Vegetables

I finally got around to planting a few vegetables, a tiny plot of spring wheat, and sunflowers. I have very little spare area, it’s all landscaped so I did the vegs in pots:

Onions, carrots, Bell/hot peppers, lettuce, spinach, and broccoli.  All seeds sprouted just fine, they will be cramped in the pots but we will see how that goes. This is about cramming crops in small spaces, most of us won’t have a lot of area in a crisis.  I need to build potato towers for the root vegetables, got the storage figured out (sand boxes and net bags) but nothing to put in them yet.

Wheat

Nothing to see on the wheat, hasn’t come up yet but here’s the seed:

5 pounds of hard spring wheat. I hand broadcast versus the standard row/seed drill method, should give me the densest plot and yield. If I’m super lucky, I can make a small loaf of bread when it’s done in the fall. The soil here isn’t really what I was used to in the Midwest, more clay so it may not yield the same. It’s tilled down to about 8 inches and augmented with organics, weather is the same so maybe it will be OK. I found an idea online for a thresher, it’s a section of threaded rod with two chain flails driven by a drill motor. All that sits in a 5 gallon plastic bucket, they dumped the wheat heads in and churned it up until it was all threshed. Winnowing was with a fan, pouring it on a tarp.  Good idea, but I immediately though of improvements. I want to mount the axle in bushings, add more flails, a screen to catch the stalks and big chaff, a hole in the lid to feed the wheat stalks, and second bucket below with a fan blower as the winnower.  That will wait until fall, nothing to test it on….

Sunflowers

Nothing to see here, ’cause just put them in. I planted a variety that produces the highest weight of oil seed per acre, and a few dwarf ornamentals to keep it from looking like Wierdo Beardo’s commune (although my wife differs).  Once these come in, they will get go in a homemade press for sunflower oil.

The point of this exercise is to gauge how much seed and area I need to produce a given amount of grain and vegetables. I also want to let things go to seed and see what will come up the following year, the seed is hybrid and won’t grow true but should do something.  One thing I did find is how viable seed is in the fridge, we had some Batchelor Buttons from 2008 that all sprouted. So, seed seems to be a low-risk factor and you can buy a load of it for very little money. It’s great insurance against a food shortage assuming you can hang on for the time it takes to grow.