 Good morning, my name is Scott Johnson from the Low Technology Institute, and this is part one of a two-part series on homescale grain production. And today I need to prepare the soil and plant oats and barley. As you can see, we've got a field here that was more or less fallow last year, so we need to at least knock down this weed load and then plant seeds in it. I have tried no till. I haven't had good luck with it. The weeds seem to out-compete the grains I tried to grow, so what I do is basically disc the top. I use a tiller with going in just an inch or two, knocking all of its vegetation down, planting the seeds in, and the seeds then have a good, a good head start and are able to overtop the weeds, so I don't have to use a lot of herbicides or anything like that. I am going to fertilize a little bit in this field using horse manure. If I'm growing other things, I don't. I'll talk about each plant a little bit as we go, but for now, let's get, let's get tilling. Let's talk real briefly about fertilizer. Generally speaking, different types of grain and different types of applications need different amounts of fertilizer. For example, rye grows really well with almost no fertilizer, so I'm growing rye where I grew corn last year without a problem. Wheat, for me, I don't fertilize and I grow on a little bit of a restricted diet, so to speak, because I want really good woody growth for the stems because I use it for thatch. You could fertilize a bit more and maybe get a little more year. I'm not that, I don't care that much about that. Because this was used for wheat last year, I'm actually going to put some horse manure on it, some well-rodded composted horse manure. I've already tilled it once, I'll spread out the horse manure and then I'll till it again and then I'll be ready for seeding. I'm going to do the same for my barley, and I'm going to do the same for my barley. I'm also going to be tilling and putting in field peas, which are soup peas, they're dried pea that you can then cook into soup. Because they are a legume, they fix nitrogen in the soil, so I actually don't have to fertilize them at all. And they're not really a grain, but I'm talking about them because this is the time that I would plant them. This is spring, and you might say spring is too late for wheat, and you're right. Winter wheat is planted in the fall, as is rye. It depends where you live, it's different times that you want to check with your local extension or your local state agencies for that timing. But you definitely want to get it in at least like a month before the first frost, so that it has a good time to start growing. It's frost-hardy, but it's nice to give it a little bit of time. Oats, barley, spring wheat get planted in the spring. And so right now, this will be oats, and so I'm tilling this up in the spring. We're still getting frosts, but that's not a big deal or a hindrance. I could have tilled this up in the fall and applied my fertilizer, that probably would have been preferable, and then maybe I would have given it a like disking to take down any weeds that had started. Now when it comes to seeding, there's a couple different options. You can broadcast seed. Broadcast seeding is the traditional way, and what one can do is take a sack or an apron and have their seed in. And what you do, your seeding rate is driven by your foot steps. So for some seeding rates, you would take a step and throw, and then one and step and throw, one and step and throw. If you want a denser seeding rate, then you could throw, throw, throw, throw on each step, or even every third step, whatever. I don't know what a seeding rate would be. You would have to experiment on your own to figure that out. What I do for laying down my seed is I put down rows. And because I do not have a large mechanical seeder, I have to use a single row seeder, a garden, an earthway seeder. If you have a multiple seeder good for you, I don't. And so what I do is I make eight inch rows. And so I've got a measuring tape down here, and I'm putting down these white poles every eight inches. And then I'm going to run the seeder between them. And when I look down the field, I see the rest of them. All right, see this exact same setup on the other side. And so what's going to happen is I will just take the seeder and run straight down to his partner. And that will give me a nice row. The reason being rows let me weed a little better, because I can differentiate between what is seeded for grain and what is weeds. This is especially important if you're coming off of grass. There was grass here before, and so this is something I'm going to have to fight with. I find that to be my best spacing. You can experiment and find what works best for you. Now, as far as seeding rate goes, I'll talk about that when I get my seeder out here in a minute. Okay, let's talk seeders. I don't have a big seeder, like that goes behind a tractor and has 20, 40, 60 drills. I have this walk-behind garden seeder, which is not designed for grain, so I have to modify it slightly. And this seeder basically what happens is it turns this wheel as you walk. This disc in here turns and pulls up seeds and dumps them out down the chute into this drill that's plowing its way through the soil, as we'll see in the video coming up. But I need to drop about 10 seeds for each foot. One revolution of this wheel is three feet, so basically I need to find one of these discs that's going to pick up and drop 30 wheat kernels for over three feet, over one rotation of this. And so basically what I do to figure this out, and I already know the answer, but I'm going to do this so you can find for whatever grain you're planting and whatever seeding