We've been watching them harvest wheat all week from El Reno up to Enid.
This week we've been making good use of our time in the car by reading Gene Logsdon's Small Scale Grain Raising aloud on the two hour stretches back and forth to Mason's presentations in Enid and Ardmore. This book is blowing my mind! I would have never imagined that you could produce a sufficient amount of grain on such a small amount of land. It's amazing what you can grow on only a few acres. It has always troubled me that our vegetarianism makes us more dependent on agribusiness than a dedicated meat eating homesteader. We buy a lot of lentils, chickpeas and grains, mostly in bulk. It's not always easy to find the origin of those products, and when it is, I find that they were generally grown across the country. It's a relief to learn that it is possible to sustain a vegetarian household on a reasonable amount of land.
We have access to another five acres the next town over. It would need a lot of brush clearing and other work, but now we're thinking of all of the new crops that it would be possible to grow there--dent corn, popcorn, wheat, sorghum, broomcorn, oats--and those are just the ones that we've read about so far. We are only 100 pages in, but I've already learned more from this book than I have from any other that I've read in years (with the exception of another incredible book I'm reading at the moment, Carol Deppe's Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties). There is too much fascinating information to list here, so I'll just say that I highly recommend it. The copy we are reading now is from the library, but I've already ordered my own.
-Megan
We loved that book also and it inspired my husband to till up part of our pasture for some test plots. So far he has naked oats planted and they are doing very well. This fall he want to plant some wheat, and maybe rye. Like you, we never dreamed it was possible on only a few acres!
ReplyDeleteHave you read any of Gene's other books. They are all good. (At least the ones we've read.)
Gina