A few mornings ago, I awoke with the anticipation of eating a homegrown cereal breakfast. I had prepared the groats the night before in the same way we like to eat our steel cut oats and had left them to soak overnight.



When I added the buttermilk to the grain in the morning, it turned to cheese as the heat rose and persistent as I am, I stood over the sink and picked out every single bit of curd.

It was a very tedious task, but the final one in a series of wearisome details in the attempt to fill those eight bowls at the breakfast table.

Until then, I had been vacillating between whether I would attempt another grain field in the future and it was at that moment I threw in the towel.

This year's crop has been our most successful undertaking in small scale grain production, but the time, effort, and money invested into the project makes it simply not worth the meager yields. I could (theoretically) produce hundreds of pounds of vegetables in the same space that yielded less than a dozen pounds of grain.

But it's way more than just about yields and expenditure of money. Time is a precious commodity and we invested way too much of it in grain growing this year.




Burning wood throughout the field to improve the soil...
Tilling to remove weeds....
Tilling again...
Planting...
Early weeding...
Keeping the chickens out...
Watering...
Harvesting- the barley & wheat by hand, the hulless oats too...
Bundling it- one. stalk. at. a. time... I listened to an entire 5 hour audio book doing a third of the oats before I gave up.
Drying it...
Building a thresher...
Fixing it...
Again...
Threshing...
Again...
And again...
Cleaning & screening...
Handpicking out the groats that didn't shed their hull...
To cooking...

To picking cheese from it...

And the plot still needs to be cleaned for future plantings.

And after all that, the thought of cheese bothered the children so much they were protesting before the groats hit the bowl. I sprinkled coconut, pecans, and even a couple chocolate chips in to entice them to even try.

The second breakfast, made with the rest of the harvest, went much better & they cooked nicely in the crockpot overnight and with the addition of a little cinnamon & chopped early season apple made a lovely finish to the whole experiment.

I feel like after three attempts, I have put forth my best effort and I'm thankful for the experience and we agreed that we wouldn't hesitate to try again on a larger scale if we had more space to devote to the crops, but while we continue to live here our energies will be directed elsewhere.