The Ruminant: Audio Candy for Farmers, Gardeners and Food Lovers - e.30: Krista Rome on Growing Grains and Legumes on a Small Scale

Episode Date: March 22, 2014

Krista M. Rome runs a website called Backyard Beans and Grains, and has published a great manual on selecting, growing, processing and storing various legumes and grains, with a focus on small-scale production.  From her website: The Backyard Beans and Grains Project (BBGP) was started in 2008 as a response to the challenge of incorporating locally-grown staple foods into the diet. Whatcom County (and Western Washington in general) produces a large variety of vegetables, berries, dairy products, and to a lesser degree, fruits, fish and meat. The missing element, especially for vegetarians, those on low income, or those with dairy allergies, is a variety of storable, high-quality vegetable protein sources, i.e. dry legumes and grains. Our research is conducted for the benefit of all regional farmers and gardeners who wish to grow dry beans and grains. We record detailed information about varieties, plant spacing, dates, labor inputs, yields, harvesting and threshing techniques, seed-saving, and storage.   We have self-published an instruction manual, entitled "Growing Dry Beans & Grains in the Pacific Northwest", which contains information on growing, harvesting, and processing dry legumes and grains tailored specifically for Pacific Northwest growers. In this episode, Krista takes me through the ins and outs of growing legumes and grains on a super small scale.

This is the Ruminant Podcast. I'm Jordan Marr. The Ruminant is a website dedicated to sharing good ideas for farmers and gardeners. On the website you'll find my podcast, the odd essay, book reviews, tool reviews, and user-submitted photos of their own farming and gardening practices. It's all at ruminantpod.com. I hope you'll check it out. Alright, let's do a podcast. All right, let's do a podcast. Dan Jason on Salt Springs Island was one of my first mentors.

He's been growing these crops for over 20 years, and others around here had been as well. So I learned that it was possible, and I just started doing seed trials on my own, and that has grown into a community effort of using dry legumes and grains as a way to more empower people how to eat locally in the wintertime with crops that they can easily store and eat 12 months out of the year. That's Krista Rome. Krista's interest in small-scale legume and grain production started with a question. Krista was interested in sourcing as much of her diet as she could from local sources, and she was wondering why it was so hard to find the grains and legumes she was so interested in eating. She found out that there just wasn't a lot being produced,

so she set out to learn how to do it herself, and she's come a long way since then. She's become really good at producing legumes and grains on a small scale to the point that she now offers workshops on growing legumes and grains on a small scale and also has a website from which she sells a book on the same subject as well as some of the legumes and other seeds that she grows. You can find Chris's step-by-step guide to growing your own staples as well as a bunch of other really useful information and some of the seeds and legumes that she grows at backyardbeansandgrains.com. But for now, I hope you enjoy the conversation we had all about what she does. Here we go. Krista Rome, thanks a lot for coming on the Ruminant Podcast. Oh, thank you so much for having me, Jordan.

Krista, you've written a really nifty little manual called Growing Dry Beans and Grains in the Pacific Northwest, a step-by-step guide to producing your own staple foods. I've read the manual. I think it's really, really good, which is why I invited you on the podcast today. But before we go any further, I think the first question I want to ask you is, what would you say to any listeners out there who are not in the Pacific Northwest? Is there going to be anything in this conversation for them? Or is this book really just for people in that Cascadia climate? Well, my book was tailored quite a bit to just the basics of what you might need to know to grow these crops in our cool Pacific Northwest climate. So it's going to apply to other areas with shorter, cooler summers.

It's also going to give a lot of basic information that would apply to anybody on things like cooking tips, how to do the harvest and threshing and seed cleaning of these kinds of crops. So I think anybody anywhere that isn't familiar with growing dry seeded crops, such as the dry legumes and grains and seed crops in the book, they can learn just the basics of what it takes to grow those, how they're different than growing regular fresh vegetables. For sure. And you know what, I've read, I've used your manual in my climate, which is very hot and dry. And I can say that there was plenty in there for me as a complete beginner. And I can say that there was plenty in there for me as a complete beginner. So I can back up what you just said. So we'll talk a little bit

about more about more about the book in a few minutes. But I thought we'd start off with just delving into your history a bit, Krista. So what was it that led you to become interested in grain and legume production on a small scale? Well, I think it was about 2008 or so, there was three or four excellent books that came out back-to-back on the subject of localizing our food system and the importance of reducing our food miles and how far we ship our food. And that was what sparked my own interest in sort of experimenting

with how many local foods I could bring into my own diet. And, you know, there's so many thriving farmers markets around here and support for local farmers. Summertime is really not where the biggest challenge is. It's in the off season. And so what we need is more crops that we can easily store and eat all of the year. And that complements other approaches like winter gardening and food preservation. But these are very basic, easy to grow, easy to store, easy to prepare crops that can add so much and has added a lot to my own homesteading diet.

