Chapter 5 Grains
Our chickens free-range during the months things are growing here and the bugs are active. Unfortunately this far north, that’s from about the end of May until the middle of October. So we have to provide other food for them.
We’ve started growing some of our own grains in the last 3 years and I can tell you, it’s a big job planting, harvesting, and threshing wheat, oats, rye, and barley with hand tools. We’re nowhere close to growing enough to feed our chickens year round, let alone having enough to use for our own cooking.
We have to buy commercial feed at this time to make up for what we can't produce. Those home-grown eggs are still delicious but they're no longer organic since commercial animal feed is sprayed with whatever herbicides, pesticides, or fertilizer farmers use these days. Organic animal feed is available but pricier.
We use 300 lbs. of layer feed per year to feed 7 hens, plus table scraps and seasonal free-ranging. We’re too far north to grow corn, but people who can grow it greatly ease the job of growing their own animal feed. Corn is much easier to harvest and process by hand than wheat and other grains.
Soybeans are a great thing to grow for animal feed. You can set aside part of your garden for them, or make a patch just for soybeans. The protein is good for animals, and adding it to your chickens' food of grains and vegetables (scraps), along with dried, crushed egg shells (for calcium), makes a good “Layer” diet. Home-grown eggs are far more delicious than their grocery store counterparts.
Wheat, oats, rye, and barley grow well in our climate with almost no care. At harvest time we cut the heads off the stalks and store them in paper or cloth sacks until we can thresh them.
To thresh them we throw the heads on a tarp and walk on them or smack them with the broom. We gather up what's left of the heads and put them back in sacks. The grains are gathered from the tarp and tossed into the air over the tarp so the 'chaff' can blow away. The chaff are very lightweight bits of grain shells and other debris from the wheat plant.
We bag the savable grain to be ground and used later. The heads that we saved are tossed into the chicken pen in the winter, an armload at a time. The chickens will happily and busily thresh out whatever grain we missed. Not only does it feed them but it gives them exercise.
If you're like most people, you like the things grains can make. Ideally you would want to be able to grow grains for the humans in your household too.
Meat, vegetables, and fruit are a wonderful diet, but when you’re doing the kind of work it takes to keep a self-sufficient homestead going, you really appreciate the breads, biscuits, cookies, pies, and other things grains can make.
In our home with two of us we use around 25 lbs. of wheat a month, since we make everything from scratch. We’d need to get our homegrown production up to 300 lbs. just for cooking, plus the 300 lbs for the chickens, per year.
Growing and harvesting 600 lbs. of wheat and other grains with hand tools is a daunting prospect. Just imagine if we added rabbits, goats, and other animals to the demand for feed!