‘the pancake patch’

This morning I came across an article on Grist about a farmer/writer named Gene Logsdon.  Wendell Berry is a big fan, and he’s known for his books, Living at Nature’s Pace:Farming and the American Dream and The Contrary Farmer. This article is a short interview with Logsdon about a book that he wrote in the late 1970s called Small Scale Grain Raising. With the renewed interest in gardening some folks are gearing up to take their patches beyond tomatoes and peppers and see what else they can add to their personal food production, and this book is garnering interest. He calls small scale grain gardening “the pancake patch”, which is pretty cute, right? I love a contrary farmer with a sweet side.

The picture above is unfortunately not an example of a small scale patch, but one I took at Pie Ranch of the wheat they had just harvested. You can see that article here. There was an enormous difference in the taste of the pancakes I had there made from freshly harvested wheat. Delicious and really full of flavor, the taste made me realize how many of the grains I eat taste really flat and flavorless. I of course knew that about my homegrown vegetables, but hadn’t extended that kind of thought to grains.

Here’s a picture of the original cover of the book. I can’t get it to enlarge, but I have to show you because being a child of the 70s, I of course think that all 70s design is beautiful – in it’s own 70s kind of way!

I’m curious if any of you have tried going grain, I imagine it’s as easy as growing any kind of grasses. Was processing the grain really difficult?  I’m putting this book on my reading list!