at the beginning about first versus second year growth)
2. I also saw a fair amount of feral today along the road running from Mt. Kisco to Chappaqua. Most of it was "singles" (single wheat plants on thier own). I don't think I'll be able to take any of it, though as most of that bit of road is the edges of private property. It's one thing to park by the side of a public highway and risk having to try and explain myself to a highway patrol officer, it's another to park by the edge of someone backyard and risk trying to explain to a worried homeowner, especially on a road where most of the homeowners are very rich, very litigious people with serios security in place (the Clintons live in one of the houses in that area. Pity since some of that was really nice looking stuff, like a nice patch of longhead near one gated community, and some stuff that impressed me with how tall it was (I don't normally see wheat, especially feral wheat) with 5 feet of stem.
3. There is also a little feral wheat I saw in some of the places I've been in Manhattan I'm keeping an eye on.
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Post by steev on Jun 13, 2013 17:31:45 GMT -5
If Clinton lives there, are you sure that's not wild oats?
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Post by blueadzuki on Jun 13, 2013 18:24:15 GMT -5
Oh, now you just getting "fatuous"
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Post by steev on Jun 13, 2013 18:47:49 GMT -5
No, just engaging in idle feculation, BSing, as it were.
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Post by blueadzuki on Jun 13, 2013 21:01:11 GMT -5
That was supposed to be a pun; the scientific name of the common wild oat is Avena fatua. Now that I think of it, if I was trying to set up a feral grain patch on purpose , I migh actually choose fatua over sativa. It's vigrous to the point of becoming a noxios weed (how many other wild grain ancestors can say that. I've never heard of Eurasian farmers complaining thier fields are being infested with wild eikorn and emmer.) It perfectly edible (less productive per unit than domestic oat of course, but you can eat them) and thier built in seed drill makes it essentially self planting.
Actually that does bring up an interesting point. Given how common it is, you'd think there'd be almost as many feral oats along the sides of the roads as wheat. There certainly can germinate without intervention if dropped on the ground (in fact, they're probably better at it than wheat is) and I imagine road crews aren't species specific when picking up straw. But while I've certainly seen oat plants sprinkled here and there (especially anywhere animals are kept, I don't think there is a farmyar I have seen that didn't have the odd clump of oats in a culvert somewhere.) they aren't nearly as common as wheat (of course since most of the ones I see are by car, there may be the fact that oats are a lot less differentiable from normal wild grasses from a distance. Haven't seen a lot of feral barley either (though a lot less of that is grown around here (plus at a distance I probably couldn't tell barley from wheat at a casual glance, or for that matter, from rye) I wonder if the areas around the Carolinas and other Southern spots have feral rice?
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Jun 13, 2013 21:56:40 GMT -5
Actually that does bring up an interesting point. Given how common it is, you'd think there'd be almost as many feral oats along the sides of the roads as wheat. When I collected feral grains a few years ago. I found lots and lots of feral rye, a little bit of feral hexaploid wheat, a very little bit of barley, a very little bit of millet, no sorghum, and almost no oats. Rye and millet are not currently grown in this area. The only place I saw oats growing was as a weed in fields where it had been planted the previous growing season. The barley patches looked like spills from trucks, mostly immediately adjacent to access roads to fields. None of them have continued to self propagate. There were the patches of grains around the suburbs from straw being laid down, but they didn't fit into my collection criteria of growing feral in non-irrigated areas. Barley and oats are not very winter hardy around here, so they tend to die out quickly. Rye is extremely winter hardy. It seems like it grows under the snow. I also attribute the success of the feral rye to it's height. At 4 to 6 feet tall, it easily outgrows any other grass or forb in its preferred ecosystem. The wheat I collected maxes out at around 2.5 feet in height, so it's easily outgrown by competing plants.
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