Growing Your Own Flour
A 4′ × 8′ bed of wheat gives you somewhere around a pound of flour. That is one loaf. Knowing that before you start is the difference between a satisfying experiment and a disappointing harvest.
To bake one loaf a week for a year you would need something in the order of a thousand square feet — a quarter of a suburban lot, sown to wheat. Growing your own flour is a way to understand bread, not a way to supply a kitchen. Once that is settled it becomes one of the most rewarding things you can grow.
Three choices, made before you buy seed
1. Winter or spring
Winter wheat is sown in autumn, sits through the cold, and is harvested in early summer. It needs that cold period — without weeks of low temperature it will grow leaves and never make a head. It yields better and it uses ground that would otherwise sit bare all winter.
Spring wheat is sown as early as the soil can be worked and harvested in late summer. It skips the cold requirement and yields less.
In a cold-winter climate, winter wheat is the traditional and usually the better choice. Sow it about six weeks before hard frost so it can tiller before it goes dormant.
2. Hard or soft
Hard wheats are high in protein and make bread flour. Soft wheats are low in protein and make pastry and cake flour. They are not interchangeable, and a loaf made from soft wheat will not hold a structure however well you handle it.
For bread, hard red winter is the classic. Hard red spring runs higher in protein still. Hard white is milder in flavour and behaves much like hard red.
Modern wheat and rye are free-threshing: beat the heads and the grain falls out clean, ready to mill.
Einkorn, emmer, spelt, most barley and all oats are hulled. The grain stays wrapped in a tough husk that threshing will not remove, and getting it off needs a dehuller — a machine almost no home grower has. People grow a beautiful stand of emmer, thresh it, and discover they have a bucket of something they cannot mill.
Grow a hulled grain on purpose, knowing how you will dehull it. Otherwise start with wheat or rye.
Rye deserves a mention for a sourdough kitchen: it is the most cold-hardy of the bread grains, it is free-threshing, it tolerates poor soil, and a rye starter is a livelier thing than a wheat one.
Sowing
Broadcast roughly 2–4 oz over a 4′ × 8′ bed — broadcasting needs more seed than drilling because the spacing is less even. Rake it in about an inch and firm the surface. Water if the autumn is dry.
Wheat is not a fussy crop. It wants sun, reasonable drainage and one weeding while it is small. After it closes over, leave it alone until it changes colour.
Harvest: the bite test
The stand turns from green to gold, the heads tip over, and the stems dry. The test that matters is the grain itself: bite a kernel. If it dents, it is still doughy and needs more time. If it cracks hard against your teeth, it is ready.
Cut the stalks near the base with a sickle or shears, tie them into bundles, and stand the bundles heads-up somewhere dry and airy for a week or two. If the grain was fully hard in the field you can thresh sooner, but a bundle that finishes drying under cover is never the thing that goes wrong.
Threshing and winnowing
Threshing is knocking the grain loose from the heads. At this scale: put the heads in a clean pillowcase or a tub and beat, tread or rub them. It is not delicate work and it does not need a flail.
Winnowing separates grain from chaff, and it is the satisfying part. Pour the mixture slowly between two containers in front of a fan or a light breeze: the chaff blows sideways, the grain falls straight down. Repeat until what lands is clean. Do it outdoors.
Drying and storing
Grain must be properly dry before it is sealed away — below about 13–14% moisture — or it will mould in the container. If the kernels are hard enough that they shatter rather than squash, and they have had airy indoor time, they are almost certainly there.
Whole berries stored cool, dry and sealed keep for years. Flour does not. The bran carries oils that go rancid within weeks of milling, which is the whole argument for storing grain and milling as you bake rather than the other way round.
Ergot is a fungus that replaces a kernel with a hard, dark purple-black body noticeably longer than the grain around it. It is most common in rye but occurs in wheat and other cereals, and it is toxic — it is the cause of historical mass poisonings.
Look over the threshed grain and discard any of these, along with anything visibly mouldy or discoloured. It is easy to spot once you know the shape, and it is worth the two minutes.
Milling, and what fresh flour does differently
A home mill turns berries into flour in minutes. What comes out is whole flour, all three parts of the grain, and it does not behave like the bag you are used to.
Stone or impact
The two kinds are not interchangeable, and the difference matters more for whole flour than for white.
| Stone burr | Impact | |
|---|---|---|
| How it works | Grain ground between two stones | Grain thrown through steel blades at speed |
| Heat | Cooler — kinder to the bran oils that carry flavour | Hotter |
| Range | Adjustable from cracked grain to fine flour | Fine flour; poor at coarse |
| Noise | Moderate | Loud |
| Speed | Slower | Faster |
For bread from home-grown grain, stone is the better tool: cooler, adjustable, and it will crack grain for porridge as well as mill it for flour. Electric countertop stone mills are commonly rated in grams per minute — around 100 g/min covers one loaf's flour in about five minutes, which is enough for weekly baking.
Which mill is a separate question, and a fair amount of money: four countertop stone mills compared.
Flax, hemp hearts, sunflower and oily nuts paste the stones and are a serious job to clean off. Buy those already hulled or ground. A stone mill wants dry, hard grain: wheat, rye, spelt, corn, rice, dry beans.
The grain must be properly dry, too — damp grain gums the stones, which is the same reason it needed drying before storage.
- It drinks more water. Bran absorbs, and it keeps absorbing for a while after mixing. Expect to add hydration relative to a recipe written for white flour, and give the dough a rest before judging it.
- It ferments faster. Whole flour brings its own enzymes and microbes; doughs move quicker and can go from underproofed to slack sooner than you expect.
- A starter fed on it is livelier. Hungrier, faster, more sour. Not a problem, but not the same schedule.
The baker's percentage calculator is the honest way to make those adjustments: change the hydration figure and see what actually goes into the bowl, rather than adding water by feel and losing the record of what you did.
The year, in order
| When | What |
|---|---|
| Six weeks before hard frost | Sow winter wheat; rake in an inch, firm the surface |
| Winter | Nothing. It sits |
| Spring | One weeding while it is short |
| Early summer | Cut when the bite test cracks; bundle and dry under cover |
| + 1–2 weeks | Thresh, winnow, sort out ergot and mould |
| Then | Store the berries dry and sealed; mill as you bake |
Seeding rates and yields are the usual published ranges for garden-scale growing and vary widely with soil, season and variety. The yield figure at the top is deliberately conservative — it is the number worth planning against.