Many homesteaders already make bread from scratch, but can we take the next step grow enough wheat for bread completely at home? And how much wheat does a family even need for flour for year at that matter? One loaf of bread may seem like a lofty goal on a small or moderate homestead, but can you go even further? How much bread can you reasonably grow in your own backyard? Let’s do that Math and find out!
How Much Wheat Do You Need to Grow for a Loaf of Bread?
A bushel of wheat can yield up to 90 small loves of bread. A bushel is 60 pounds of grain. So if we take 60 pounds of grain and divide that by 90 we get 0.66 pounds of grain per loaf of bread, or 2/3 lbs per loaf. So what we really need to figure out at this point is how much space you need to grow at least 2/3 lbs of grain.
Surprisingly to some you can grow a bushel of wheat on 1,000 square feet of land.
Yes you read that right, just a thousand square feet of land to grow 60 lbs of grain. So if you only want a single loaf of bread you need to grow 1/90th of that. That ends up being 11.11 square feet, but we’re going to round up to 12 square feet to be safe and account for any loss.
So that’s it, if you grow 12 square feet of wheat you can make a loaf of bread completely from scratch!
Growing Wheat for Bread
If you want to grow wheat to make bread yourself or even just to have flour, you should now have a good understanding of how much you need to grow for your utilization. If you have a larger homestead or live in a more rural area, a full bushel of wheat is more than achievable for just about anyone.
Once you figure out how much space you want to dedicate to wheat on your homestead you actually need to pick out the variety that you want to grow. It’s a bigger choice since we’ve been making various breeds of wheat for hundreds of years. The biggest considerations are going to come in the form of understanding your soil composition and your growing zones. From there your selection is down to how much fertilizers and pesticides (natural or otherwise) that you are comfortable using.
There’s a lot we could say here about growing wheat at home, but generally we recommend following the planting guidelines for your specific variety as they can vary a bit more for wheat as opposed to other garden crops.
Processing Wheat into Flour
There are a lot of steps in processing wheat into flour and it will easily be an all day activity. First after you harvest your wheat whole with a scythe or by hand with a smaller blade, you’re going to separate the berries from the rest of the stalk in s process called threshing.
Threshing
Threshing used to be done by banging heaps of wheat on a stone surface where they would drop their berries and you would toss the stalks away, but for a home garden and a small amount of wheat this process can be done more individually. The advantage of doing this by hand is that you won’t have sand or rock grit in your final product.
If you don’t want to spend the time snipping the heads off of individual stalks (which takes a long time) you can put the whole bunch of wheat into a sack or pillow case and then just beat the heck out of it. This does the same thing, but it does mean you have to be more careful about cleaning the wheat berries from the inedible hulls and bits of stalk.
Winnowing
After you thresh your wheat you need to winnow the wheat, which is where you separate the wheat from the chaff. This removes that outer coating from the wheat berries and gets you the final grain product you will be further processing into flour. But how do you separate them all? The easy tick is to use wind.
The simplest method people used to use for winnowing was to drop all the threshed wheat on large screens or trays and simply let the wind carry away the lighter hulls. Once you do this a few time you end up with pretty clean wheat berries as the only thing left. We don’t have to wait for wind and can instead separate our wheat using a large fan and a bucket. Just dump your wheat in front of fan and repeat until it’s just the wheat berries left over.
Milling
Next up you need to mill your wheat berries into flour. This process can be done in a home mill which will run you about $100 – $500 depending on the size and capacity of the mill, but if you want to go much cheaper you simply use an electric coffee grinder and mill your flour in small batches. The process is very simple, just grind the berries and you’re done.
From Seed to Bread
There you have it! It doesn’t take really much space at all to grow enough wheat to bake a fresh loaf of bread from scratch. Sure it will take a while, and it’s really not all that cost effective, but there’s something magical about eating bread that was grown at your own home. So no matter the space you use, 1,000 square feet or just 12, you’ll definitely be able to get a loaf or two our of your own home garden.