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Wowa, something I have experience with.

I've harvested 25lbs of wheat berries from a boulevard in my city. I then threshed, winnowed it myself. I still have some of the flour and berries left and use it to make bread.

I did my threshing using a lawn mower on a big tarp. This actually worked fairly well. Were I to do it again I would probably want a more repeatable setup. Ive seen some good strategies on youtube.

The winnowing I did with a leaf blower, and worked pretty well, I think I would use this strategy again, but I suspect if you were going to do it more often it would be very easy to build something that would help mechanically.

I have a friend with a little home flour mill which took a while but was perfect for turning it into flour. If you were to do it fresh when you wanted to make bread these little mills are fantastic.

There's a book I highly recommend reading called Small Scale Grain Raising [1] that has a lot of good tips, and ways to do this kinda stuff.

In this book they recommend using a leaf shredder or wood chipper which would be incredibly effective.

[1] https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/small-scale-grain-raisi...

I did a small patch of wheat and barley. I also malted it to make my own beer.

I just used a box fan for winnowing. I built a 5 gallon bucket thresher to use with a drill. Worked really well.

I'm doing winter wheat this year for bread.

I'd be interested to hear about the bucket thresher. Most of the DIY options I found when I was looking where larger with custom flail mechanisms and bike-chain drives etc. Honestly, building the thresher itself seemed like kind of a cool project on it's own, but it was just more effort than I was willing to put in. But a 5 gallon bucket option that runs of a drill sounds much more my speed.

How much did you process? What is the maximum amount you think you would have been willing to process with that method?

I did about 3 pounds at once, but could have done more. Maybe 5 pounds. It goes fast, so you can do multiple smaller batches more quickly than the bigger batch.

I made a round out of plywood to put in the bottom of the bucket, drilled a hole in the center, and put a steel pipe end cap in it. I put a ball bearing in the end cap. Then a threaded rod up through the top resting on the bearing. I cut a round of plywood for the top of the bucket, chamfered to fit snugly. I drilled a hole in the center of that and put a pillow block on it to fit the threaded rod. On the bottom of the rod I put two pieces of flat stock about 1/2 from the bottom and about one inch above that one, just held on with nuts. That's pretty much it. There are lots of YouTube of variations on that design. Runs with a corded drill. Cordless might work for very small batches.

There are open design plans for homestead scale hand fed threshing and winnowing/seed cleaning machines. Put them in series. Sheeves of wheat in one end, clean grain on the other. Well worth the time to build if you are cleaning that quantity of grain.

How did that boulevard end up planted with edible wheat?

I'd be more worried about how polluted it is

You are not going to believe what they use to harvest and deliver wheat

I would suggest that the edge of a typical busy boulevard features 10-30 thousand vehicles per day, whose brake and tire particles in particular end up in the soil around the road. Typical farm fields might see 30,000 trips over the span of what, 100 or 1000 years? It's not in any way comparable to an urban roadway.

I think it's a bit of a different comparison given that there's probably some accumulation of lead from decades of leaded gasoline from urban traffic.

Obviously still worth doing but it'd be interesting to see whether remediation of some kind would be worth while.

It was erosion control after some new road work. I sorta suspect they did bring in new dirt for it as well. I do only use it in small amounts. Not really gonna make a difference over time in terms of pollution/heavy metals. But it was still a worthwhile project.

I can't see it's possible to grow a useful amount of wheat for a single family without a decent sized plot and a large amount of labour. Most modern varieties rely on a lot of fertiliser as well. Wheat is more or less useless for the home gardener and has been for 200 years.

https://books.google.com/books/about/Homegrown_Whole_Grains....

> are a dead-end genetically

Is this on purpose or a technical limitation?

Can we create a new plant that (1) tastes good (2) is not a genetic dead end (3) is easily spread to other farms by squirrels and birds (4) low maintainence, and put an end to this DRM?

I mean it would be kind of nice if there existed a forest full of food that nobody had to maintain.

> they are paying to support the continued cultivation of those varieties

The plants are living beings, if they are allowed to behave like living beings without being crippled, perhaps the varieties will continue to exist naturally without said support.

I meant dead end in the sense that their genes aren't going anywhere. 90+% of home gardeners don't save seeds, and the few that do are almost certainly not preserving the strains they think they are since, most gardeners grow multiple varieties at the same time that are all getting cross pollinated. It was not meant to imply anything about the viability of the strain they are growing, many of which are fantastic heirlooms that have been around for generations.

I keep and grow as much seed as possible. It is the only way to adapt plants to your local environment and farming methods and needs. I get plants that are much easier to grow, then breed for taste or other features. Thats how the heirlooms were created.

If you are growing grains and harvesting by hand eat the seeds from shorter plants. Taller plants are easier to handle. And give more straw for animal bedding. Taller grains have been mostly bred out of the seed stock. Machines are more efficient on shorter plants.

Yes, I didn't mean to say it was impossible. Merely that the vast majority of home gardeners aren't doing it. If you have enough space to grow enough of something to keep a decent genetic pool going (which already excludes the vast majority of home gardeners), then it is certainly possible to either/or preserve a given strain or adapt a plant to your very specific micro conditions.

Most home gardeners can much more easily support the maintenance of old strains by buying heirloom seeds from breeders.

However, if one has the space, time, skills, and interest to do what you are doing, then by all means go ahead.