And Krista, one thing you mentioned in the introduction to your manual is that while it's fairly easy to find various kinds of vegetables for most of the year in Cascadia in the Pacific Northwest, it's not all that easy to find grains and legumes, and really at any time of year that's produced locally. And you mentioned, you kind of go into a little bit why that is. Why aren't we seeing lots of commercial legume and grain production in your neck of the woods? Well, there's several reasons that I've identified. One of the biggest reasons is just the basic economics of land prices and the fact that these kinds of crops are most efficiently produced with large tractors and combines on large acreages. And that poses a real difficulty for farmers around here to compete financially with farmers in the eastern part of Washington, which is where I live, or the Midwest, where land prices are so much lower and farmers can afford to grow these kinds of field crops more economically.

That's the main reason we don't see them more commercially produced. sort of lack of infrastructure and lack of knowledge. And farmers have to gear up in a totally different way than they do with the fresh veggies, which is the way they can make better money around here on a commercial scale. And so when you decided you wanted to make inquiries into producing for yourself, what did you do? Well, the first thing I did was put out a little survey to every, I targeted organic farmers just because that's how I like to grow, but I sent a survey out to all farmers on Whatcom and Skagit County down here asking whether they've ever grown dry legumes or greens.

It's so why they aren't doing it anymore. If not, why not? Just trying to not reinvent the wheel. If there is knowledge out there as to why this isn't possible or isn't easy, I wanted to find that out first before just diving in like a naive person, idealist, I guess. And I actually didn't get a whole lot of feedback. It was discovering a few key people in the region that have been growing dry beans and grains for decades

that really showed me that it was possible. And so I would love to hear a little bit about your very first season, trying it out. Tell us some of the, some of the successes and some of the mistakes or failures that you had. Well, the first season was pretty interesting. I had been at a small scale backyard gardener for many years, but this was the first year I actually tried what you might call farming, which is what I think of as there's a tractor tilling the soil for me, and I'm weeding things

with a hoe, and things are in straight lines, and it was definitely a change in my growing habits. But I found many different types of dry beans to trial. I did flax, hollis oats, quinoa, flower corn, amaranth, and soybeans. I might be forgetting something, but I trialed all of those the first year. And amazingly, I can't even think of anything that didn't work. I had great success, was very inspired by how well most of those crops did for me and just plowed forward. Well, I know that I know in your book, you mentioned that when you were surprised by a few things or challenged by a few things, I know that you discovered that lentils don't yield very highly, and I mentioned that one because French lentils were one of the ones I tried myself this year,

and I didn't even end up bothering to harvest. There was so little on each plant. A couple of things I didn't expect. The oats have been much more of a challenge than I expected. What we're looking for is a hole-less oat, and there's lots of different varieties out there, but that hole-less oats and hole-less barley being what is more suited to a backyard gardener or homesteader

because they're easy to thresh. They don't have a hard hole attached that requires machinery. So I have yet to find a hole-less oat that actually 100% threshes clean, that doesn't leave a few little toothbreakers in the mix. Oh, right. So that's been a little frustrating. And then, of course, quinoa. Everybody wants to grow quinoa these days.

