Grains continue to be a very important area of research and trialling for us. We’re constantly evolving lists of those that do well for us. The quinoas and amaranths, flour corns, and Essene flax seeds are my favourites. Traditionally these crops that we store as seeds have been a really important part of our diets, and I’m fascinated by how different it feels to be growing and eating these crops myself now. They feel nutritionally really different to all the fresh stuff, or the same seeds from the shop, for instance popped amaranth is now available as a packaged breakfast cereal with a very impressive nutritional write up. If you have ever tasted your own home grown popped amaranth it is very clear there is a huge gap between the two.

So far we have focused on the grains that grow well in the north that can be processed and served without the need for any expensive technology. We are working with selecting the hullesss oats for disease resistance in the north (the original line was susceptible to rust). I can see that millet is a great crop, but we need to develop ways of hulling seed heads, sunflowers could be good if we can hull them, buckwheat would be a wonderful grain if we could hull it, and even some of the traditional wheats and rye grains would be great if we can develop appropriate technology to thresh and hull the heads.

I’ve listed below all the seeds in our collection that we are growing for their use as dried seeds or grains and which are notlisted elsewhere. Added together they make quite a difference to our diet, and I love them all.

There is a small group of local people up here that have been trailing rice growing for a few years and we are offering seed that has been grown here in Kaiwaka in paddies for 8 years. The rice has been grown by Yoshi, from the experimental house. We tried growing this seed in one of our raised beds in the vege garden this season because much of the world’s rice is grown in dry beds rather than in paddies, and it did very well. We have left it in the ground and the new owners of the garden will continue to keep us in touch with how it goes. A definite possibility I would say.

Rice OS

Yoshi has been successfully growing this rice in Kaiwaka for quite a few years now. Growing instructions will come with this seed which must be planted in mid August for the seed to mature.

Essene Flax OS

This is a line from KUSA in the USA (11 years ago) It is the original flax seed, and it’s quite a different shape and size to that commercially available today. It’s larger and flatter. We grow enough for us to grind and eat with our breakfast every morning.

HullessOats OS

These oats can be easily grown Biointensively, harvested and threshed by hand. They will require us developing our techniques for threshing, perhaps using flails, two sticks joined by a piece of strong leather to beat the seed to clean it. They have tendency to get rust in the northern humid climate and we are selecting hard for the rust free plants . South of the Bombay hills they seem to be rust free. They are a traditional oat cultivar, that would have been part of the diet of many of our ancestors from Europe

Barnyard Millet OS

This is an easy to grow grain, as long as you have a system for keeping the birds off it. Barnyard millet is a traditional Japanese cultivar, and millet was once the main grain eaten in Japan. Barnyard millet is a tall variety growing to over two metres when in seed. When we have developed a low tech system for hulling the grain I’m sure it will become an important grain for us.