As long as we can still order seed new genes can be introduced, in a small plot, at any time. My goal is to easily grow good food. I really don't care how old the line is or what it is named. That just doesn't matter when growing for food. If you are buying seed for a specific variety that is already a narrowed gene line. If the saved seeds are producing for you it doesn't really matter how narrow the gene pool is. You actually want to narrow the gene pool that is what adapting is.

All you really need space for is allowing plants to reach full maturity. Some plants, like carrots or radishes, get huge if left to seed. One fruit from most plants will give you more seed than you likely planted. Each seed in a fruit is a unique individual that was fertilized by a different pollen. Even with self fertilization the seeds will not be genetically identical.

> I keep and grow as much seed as possible. It is the only way to adapt plants to your local environment and farming methods and needs. I get plants that are much easier to grow, then breed for taste or other features. Thats how the heirlooms were created.

Do you actively select and breed the plants you grow, or does the selection happen "by itself" since only plants that are somehow adapted to local condition reach maturity?

Both. I started doing this because my area was populated after industrial farming started. Local adaptation slowed drastically after it was possible to ship food such long distances. Prior to that every food grower kept seed and brought them to new environments. I came to realize that all my seed comes from at least 8 degrees closer to the equator than me that are generally warmer, have a longer summer and are certainly dryer.

Starting with a new plant I will buy a few varieties whose descriptions suit my fancy. Then plant as many seeds as I have space for. Adapting plants is a numbers game. Some won't germinate, some will grow slowly, some will become diseased and some will be eaten by pests. None of those are suited for the local environment. Thin the planting to allow the strongest growers room. It should be obvious which ones to keep. Once you have the plants that started from seed best its time to start selecting for other traits. Traits depend on the plant but for food you should be selecting mostly for taste at first. For example, I am crossing one pea variety selected for wirey strong vines and purple pods and a couple others for taste. This is my third year with those and I am getting sweeter pods on wirey vines but the vines aren't quite as strong or tall. So, I planted some of the original wirey vine seeds to try pushing the line that way more.

Some trait selection is unintentional. The plants are going to adapt to you as well. They will adapt to how you plant, harvest, and save the seed. With my grains some of the plants are too short to harvest with a sickle comfortably. Those go in the eat or feed to chickens pile. Some also don't separate from the plants when I thresh by hand. Also to the chickens. What I am left with are seeds that were easier to process just by not being super careful to get everything. With biennials or clonal root crops you will also unintentionally select for plants that store well as you have to keep the roots over winter to plant them in the spring.

I started saving seed about 5 years ago so nothing has really stabilized into something that could be considered a new variety. But, I have seen the steps closer to my goals.

Purchased seeds are a narrow part of that plants gene pool. If they are open pollinated they were bred until most of the produced seeds make the same looking and tasting plant in a specific environment. Really, if you are gardening, you should learn how to save seeds unless you have a seed grower near you. If you save seeds you will also have more seed than you know what to do with.

even if they do get cross pollinated, if the seeds grow, who cares?

I'm not saying anyone should, but in the context of preserving particular strains and particular genetic diversity (which is what this article is about), if you are breeding willy nilly (which there is nothing wrong with, and can, as the other commenter mentioned, help you select for your very particular micro-conditions), you almost certainly aren't preserving whatever strain it is you started with.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but it seems like promoting genetic diversity and maintaining the purity of specific strains are contradictory goals. Wouldn't you want a lot of cross-pollination to maximize overall genetic variation and generate lots of new varieties?

There is the perfect situation and then there is the best realistic situation. The perfect situation for maintaining and expanding genetic diversity is probably going back to every region growing it's own particular strain of a given vegetable, with people in those regions mostly breeding and maintaining their own strains. In the really old days, pretty much everyone in a small region was growing the same variety (ish) and was saving their seeds and the combined gardens of the community (village, what have you) were more than large enough to be a self sustaining population, while also being the right combination of homogeneous (to maintain good traits), and large enough to have enough diversity to allow for new traits and hopefully even protect against disease or changing conditions.

But that's not really realistic anymore. If someone like the other poster, who has the space (both to maintain a large enough population as well as the distance from other gardeners who might be growing modern strains), the time, and the interest, they can indeed be doing the "best" thing from a genetic diversity perspective (as long as they make sure that their strain doesn't die with them). But those people are very, very rare. So the next-best option is to try and maintain the current genetic diversity we have, in a persistent way (as opposed to a static way in seed banks), by having breeders breed as many different varieties as possible. They will hopefully be following the dual mandate of maintaining unique traits while also allowing adaptation to changing conditions.

Your average gardener, even if they wanted to, can't maintain any real genetic diversity because A) they don't have the space for a viable population and B) their genetics will constantly be contaminated by their neighbor growing Early Girl or something. So making sure that the already extant genetic diversity doesn't dissapear by supporting heirloom breeding is not the "optimal" solution to genetic diversity, but it is, in my opinion, the best "realistic" solution.

> The plants are living beings, if they are allowed to behave like living beings without being crippled, perhaps the varieties will continue to exist naturally without said support.

Alas, there are too many humans for that. So, either you support the plants, or one of us has to give - plants or humans. Humans aren't known for giving in, which means slim odds for unsupported plants.

Yeah, this tendency of ours (and life in general- look how invasive species can flourish without much predation) to take what we can has gotten us in trouble now that we have so many resources available to us. Unpopular and I'm not sure how unethical, and likely dead on arrival in congress, but rrgulating the extraction of resources, including and especially petroleum, is one way. Needs to go hand in hand with culture shift to be effective, though; enough of us have to realize the harm we're doing and opt for a better (as in, more respectful of the future of diverse life on earth) way to live.