Grainy Successes

The problem with popcorn is that it “don’t get no respect.” Sure, it’s a fun food, nice to toss into your mouth while you watch a movie. But that’s been the case only since the 1930s.

Popcorn is a grain, a whole grain, as good a source of nourishment as wheat, rice, rye, or any other grain. Popcorn was among the foods brought by native Americans to the first Thanksgiving dinner. For anyone who likes the idea of raising their own grain, popcorn is a good choice. It’s easy to grow, it’s easy to process, and it’s easy to save seed from one year to the next. I grow two varieties -- Pink Pearl and Dutch Butter-flavored -- and have saved seed from my plantings for over 20 years.

Every year I plant two beds of popcorn, each bed 10 feet long by 3 feet wide. Growing popcorn is no different than growing sweet corn, except that you can plant a little earlier (early May around here) because

the lower sugar concentration of popcorn seeds make them less likely to rot and because the plants inhabit their beds pretty much the whole season. Popcorn, like any corn, needs good soil; all the beds in my vegetable gardens are moist and rich from drip irrigation and a yearly dressing of compost.

Popcorn and sweet corn need to be isolated from each other as does each variety of popcorn, if you want the varieties to remain pure. My popcorns grow in separate beds that are within 20 feet of each other so they do cross-pollinate a little, which is interesting. The sweet corn, though, is in a separate garden. Cross-pollination, in this case, would make for less pop-able popcorn and less sweet sweet corn.

I plant two rows of “hills,” or clusters of plants, down each bed, with 2 feet between hills and 8 seeds per hill. Once seedlings are up and growing, hills get thinned to the best four plants. Yields are about 36 to 72 ears of popcorn per bed (the Dutch Butter-flavored variety bears 2 ears per stalk), which translates to 6 to 12 pounds of popcorn per bed. We just finished off the end of last year’s harvest, so 12 to 24 pounds of popcorn is about how much Deb and I pop each year. (The average American consumes about 3 pounds of popcorn per year, in a movie theatre, of course.)

Besides offering the satisfaction of growing your own grain, popcorn-growing also lets you choose from a

number of varieties. They don’t all taste the same. An important commercial criterion is volume after popping. My popcorn does not puff up to great volumes, but the popped kernels have rich flavor.

We just finished snapping the dry ears from the stalks of this year’s crop, although there’s no rush to harvest popcorn. Processing entails nothing more than pulling back the husks and tying 2 or 3 ears together to hang and dry from the kitchen rafter. It looks very pretty.

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Months ago, I wrote about planting another grain, wheat. The plants grew nicely, ripening to a small amber wave in their corner of the garden before being harvested back in July. After hanging the cut stalks to dry for more than a month, I stuffed them in a pillow case and batted the pillow case around to knock the wheat berries from the stalks. No luck.

So I let the pillowcase full of stalks, seedheads, and grain sit another few weeks. This morning batted it all around some more. Too many berries still clung to the the seedheads. Popcorn is easier.

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Besides popcorn, another of my successful and satisfying home-grown grains is chestnut. Okay, it’s not really a grain. But chestnut is unique in being a nut that’s high in starch, just like grains. In many parts of

'Colossal' chestnuts dropping from tree

the world, the nuts are dried, ground into a flour, and used to make breads, pancakes, and other foods usually made with grain flours.

Like popcorn, chestnuts are very easy to grow. Just plant two trees. They grow fast, they bear quickly and reliably, and they have an attractive spreading form clothed with leaves that stay glossy green all season until they turn a rich brown color in autumn. The only caution is to avoid planting them where you’ll be frequently walking, playing, or sitting because of the spiny burs that drop with the nuts.

American chestnuts succumb to chestnut blight but there are plenty blight-resistant varieties, such as Colossal (slightly resistant), Eaton, and Peach.

Chestnuts are a lot easier to process than wheat. Just pick nuts up from the ground daily during their

'Colossal' is colossal!

2-week ripening period, let them sit a few days to cure, then slit and roast them -- 450° F for 1/2 hour. The nuts can also be dried for grinding into flour. I may try that.

Rice, Corn, & Barley Harvest

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It’s been awhile since the grains have been harvested so it’s time to prepare them for consumption. Longest in preparation will be barley.

