Growing Winter Wheat in Manhattan

Growing Winter Wheat in a Manhattan Raised Bed

This year’s fun experiment: growing winter wheat in an outdoor raised garden bed in Manhattan. It turned out to be a great project for the kids, and by the end I had milled about 1.5 cups of homegrown flour.

Growing

Winter wheat is planted in the fall, sits through the cold, and then takes off in the spring. In a raised bed it needs surprisingly little attention. The kids loved watching it come up green and then slowly turn golden.

Harvesting and Threshing

Once the wheat was golden I let it dry, then cut the tops (the seed heads) off. The low-tech threshing trick: stuff all the heads into an old pillow case and smack the pillow case against the wall. The impact knocks the grains loose from the chaff and heads.

Milling the Flour

After separating the grain, I ran it through an ordinary coffee grinder to make flour. The whole raised bed yielded about 1.5 cups. Not enough to open a bakery, but plenty to bake something with the kids and say we grew it, threshed it, and milled it ourselves.

A fun, hands-on experiment from seed to flour, right in the middle of Manhattan.