Oat
IT WAS an accidental crop, oats. We had cleared the garden bed of the residue of the vegetables that had grown there and forked it to open the soil to water and nutrients. Add some dynamic lifter and blood and bone fertiliser and we were ready to go. All that needed doing now was to spread straw mulch.
A visit to the local nursery saw us loading bales of oat store into the van. Spread over the garden bed, we left it for a time before we intended to plant into it.
But, what’s this? The green straplike leaves of some plant were growing out of the mulch. A lot of it. What could it be? Looks like there’s seeds in the mulch, said Fiona. So we are going to get a crop of oats, are we, I asked?
Fiona wanted to pull out the mysterious new growth but I convinced her to leave it so we could see what it was. Doing that wasn’t easy.
We watched it grow taller and taller as we moved into the warm season. Then it started to set seed. Being unfamiliar with grain growing I took a picture and posted it online. Yes, maybe oats came some responses. No, it’s wheat came others.
And so the mystery crop grew and as we moved into summer it started to dry. And, yes, it was wheat. We harvested the grain and Fiona looked online about how to thresh it to recover the seed.
That is as far as it has gone at the moment. The stalks with their grain heads I bundled into a tarp and now they wait under the house for our next step.
We’re leaving the roots of the wheat in the garden where they will breakdown into organic matter. Fiona says we might take the cultivator over the bed to break up the roots and loosen the soil, then plant vegetables.
The question we are yet to face is what to do with oat. We don’t have a grain mill so we can’t turn it into flour. Maybe we will give it to our neighbour’s chooks.
Well, it was a bit of an experiment, this wheat growing. Would I plant wheat or any similar grain in our home garden? Other than corn, I don’t think so. It takes away space from the vegetables, and vegetables are what we eat.
I come from the school of thinking that says let’s stand back and see what happens. Fiona does not. She’s a detail and planning sort of person. Together we achieve a rough balance in what we do, an example of the harmony of opposites, perhaps. But in the case of the spontaneous wheat crop my ‘let’s see what comes up’ approach prevailed, but Fiona’s more-considered approach is the one that will see any future grain crops that grow from the mulch removed immediately.