And it's got several challenges that I'm still personally trying to overcome, one being the most common weed we have, lamb's quarters, is able to cross-pollinate with quinoa. And two is the issue of cleaning the saponins, the soapy, bitter residue, off the grain to make it actually palatable. And another is just the climate, finding a variety that is grown in a similar climate in South America, a similar latitude, I think will help have more success. Right. Okay. Well, despite some of these challenges and some in the past and some ongoing,

you have been very successful over these years and you've've learned a lot can you give me a sense so so so i'll just frame this because we were talking before uh you have your own business that involves producing seed for sale as well as giving uh workshops and that sort of thing so you're growing um and and i think what's relevant is that currently it's just yourself you don't have employees. So what are you producing in one season? What is one person able to do if they have enough backyard space? Well, I've been growing the last 400 pounds a year in dry beans plus other legumes like soup peas and garbanzos and favas, plus a couple hundred pounds of corn and then all smaller varieties of the other grains and some vegetables. As far as a backyard gardener, people with the smallest spaces, I like to start them out with pole beans, make a bean teepee or a trellis

because they'll get a lot more yield for a smaller footprint since you have the vertical growth pole beans or pole soup peas. Also, something like flaxseed is maybe a grain type crop, seed crop, to start with for someone with a smaller space because you don't use so much flaxseed every time you eat it. It's not like you need steps every time you make a loaf of bread like you do with wheat. That takes a lot more space. Corn is a lot more productive than any of the other grains. So if you're going to pick just one grain and you have limited space, I highly recommend grain corn. And you could get, for the beans, you get about a pound per 10 row feet.

So that's two and a half cups of beans for 10 linear feet of plants. And you would get more if you were doing a pole a pole variety two to three times more of that so so i mean it sounds like your conclusion has been that if someone wants to set out to do this not just for fun but to actually substantially you know stock their their pantry for the winter that that with with a reasonable size backyard garden they can do this i do believe that a reasonable size backyard garden if you have a real small city lot you maybe are better off doing some of the the prime you know vegetables just enough for your salads and you know your fresh tomatoes and whatnot but if you really want

year-round food you really should devote most of that space to winter crops and and storage crops and like i said that the three most productive i think are the grain corn the the pole beans and soup peas and fava especially i guess if you are really committed to eating super hyper locally there's going to be lots of other people and commercial or not who are focusing on uh kind of the more the vegetables and stuff yeah you can go yeah you can definitely go out and buy your summer veggies. Well, depending on where you live, of course. If you have access to farmers markets and food co-ops, you probably, chances are, can find produce in the summer season.

Right, right. Okay, so, well, look, let's talk a little bit about your manual. I just want to give people a sense of what's in here because I've personally found it really helpful. And one compliment I want to pay you is that it's just really well formatted or laid out. I own Gene Lodgson's book, Raising Grain on a Small Scale. Small Scale Grain Raising. There we go thanks it's a great book but it's it's more of an investment and what i what i really appreciate

about about your your manual is that there you're really succinct in there and you've got photos for for the different um crops that you're talking about and it's just it's a great it's a great reference when you're when you're just about to go out and try lentils for the first time or flax you can flip this thing open and get a few important pointers before you head out there. Well, that's really excellent to hear because that was what I set out to do. I didn't want to write the whole history of all these different grains and everything about their biology because I figured there's other books out there, genes included, that can give you all that information when you want and written by

people that are experts in those crops and their biology i just wanted people to be able to actually go out and do it and to know real specific tips on making it work in this climate but also specific tips on how to do the harvest and processing when you don't have fancy expensive machinery you know just make it very accessible to people so that they didn't feel like they had to have anything special other than a tarp and some boots and and uh and a box fan absolutely and i think i think that's that's what's great is your your book your your manual is like it's really accessible and it's not overwhelming and i think it's a good place to start because of all the tips for each crop.

But also you've got a great resource list at the end that lists some, some further reading recommendations and also sources for seed. So yeah, no, it's, it's great. And I, now I just want to get you to help me take us through it here. What I thought we'd do is just pick a few crops and I'll just get you to talk a little bit about growing them. What I thought we'd do is just pick a few crops, and I'll just get you to talk a little bit about growing them. So maybe we could just start with the dry bean in general and some considerations that people need to have.

If they just want to, I mean, it seems to me that would maybe be a good place to start for people, wouldn't it? To focus on trying to get a few pounds of dry beans put away for the winter? From what I've seen with people in my area that come to my workshops and come to teach me at the farmer's market, the dry beans are really the one that hooks people and draws them in and gets them excited because there are so many different varieties, colors, shapes, patterns, and folks are familiar with cooking them a lot of times and they're just very fun easy to harvest and process it's very easy to get children involved in in the dry beans as well which is encouraging okay well since since since a lot of people listening will at the very least uh or many people listening will have experience growing beans of different types. Let's just talk about processing them.

