How to grow your own wheat

Global stocks of wheat are plummeting and people are starting to worry about the price of staples like bread. But can you beat the commodity market by growing your own?

… Baker and organic food campaigner Andrew Whitley believes the answer lies in your back garden and that it’s time, as he puts it, to “bake your lawn”. He is launching the Real Bread Campaign.

… A conservative yield estimate of three tonnes of wheat per organically-cultivated hectare is reasonable, Whitley suggests. Assuming you’re going for an extremely wholewheat approach – using the whole grain, including bran and germ – each tonne of flour pretty much equates to a tonne of wheat (in British commercial milling 4.5 million tonnes of flour is made from 5.5 million tonnes of wheat every year), then you need 297 square metres of wheat to provide your family with bread.

And there’s the rub. According to Garden Organic, the organic growing charity, the average British garden size as of 2006 was about 90 square metres.

BBC