"Give us this day our daily bread . . ."

Wheat is one of the oldest cultivars on Earth and one of the major turning points in moving man from nomad to farmer. Wheat is generally hardy, easy to grow, has a shelf life of decades, and is highly productive.

Planting

Growing wheat is not a difficult proposition. There are winter wheats and summer wheats (winter wheat is sown in late fall, summer wheat is sown in the spring). Wheat also comes in hard and soft varieties. A hard spring wheat is a good kind to start with, as it plants with the rest of your garden.

Always start small and try different types to see what works best for you and your area.

Wheat seed is easily gotten, as the whole wheat that people buy to grind for flour IS wheat seed. It does sprout and most types sold to the public whole grain will grow true (heirloom).

To grow wheat, you want rich friable soil (not sandy or clay). Cover an area with plastic or grassclippings to smother weeds for a few weeks before the last frost. Once you are a good week or two past frost, remove the covering, till and turn the soil (you can turn in a grassclippling cover), and spread the seed. Work the seed into the soil an inch or two to protect the seed from birds and water. Before long your bed will look like a chia pet.

Once wheat is established, it will smother out competing weeds. If your wheat does not get enough of a head start, do not pull out the weeds - this will damage the wheat, creating holes that will grow more weeds. Rather, carefully cut the weeds near the ground and hope the wheat will outgrow it. Growing wheat in large patches rather than strips will help keep the weeds down.

Harvesting

Once the wheat starts to turn golden and the heads are heavy, pull out a few grains. If they are chewy, they are not done. If they are firm and crisp, they are. There are plenty of old school tools to make harvesting easier, but you can gather it by the handful and cut the stems with a sharp kitchen knife.

Once you have a handful (a "shock"), tie it with twine (or a few extra straws of wheat) and stand it up to dry. You can hang it to dry if you do not have much.

Once it is dry, put the shock into a clean trashcan and beat the living hell out of it against the sides. The dry grains will fall into the can. The dry straw left over is not useful as animal feed, but straw can be used as bedding and garden dressing (look at the animal husbandry and gardening links for all the many uses of straw).

On a day with a decent wind, toss the grains up in the air and the chaff and bits of straw will blow away. You can also pick out the impurities in your grain yourself later on when you go to grind it.

Using Wheat

Once you have the dried grains, they can be ground into flour and used like any whole wheat flour. You can grind them by hand (a lot of work) or use a grinder. Since ground flour is best fresh, a hand grinder works as well pre-apoc as it will post-apoc - grinding flour a few cups at a time is not exhausting and most hand grinders are easier to clean.

Splitting or crushing the grains for white flour or bran is typically more work that it is worth.

Conclusion

Survivalist have always stockpilied wheat grain for its long shelf life and the joy of a warm loaf of bread during the apocalypse. Once you have a few sacks set aside, if you have the space to grow it, you can multiply your holdings for free year after year.

Three or four handfuls will seed a begginner's 10' X 10' patch and will usually return about 2.5 gallons of grain (8-10lbs). For a large patch you can figure around 1500-2000lbs per acre (30-35 bushels) and twice that with fertilizer and irrigation.