Are they very difficult to thresh and to store? Beans are pretty easy. I'm going to back up one step before we jump back to processing. That is a big difference in the beginning of the season between beans that are grown for green beans and beans grown for dry beans. And that is their planting dates are much less flexible for any of these crops to get them to mature in a short season. If you are in a short season area, getting them in the ground at the primo time is going to give you an easier harvest so that they dry down in time by the end of the summer. So there's a lot of information on planting dates in the book, but that's going to vary depending on where folks live. The harvesting, so basically you just let

the plants completely dry out in the field. And unless you got them in really late or have some freak early set of storms where it just won't stop raining and things are starting to mold, you can pull them out if they're mature but not dry and hang them in the barn. But it's just so much easier to process them if they're dry before you harvest them. There's a couple different ways to do it. You can pick the individual pods, which actually is a lot quicker than it sounds. You can cut the whole plant out. I like to cut it with pruners at the base of the plant so that I leave the roots and all that dirt behind.

That makes it hard to clean later. You can prune off the base of the plants and throw them in a heap on the tarp. And the threshing, the easiest thing to do is to have everything on a tarp on top of a hard surface, like a paved driveway or in the barn, and just stomp around on them. If they're nice and dry, the threshing will go pretty easy. You can also have the pods in a bowl and just be sitting around in the house doing it with pulling the beans out of the pods with your kids or in front of the TV or while you're chatting. And the one step up in the processing that a lot of people are going to on a small scale is getting a little old wood and converting them into threshing machines.

So that's a piece of equipment if your body doesn't really want to do all that stomping or if it's tedious to thresh them by hand. Yeah, and actually I've got plans for a – I've shared on the ruminant, I've shared plans for converting an old wood chipper into a threshing machine if people are interested in that uh but i can say yeah i mean if you don't want to if you don't want to do any of the larger scale i mean relatively speaking type threshing you can i think you're right i've i've spent uh a good amount of winter hours just sitting in front of a movie and and pulling the beans out of the pods and that works just fine

and especially if you have extra hands to help you. Yeah, and if you enjoy that, I really enjoy sitting around threshing the beans by hand some winters. And then, you know, other times I'm not in the mood, but they're a pretty nice crop to work with. And it feels kind of like the old village days, especially if you get some family members or friends involved doing it together. So, Krista, let's talk about grains and seeds. Uh, what, what, I mean, for, for a complete,

for a complete beginner, what, what do you, what's one you recommend starting out with? That's, uh, not too difficult and, and rewarding in terms of what you get for harvest. Well, if you want to talk, talk about the corn separately. Uh, no, no, that's, separately? No, let's start with corn. Tell me about corn because I haven't tried saving grain corn myself. So there's several different types of grain corn, and it tends to require less water and less fertility than sweet corn. So people that have been stymied in the past by corn not doing so well for them, they might want to try a lower demand grain corn and see

how it does. They still like a little more fertility than your typical, you know, they need more than regular grains, but it's not bad. If you get some of the heirloom varieties, they've been sort of adapted over the years to not be in such heavy feeders like these new hybrids are. And corn has evolved in the Americas basically with hand tools, and that's different than most of your traditional grains, And that's different than most of your traditional grains, which came about in the European continent with the ox and the plow. And so corn ends up being actually a lot more suitable for your low-tech backyard farmer. It's very easy to grow without any specialized equipment and it's very easy to harvest and shell a lot of corn with very inexpensive hand tools as composed compared to if you want to grow a lot of wheat

you start quicker getting into the realm of wanting some more specialized equipment. So that's my pitch for corn. And also the fact that there's so much that's under such threat from GMO contamination right now that I feel like it's a very important crop for us to steward. If you have an isolated site or you're willing to do some hand pollinating to just keep some of these short season grain corn varieties pure and alive for the future. Now, Chris, is it fair to say, though, that corn presents kind of a challenge in terms of people's familiarity with it in the kitchen? I mean, to be honest, I wouldn't know. I mean, I know I'm aware of what I could do with corn, but I wouldn't know where to begin.

