I had mentioned that I needed to start putting away grain in quantity. I checked a few known suppliers for rough costs, and found that shipping anything resembling a quantity of grain was going to run into stupid money very quickly. (Stupid money: shipping costs significantly more than the grain.)
I've read that some Walmarts carry wheat berries, so I've checked those local to us. No joy. The local hippie market - which I have NEVER set foot into before - does carry wheat berries among other whole grains, to the tune of $1.50/lb or more. Not terrible, but a bit on the high side.
A bit more work found a local granary that supplies both the hippie mart and a local flour mill, and will sell directly to consumers. All their product is certified-organic, which I don't particularly care about either way, but even paying the premium for organic grains is cheaper than paying shipping from a larger mill.
Reading over their web site, I found that one of their suppliers is a farmer whose property I've hunted on nuisance tags for several years. When I went to pick up my order, MrsZ and the girl working turned out to have gone to college together - not close friends, but several classes together.
It's a scary-small world sometimes!
(For the curious: I bought 50# of hard red wheat and 25# of oats for about $75. They are out of soft white wheat until the next harvest, probably July or so. I will continue looking for local and hopefully less-expensive sources.)
7 months ago
2 comments:
Small world indeed! And local hippie marts can have plenty of good things to offer, though they usually carry at a premium.
How are you storing the wheat?
Storage is, indeed, the trick. There are lots of people with lots of different opinions on how best to store whole grains. Buckets, bags, mylay, CO2, oxygen absorbers, vacuum sealing, and so forth.
I've portioned the grain into 3lb bags, then piled those into a 5-gallon pail with a trash bag liner. I will be ordering mylar bags and oxygen absorbers in the near future and re-packaging the grain into those.
Buckets will be stacked in a corner of the cellar, and opened as needed.
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