Saturday, March 25, 2017

ancient wheat

that the winter wheat did not overwinter has already been well established and that will become a potato bed in the next month or so...however i did not what to have a grainless season and i happened to have some emmer and dwarf syrian wheat seed left and it happens to be very early spring...prime wheat planting time ( it is a cool weather crop )...the emmer wheat has a very tough husk ( top photo ) and i spent about half an hour threshing out some grain to plant...emmer is very old wheat...domesticated between nine and ten thousand years ago at the beginnings of the neolithic revolution...and there is evidence of its wild ancestor being gathered and eaten up to seventeen thousand years ago ( even a cursory review of archaeological evidence will put the lie tot he whole "paleo diet" nonsense...gluten has been with us a long time and there are crackbrained diets everywhere...not so much what you eat [within reason] as how much )...i wonder how many generations of this wheat this will mark...uncounted...so i prepared some containers...broadcast the seed...and raked it under by hand to a depth of about a quarter inch...it will surface germinate but i wanted to keep the birds guessing...give it a week or two and we will check on the progress and the continuation of ancient strains of dna.

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