You know what I mean? I've never worked with it, you know, starting from seed and doing something with it for eating. What do you do? Yeah, that's a really good point. So, well, the easiest one to start with might be popcorn because people are familiar with that. The only trick is find a variety that will mature in your area,

and then you have to make sure it's nice and dry before you pop it or you won't get a very high or you'll get a lot of kernels that don't pop. But I found an excellent popcorn that I'm very happy with. So that one's pretty easy for folks to relate to. There's also, my favorite is making tortillas. So that's, dent corn is the most traditional use for making masa and tortillas. So that's dent corn is the most traditional use for making masa and tortillas. And it involves that process where you soak the kernels in pickling lime overnight and then rinse it off. And then you grind it up as a wet dough and make your tortillas. You can also make pozole,

which is similar to hominy. A lot more people are familiar with hominy. That's made with lye, and pozole is made with pickling lime. And it's a cooked whole grain corn. It's very hearty, slightly chewy, dense, nutritious addition to any kind of soup or stew. nutritious addition to any kind of soup or stew. You can cook it on the side just as a cooked whole grain. But this is where I start people off because they don't have to have any sort of grinder, no equipment whatsoever. All they need to do is go to the canning section and get the $2 bag of pickling lime and that's all they need other than the corn. So that's what I think, that's what I pass on at the farmer's market to folks that are buying my corn is I give them the recipe, I give them the lime, and they're very excited.

You know, they don't have to have an electric grinder to make the cornmeal or the polenta, you know, which would be other options for growing grain corn is get a grinder and just make cornmeal out of it. Right, right. And now a general question about all of these different legumes and grains and seeds. Is it true that they're a lot tastier compared to what we're used to getting from the store? Well, I think so.

The corn, I do tortilla-making classes. I've probably had six or eight different classes, and everybody that's ever come is just amazed at how much tastier the tortillas are than what they're used to. But, you know, I don't trust my own opinion all the time. I always think everything I grow is way tastier than anything else in the universe. So I think gardeners can be biased that way. But I definitely think there's a lot more nutrition in some of these varieties that are more heirloom or older varieties or ones that have evolved in backyard gardens or with breeders that are focused on things like flavor and nutrition

as opposed to just getting the highest yields or the best resistance to the Roundup that's being sprayed on it. Oh, right. Good point. Okay, and I'm jumping all over the place here, but I've just got all these different questions for you. In your kitchen, do you tend to have one kind of all-purpose grinder for all these different things, or do you have like six different types of grinders for different applications so i have a hand crank masa mill which is corona or estrella

are the main brands the masa is a wet dough so you don't need that extra power of an electric grinder that it's actually the guts out of an old commercial coffee mill, but that's what I was using for my other grains last fall. I think I'm not going to keep doing that because I feel like eating the grains in their whole form is really preferable most of the time, as opposed to making them into flour. I can't talk a whole lot about grinding, because I'm gluten intolerant, so I can't even eat the wheat or the barley or really the oats that I grow. But if I did, I would be eating them as a whole grain.

I think to take real full advantage of the nutritional value and the fact that it was probably a lot of labor to grow them, I want to really honor them in their full state. But for folks that are wanting to grind, anything other than corn will grind pretty well in a regular coffee grinder. If you don't need large amounts, if you just want a cup or two to make a recipe, that's what I recommend. And it's nice and fresh, and you don't have to have a fancy kind of grinder to do it. Okay, cool.

All right, so now let's go back out to the garden and let's talk about buckwheat. Is that one that you'd recommend to the new backyard grower? Buckwheat, did you say? Yeah. Yeah, buckwheat is one of, I think, one of the more valuable crops out there. It has so many different uses beyond just the food value. It's got great abundant flowers for the pollinators. It can be used as a cover crop. I believe it pulls up and concentrates the phosphorus, which is lacking in a lot of soils. And it's extremely easy to grow. It tends to choke out the weeds pretty darn well after maybe one hoeing.

Easy to harvest and thresh. It's a little lower yielding than some of the others. So there's tradeoffs there. It's easy to grow, but it's lower yielding. So if you have a limited space, maybe it's not your first choice. If you have plenty of space but not as much labor, it might be a better option. And one thing to point about both the buckwheat and the millet is that they actually naturally have a hard hole around the grain. And those holes are normally removed with fairly expensive machinery.

