I’ve been selecting rye for seed, and decided to make the activity more productive by doing some simple observations, and measuring yields.
Saving my Rye Seed
I recently read an old article that suggested that grain taken from the middle of the ear produced better and higher yielding plants. This article on how to rejuvenate crops describes the process. So as I was preparing seed for sowing I thought that I would use this and select that seed. I have ten bundles of rye, so cut 5 heads from each bundle to use. When cutting I chose heads that were long and fat with seed. Part way through I noticed that there was a noticeable difference between the thicknesses of straw where the head attached to the stalk, so decided to restrict myself to the thickest straws. I hope that this will increase the bulk of straw over time.
Removing the Rye Seed from the Ears
There wasn’t enough grain to try threshing it, and I wanted to restrict my seed grains to the ‘productive’ section of the ear, so I simply rubbed the Rye grains out of that section with my fingers. I left the last ear to count the number of grains in the ear, and then to weigh it.
Grain Count and Weight
The last ear contained 78 grains, of which 6 were small, and not properly formed. Those 78 grains weighed 5 grams. My scales only weigh in whole grams, and were flickering between 4 and 5 grams, but 5 grams is about right I suspect. I have now ordered one of the little pocket digital scales that you can get to weigh in 0.1 gram increments, and will do the same again once they arrive.
With a rough number of grains for a 5 gram weight, and wanting to 200 plants for this year, I weighed out 20 grams of Rye from this special selection, and they are soaking ready to sow soon. The rest of this selection was put into a plastic container with some Diatomaceous Earth, which should kill any bugs, or mites, and put it to one side.
Grain Removal
The ears of rye still contained plenty of grain, so I decided to see how long it would take to strip the grain out of the ears just using my clumsy, unpractised fingers. It took fractionally over 30 minutes to remove the rest of the rye grains, whilst drinking tea, and listening to the radio. Not an unpleasant job, but one suited to smaller fingers than mine. This grain weighed 168 grams. This suggests that it would take about 90 minutes to produce 450 grams (1 lb) of rye. Enough for a small loaf. That may seem fiddly, but there is a lot of calories and healthy nutrition in Rye flour, as the information on this nutritional site suggests. So that 90 minutes sat down will produce enough grain to meet about 90% of your needs for calories.
Very Rough Yield Calculations for my Rye
With a figure of 5 grams per ear, I decided to take a count of the number of straws per rye plant. Although not totally accurate, or scientific, I picked a block of ten ‘stubs’ from the center of one of the beds, and counted the number of large straws for those plants. This gave me a total of 177 large straws. I ignored the smaller straws, but cannot be sure that all of the large ones carried an ear of rye. However if they had all carried an ear, that works out to 885 grams for ten plants. With the rye plants set out at a 1 foot spacing, and 10 sq feet being around a sq meter, I have a rough yield of 885 grams per sq meter (almost two pounds of rye) or 800 grams per sq yard.
Again I need to stress that this is a really rough guide, but it’s based on real figures from a real plot.
As you can imagine, I’m pretty chuffed.
All of the best
Deano
Hi Deano
Since you moved the website / blog I have been missing your posts as I had not (until just now) subscribed.
Very interesting re how long it took to get sufficent grain for a loaf and the calories therein. I have long wondered if it would be possible by hand or if some kind of tool was necessary. Did you make a loaf?
Anni
Hi Anni
Lovely to have you back 🙂
I have a grain mill arriving in a couple of weeks. First loaf to follow. It will have a post or posts all to itself.
How’s it going at your end?
Deano
Hi Deano
All very good here thank you. Most of the plants / veggies in the garden have grown huge this year which I am hoping is an indicator of ever increasing fertility, helped by the warm weather as well. Looking forward to hear how you get on with the grain mill.
Anni