rate you want. So I'm first going to start with the Beatz Okra Chard disc. The slot's right in. Now I'm going to open up my, these are Streaker Hullus Oats. I'm doing Hullus Oats so I don't have to take the hull off, which I don't have equipment for. We'll talk about that in video number two. So here we have our oats. I'm just going to drop a handful in here. Now what I do is I set this over a bowl and once it starts dropping I rotate one full rotation. So okay so there we go. So from the top. So that would represent three feet of walking. Now I take the oats out and I count them approximately 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 78. So that's more than twice as much of what I need. Almost three times what I need. And so one option I would have, and I dump all these seeds out, one option I would have to modify this would be to take tape and go right over every other one of these and you push it down right nice and tight and then tear it off so it's not on the back otherwise it gums up the system. I would cut that clean and that would reduce my seeding rate by half. And I would do that here, here, here and here and then right that would reduce the seeding rate and it would spread them out a little bit. That's one option. Or I can try another one. So this is cabbage, onions, endive, turnips, disc. You can also buy blank discs and then use a heated metal probe to create your own dishes, the little dish cups to catch discs. And maybe someday I will do that since I do do a lot of grain. Make my life a little easier. All right let's see how many this does. It's doing almost none. I can see them dropping in there. It's almost none because this disc is too small so that doesn't work. All right so it's basically trial and error. So let's talk seeding rates. When you look on an agricultural extension or some website about growing wheat, it's going to tell you how much seed they put in the big machines. They sow at something like 80 to 120 pounds per acre. I'm not doing acres. How many pounds right? So I don't use that. What I use is per square foot. How many seeds? Or because I do 8 inch spacing of all of my rows, I just do it by how many seeds per foot. I know for wheat I like about 10 seeds per linear foot on 8 inch spacing and that gives me like 14 seeds per per square foot. And what that does is it's like a quarter or a half of the recommended seeding rate for industrial wheat because what I want is tillering. So usually in industrial wheat you have one seed, you have one plant. Well tillering that one plant senses that has space around it so it sends up multiple plants. So from one seed I get multiple heads. It's more seeds. I get more return on the seeds I invest. And also it works well in my application. I'm not sowing as densely. I'm not fertilizing so it's nice to have that one larger stronger plant rather than a whole bunch of small plants. So right now I'm seeding oats. I could till at a similar rate but I think I'm actually going to overseed because I have a little more oats seed than I do space. So I might actually just use this one. Another modification you can do is take a piece of tape and go right here so the cup is still open but it's reduced. And if I do that that will somewhat reduce the seeding rate and I'll have to test it to figure out what that is. But play with tape and play with your seeding discs and you can usually find something that is close to the seeding rate you want. And if you don't know what your seeding rate should be do that's what I did my first year. I grew some at the industrial seeding rate at the suggested rate. I did some at half that. I did some at a quarter of that. I did some at double that. And what worked best for me was half the industrial rate. So I just did it by experimentation. I highly recommend that approach when we're dealing with small scale because the people who knew how to do small scale wheat growing are either dead or there's actually a lot of people around the world who still grow wheat this way. But they probably broadcast. I don't know how many small scale farmers in less developed parts of the world actually use a seeder. I imagine most of them just use a broadcast method which is a little easier. Now what I'm going to do is line up with my seeder in this first space and walk down to its partner down at the far end. And when I'm walking I focus far away from me. I focus from the far end of the field and that lets me keep a straight line. I'm planting these at a depth of about three quarters of an inch to an inch. If you notice as I walk I drag the forward in this case my right foot and deposit a little soil over the line that I've just sown that helps bury the grain a little bit so that the birds don't get it all. And then when I finish a route I take out the post so that it's easy for me to see that I'm just headed for the next one that's available. And I don't mind trampling the ground because that would be done often after seeding in like ancient Egypt they would run their sheep or cows over to trample the soil in. That's no problem. After each pass I refill and here you can see the result of this type of seeding. Here's last year's rye and here's last year's wheat. You can see there is some competing weeds coming up here but because these are spaced at eight inch intervals I could walk my high wheel hoe down them and knock all this down once and then this is going to grow up to be this high it'll blot out all other weeds. And this was prepared just the same way I planted the oats so you can see the nice results that this has. Well thanks so much for watching part one. Part two will cover harvesting and threshing. 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