Last weekend looked like it was shaping up as the most perfect in the garden so far this year. Sunny. Warm enough. The welcome gush of moisture earlier in the week had soaked in. It was safe to dig and walk around without worrying our footsteps would compact the soil and undo the silent winter work of our earthworm friends. I imagined spending time plotting exactly what would go into the prepared soil.
Cue winds so fierce that pine cones were flying off a neighboring tree like bullets. But a ruined day outdoors can always be rescued by flipping through seed catalogs — or a copy of John Seymour’s “”
It’s a book published in 1976, and my partner in the experimental garden clearly has been heavily influenced by its advice — she built a blacksmithing studio in her yard. Could we consider growing enough wheat to make a loaf of bread, she wondered, flipping to a section of the book suggesting it’s perfectly reasonable for someone who lives in a 10th floor apartment to buy a small stone or plate mill and grind his own flour.Mill notwithstanding, finding seed was tougher than it should be. Beth laughed when she heard me on the phone, explaining to a garden center clerk that I was looking for wheat, “you know, like you would grow if you wanted to make wheatgrass shots for your smoothie.”
We are distant from the origins of our everyday foods. But that doesn’t mean we should stop trying to understand what it takes to grow the basic ingredients. This year our garden will include a few rows of wheat and oats — probably only enough to make a dinner roll and a bowl of oatmeal — but we’ll know it was made from the work of our own hands.
