Species Tulips - 'The First'

 

 

Ah the wheat, waiving in the, waiving in the... MANUEL!!!

When I told people that I wanted to grow some wheat a lot of them said, what? For a variety of sensible reasons, wheat is not really grown domestically. It's got a poor square meter to loaf ratio, you've got to de-hull it and thrash it and mill it etc, and it's also of no real value as a green manure. On top of, or perhaps because of all this it's quite difficult to buy. You won't find it in the seed section at Bunnings or even on the funkier new age organic seed websites. I didn't  much feel like driving to the Mallee to buy a 20kg sack of grain and was about to give up when I found a website selling 1kg bags of wheat seeds for wheat grass juice. Even more than that, if you were a high powered business executive you could order your wheat pre-germinated and delivered in ready turf format. So for $10 I acquired my grain and it was sown. i wanted to grow wheat because a lot of my recent reading has been about the history of agriculture and all its recent nasty developments. I wanted to grow something that we eat (most of us) everyday but we never see. Possible sequels include sugar cane, cotton, soy beans and canola, climate permitting of course. It's been a bit of a let down I must say. The wheat certainly hasn't reached elephants eyeball height and waiving in the wind has only resulted in it getting mashed into the ground. I am looking forward to watching it change colour as it dies off and then deciding whether to make flour with it or feed it to the lawn mower.