7 Reasons You Should Grow Wheat in Your Garden

Most gardens are filled with vegetables, flowers, and fruits, but grains offer an equally compelling and beautiful opportunity to produce your own food. Wheat is an ancient crop that humans have cultivated for thousands of years. While many of us think of wheat as a plant reserved for industrial production, clearly, our ancestors were cultivating this grain on a small home scale for centuries before big equipment was invented.

You don’t need a ton of space or fancy materials to grow or process this grass-family crop. It is high-yielding and easygoing, even in a small garden. Making your own flour or baked goods is particularly rewarding with heirloom varieties. If you don’t want to thresh the grain, you can use it as a cover crop, rotational species, ornamental accent, or compost input. Better yet, plant in containers and harvest young for nutrient-dense wheatgrass shots.

Let’s dig into the top reasons to add wheat to your garden repertoire! After growing his own wheat for flour, Jacques in the Garden insists that he won’t go another season without it:

Why Should You Grow Wheat in Your Garden?

Wheat is a grass-family crop that can add beauty, edible grain, self-sufficiency, soil enrichment, and ecological benefits to your garden. Though commonly considered an industrial-scale grain, it is perfectly suitable for small-scale backyard growers. 

Homegrown wheat makes the perfect cover crop, green manure, compost input, and kitchen ingredient. This high-yielding grass can produce dozens of pounds of grain from a small space. Moreover, it can help improve garden soil and aid in vegetable crop rotations by introducing a less-common plant family (Poaceae). 

Benefits

7 Reasons to Grow Wheat

Growing your own wheat may seem like a lot of effort, but it could actually make your garden maintenance easier! Here are seven reasons to consider cultivating this grass on a small scale.

Enhances Soil Quality

The greatest benefit of wheat is not just its edibility, but its capacity to enrich the soil. The deep, fine roots spread wide and far, creating lots of aeration and structure in the depths of garden beds. This grass is widely used on farms to increase soil organic matter and fertility in preparation for future crops. A dense stand is helpful for preventing erosion during the winter and suppressing weed growth, making your maintenance efforts much easier in the spring.

Because wheat grows so quickly, it can provide tons of foliage over the winter. This foliage can be used to enrich the soil with organic matter for spring crops.

You can also grow this grass specifically as a “green manure” to produce lots of biomass in your garden, which means you don’t have to source straw or compost elsewhere. If you harvest it while the blades are still fresh, it counts as a nitrogen-rich “green” input in your compost pile. But if you wait until the grass dries (so you can harvest the grain), the stalks become carbon-rich “brown” material to use as a compost input or as a homegrown mulch. 

Excellent for Crop Rotations

Wheat is scientifically-proven to improve the yields of other plants when it is grown in a crop rotation. Crop rotation is the art and science of alternating plant families in garden beds. Instead of growing the same vegetables in your beds every year, rotating related plants can interrupt cycles of pests and diseases. Rotation also ensures a diversity of roots, microbes, and nutrient planning. 

However, many of us struggle to find new crops for rotations. Most vegetables fall into a select few botanical families. Members of each family can be attacked by the same pests and diseases, which makes rotations even more important. 

If you’re running out of rotation options, wheat is the perfect addition to the mix! Corn is the only common vegetable that belongs to the grass family. So, if you’ve alternated brassicas and legumes in the same bed for several years, wheat can interrupt the cycle. Better yet, it can enhance the performance of future vegetables by enhancing drainage, organic matter, and weed suppression.

Wheat is Easy, Reliable, and Resilient

Generally, this plant is much easier to grow than most fruits and vegetables. It is a grass, after all, and it is widely adaptable to every region in the U.S. Winter wheat can withstand temperatures as low as -15°F (-26°C), so you don’t have to worry about displacing your summer crops. Instead, grow this plant as a winter cover crop for reliable, low-maintenance production.

This grass-family species is vigorous and reliable. It doesn’t require much fertilizer and it is unlikely to get attacked by many pests or diseases in the garden. Once you sow the seeds and water them in, the seedlings mostly fend for themselves. Young stands are somewhat drought-tolerant, but not as water-resilient as its cousin, sorghum. Still, mature stands boast an impressive resilience to heat, drought, and cold, making wheat more reliable than many other cover crops.

DIY Breads and Baking

On average, just one square foot of wheat yields 60-80 grain heads, which translates to about ½ cup of flour. A large 12” Birdies Modern Raised Garden Bed is about 4.8 square feet, which is almost enough flour for a loaf of bread. Thankfully, you’re growing wheat for more than just the flour; you could enrich the soil and produce straw in the process. A larger stand of 1,000 square feet could produce enough flour for 90 loaves of bread.

Yields aren’t the only thing that matters, though. Baking your own bread and cakes from scratch is a special experience, especially if you’ve grown all the ingredients on your own. For those of us foodies and DIYers who want to experience life from the source, this is a great way to reconnect to the entire lifecycle of your food. 

Plus, the resulting baked goods taste absolutely incomparable to those made with store bought flour! The texture and flavor is far superior, and you can be certain that your grain was not contaminated with pesticides.

Gluten-Free Option: If you are allergic to wheat or you avoid gluten, you can still enjoy this grass in your garden and kitchen. Research confirms that the green sprouts of wheatgrass are gluten-free. Only the seeds (grain) contain gluten. Wheatgrass is popular for juicing and nutritional supplements.

Self-Sufficiency

If you’re tired of depending on farms and garden stores for your straw, and you want to be more self-sufficient with your food, wheat is a staple crop for a reason. This plant has been grown around the world for centuries. It is arguably the backbone of modern human civilization. 

Preppers and hobby DIYers share the desire to grow as much of their own food as possible. If you can produce your own grains, you have a huge advantage over a garden that only produces vegetables.

Heirloom Varieties

We’ve all heard of heirloom vegetables, but what about heirloom grains? Chefs, farmers, and foodies have joined in a modern revival of heirloom and ancient grain varieties. 

Many health-minded consumers are concerned about widespread hybridization and genetic modification of modern wheat varieties. Thankfully, heirlooms are open-pollinated, non-GMO, and un-altered. The seeds have been passed down for generations and retain the traits of ancient lineages.

These old-time cultivars offer a blast from the past with higher protein content, more flavor, and even unique colors like ‘Utrecht Blue’! You can save the seeds from these stands to reliably produce the same varieties year after year. 

Chicken and Duck Feed Supplement

For those of us who love our poultry and backyard livestock, we often spend audacious amounts of money on feed. What if you could grow some or all of the grains for your chickens and ducks? 

Wheat is a very healthy grain for poultry feed. It cannot supply all of the birds’ needs, but it can supplement insects, vegetable waste, oats, and rye. If you are growing this grain primarily for the soil benefits, it can be chopped down after seeding, and the grains will delight your laying hens. 

Chicks are particularly fond of the whole grains as long as they are ground small enough. Larger birds can pluck up the whole seeds, which means you can just toss in a handful of mature stalks and let them do the work!