The barley is from last year’s harvest, and the grain-laden stalks have been bundled together and hanging from a kitchen rafter since then. I’ve procrastinated processing because of last year’s frustrations in trying to thresh wheat, also grown last year; the grains clung tenaciously to their stalks and no amount of battering would thoroughly separate them. I’ve also procrastinated because the bundle of barley’s tawny brown stems, with long, delicate, spiky awns emerging from the heads, look so decorative dangling upside down near the kitchen ceiling.

A bare spot now remains where the barley once hung. Earlier today, after being stuffed into a pillowcase and batted against a brick wall, the stalks easily released their plump grains. I separated the grain rom the chaff by pouring the grains back and forth between two buckets in a slight breeze, and soon had the whole crop cleaned.

As you’ve probably guessed by now, my barley crop wasn’t measured in tons or even bushels. I had planted a 3 foot by 3 foot area and reaped a quarter of a pound. Consulting my 1914 “Farmer’s Cyclopedia of Agriculture,” an acre of barley (back then and in Iowa) averaged 45 bushels of barley, or 1,800 pounds, which would translate to a bit over one-third of a pound for my 9 square foot plot. Respectable for my first try.

The end-product for my crop will be beer. More specifically, the goal was to find out how much barley to grow to make a 6-pack. My next step, then, is to malt the barley. More on that at a later date . . .

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I “hauled in” the rice harvest back in early October, all 40 grams of it. That 40 grams was not a bad yield considering that I got the seedlings started late; that I only planted a 2 foot by 3 foot bed of it; that it was growing under dryland conditions, which yields less than wetland rice; and the variety I planted, Hayayuki, is a wetland variety. Still, it was fun.

The aforementioned limitations are nothing compared to the limitation in preparing the rice for consumption. Like most other grains, rice has a hull that needs to be removed before the grain can be eaten. (The hull is no impediment with barley for malting because what’s used for beer is maltose-laden water that is leached through the sprouted, cracked grain.) Hullers are available for small-scale grain processing, but are neither economical nor capable of handling nano-yields such as my 40 grams.

A conversation with Ben Falk (www.wholesystemsdesign.com), who had given me the seeds and has harvested over 100 pounds of rice in Vermont, did not leave me optimistic about getting off those hulls. (He has a small huller.) No need for me to try cracking them off with a rolling pin, boiling them and hoping they would float up to be skimmed off, or toasting -- he’d already tried all that.

Years ago, I got a Solis coffee grinder that does an adjustable grind. How about setting the Solis to barely grind the rice, just enough to crack off the hulls? The problem is that the largest setting was a bit too small for the rice grains. Still, no other options presented themselves. What I now have is cracked rice. I cooked some; the flavor was very bland, even for rice.

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It isn’t only a lot more growing experience that is responsible for my much more successful crop of a third grain: corn. Corn is easier to grow, to harvest, and to process than other grains on a home garden scale. I grow popcorn and polenta corn in addition to, of course, sweet corn, the latter considered a vegetable because it’s eaten “green,” that is, before full maturity.

It’s with good reason that corn has been such a success for so long here in the Americas. The grains are large, they come packed together in a single ear, and that ear is covered by one easily shucked husk. Corn is such a successful cultivated grain that it can’t even survive in the wild. An ear dropped to the ground would sprout too many seedlings so close together that they would be stunted fighting each other for water, light, and nutrients.

Processing popcorn and polenta corn entails nothing more than picking it, pulling back the husk, and hanging it from kitchen rafters until ready for use. Giving a ear an “indian burn” snaps off kernels for popping or grinding.

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One more home-grown grain rounds out my larder. Chestnuts. They’re not actually a grain but are a uniquely starchy nut so fulfill much the same purpose as any grain in the diet. Chestnuts have the advantages of being perennial, borne on an attractive tree, and, because they bloom late and have few pests, bearing reliably.

Chestnut preparation is easy: One cut crosswise about half way through each nut, then roasting in a hot oven for about 30 minutes. Delicious.

FINDING THE RIGHT CURE

“Cure” is a funny sort of word. It means, on the one hand, to relieve from illness, and, on the other hand, to subject to some sort of preservative process. (And, on yet another hand, a few other things.)

The chestnut variety 'Colossal'

Which brings me to my chestnuts . . .  no, they’re not diseased, but they do need to be cured. We chestnut growers face two opposing goals with our harvested nuts: Good storage versus good eating. A freshly fallen chestnut is rich in starch and moisture and, because it is alive, it’s able to fight off mold and store well if kept near freezing temperatures. But it doesn’t taste good. For best eating, the nuts need to cure, a process whereby some moisture is lost and some of the starch changes to sugars, dramatically improving flavor. But cured nuts don’t keep well.

This story has one other wrinkle, the chestnut weevil. This bugger lays eggs in the nuts while they’re on the tree and, after nuts drop, eats some nutmeat and then crawls into the ground for winter. 

Chestnuts begin to lose moisture usually as soon as they touch ground. They start at about 50% moisture and once moisture drops below 35%, they’re dead and will rot unless eaten quickly or thoroughly dried (for chestnut flour, for instance). The way to store chestnuts, then, is to make sure they’re plumped up with water, and the way to do this is with a dunk in water for about a week. Soaking also kills weevils. The nuts may begin to ferment, so the flavor is ruined after the dunking -- but they’re not supposed to be eaten yet. 

Another way to deal with hydration and weevils is with a 30 minute dunk in water heated to 120° F. The temperature and timing are exacting so I this week opted for the less exacting week-long soaking from my just-harvested nuts.

Kept plump with moisture and at temperatures near freezing, nuts subjected to either water treatment will store well until -- since they are alive -- they begin to sprout.

The way to get chestnuts ready for eating is to bring them to a drier and slightly warmer, but still cool, location. Depending on temperature and humidity, the transformation from foul to flavorful could take from 3 to 14 days. Cooler temperatures and moister air lengthen the curing time, but also offer better flavored chestnuts.

(Much of this information was gleaned from an article by Greg Miller in The Chestnut Grower, http://www.centerforagroforestry.org/pubs/chestnut/v8n3/v8n3.pdf. Greg is the owner of the Empire Chestnut Company, http://www.empirechestnut.com, which sells high-quality chestnuts, chestnut trees, and chestnut seeds.)

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The sweet potato harvest is in, as it should be before cold threatens. Soil temperatures below 50° F. cause chilling injury to the roots and internal decay. As I’ve written previously, I planted the vines atop piles of wood chips and leaves that arborists and landscapers dump here and that I spread as mulch later in autumn. All summer, the sweet potatoe vines multiplied and stretched out as far as 20 feet from my original plants. 

Unfortunately, it looks like the plants put more energy into making vines than fat roots. From 4 plants and a lot of vine growth I harvested a mere half-bushel of sweet potatoes. A couple of the potatoes were football-sized, others were below average, and too many were like swollen, orange strings. 

Stringy roots result from too rich a soil, but I didn’t even plant in soil! Probably the hot summer and sometime moist weather sped decomposition of the chips and leaves to release nutrients.

But we’re here to talk about curing. Like chestnuts, sweet potatoes need to be cured for good storage and good flavor. In this case, what’s needed are a week and a half of temperatures 80 to 85° F. and high humidity, not easy to find this time of year. My greenhouse benches are cleared and temperatures there  get quite warm on sunny days, so that’s were I’ve spread out the sweet potatoes. Longer curing times are needed at cooler temperatures, such as at room temperature. Covering potatoes with cloth or putting them in perforated plastic bags, or keeping them in the greenhouse, maintains high humidity.

Once cured, sweet potatoes are ready for eating. My paltry crop will be eaten soon, but for longer storage, medium humidity and temperature around 60° F. are ideal. Refrigeration is a no-no. The roots get chilled, just as they would in the ground (or my mulch pile), and show it. 

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Black walnuts trees abound and the nuts are raining down and free for the taking. The sooner the fleshy husk is taken off, the less stained and better-flavored the nuts. No end of innovative ways have been devised for separating the husk from the shell, everything from spreading the harvested nuts on the driveway and running over them with your car to stomping on each nut to cutting the husks off to letting the weight of a small sledge loosen them and then twisting them off with gloved hand. We opt mostly for the latter, followed by hosing and drying them in the sun for a couple of days.

Of course, hulled black walnuts are not yet ready to crack and eat; they need to be cured, for a couple of months. Curing black walnuts is simple, involving nothing more than storage in any cool or cold, dry location impervious to squirrels. There are plenty of black walnuts for human and squirrels alike, but a cache of hulled, clean nuts is too tempting to those rats with tails.