So when you grow it for yourself, I use them as flour. You can grind them up with the hole and it's a perfectly good flour but if you wanted to get the hole off and cook it as a whole grain you'd have to devise some kind of low-tech de-hulling machine i see okay and all right i'm gonna now i want to ask you about flax uh i tried growing some golden flax this year i uh i didn't a – actually, I got an all right yield, and it's beautiful, and I didn't find it that hard to thresh and to clean. Has that been your experience? I think the flax is very easy to grow, harvest, and thresh.

The one thing about the flax that's difficult is the weeding. It doesn't tend to shade out the weeds as well as some of the other crops. So I tend to have to weed it about twice as much as the rest. But it loves growing during a cool spring. I plant it here in western Washington in about mid-April. It's ready for harvest right during our nice summer drought season, so there's no stress or pressure about getting it out quickly. You just let it dry down, and I use a little $10 serrated hand sickle

to harvest the flax and most of the other grains with. I just grab a clump with my left hand and cut with the other hand right below the base of the flowering part of the stock. Right, okay. And so another general question, what are you using to plant most of this stuff? So is a lot of this stuff being started indoors or is it mostly being direct seeded? No, this is actually the first year I've ever had access to a greenhouse. So most is direct seeded. The two things that I don't direct seed are the amaranth and the quinoa,

and that's because they look exactly like our most common weeds, the pigweed, weedy amaranth, and the lamb's quarters that I mentioned. And even if I plant them in very straight lines that are marked, I still can't tell them apart when they come up. So I like to do those as transplants. Everything else is direct seeded, although certain things you definitely could start ahead of time in pots if you wanted, the beans and the soybeans. The corn can be transplanted if you have a little bit of a short season and want to get a jump on it. But most of them do grow quite well just in the field.

And how I plant is basically making a furrow with a pointy hoe and dropping the seeds in by hand. Sometimes I'll borrow an Earthway seeder. It's about a $150 tool to plant the seed a lot quicker but not usually and you have you have spacing instructions for all these different um seeds and grains and stuff but is there a fair like are they fairly um tolerant of denser planting i mean mean, like, I don't know, let's just take flax as an example. I mean, you have here that, you know, aim for one seed per inch. What have I got? What are the consequences of three seeds per inch? I think you probably get about the same harvest because your plants, each plant will be a lot smaller and skinnier and they'll be competing

for the same amount of nutrients out of the same area of soil. So I've definitely had times where I'm sprinkling teeny tiny seed in a furrow and I'm really not getting them spaced out as much as I should. And it doesn't really hurt anything. It just, a lot of these plants will take up the extra space or squeeze themselves into a smaller space, whatever you get them, but it doesn't tend to affect the yield a whole lot. Right, okay. So look, let's just do one more, or rather two more. I'd love to just finish this off by talking about amaranth and quinoa.

I think, if I'm not mistaken, my second episode ever for the podcast was with Dan Jason on the topic of amaranth and quinoa uh i think if i'm not mistaken my second episode ever for the podcast was with dan jason on the topic of amaranth and quinoa and one thing he suggested was that he was he was making the case for amaranth at least for me up in this hot dry climate because it does a little better than quinoa in that case um but one point he made uh was that he really advocates it in general because it's a beautiful plant and it's easier to harvest it doesn't have that soapy seed coating that quinoa does and I found all of that to be true I mean we had beautiful plants with huge heads and really decent yields but I just have to say and I'm wondering how you feel I He also suggested that it's essentially like the same in the kitchen as quinoa, and I didn't find that to be the case.

I found it not nearly as enjoyable, unfortunately, to consume. I like quinoa a lot better. What's your take? Well, as far as the kitchen goes, I really like to mix amaranth half and half with quinoa or with millet. Of course, that would probably be millet from the store since ours has holes on them. But a little bit larger seeded grain balances that tiny seed of amaranth, which tends to be a more sticky kind of product. You can also use amaranth as it makes a teeny tiny little popcorn.

You can pop it in a cast iron pan and they're very, very small, but you can pop it and eat it as a snack or put it on your cereal or some such thing. And it's also an incredibly nutritious, high protein, gluten-free flour. So there's other uses for amaranth and it's a little bit more challenging where I'm at because our summers are cooler and shorter. You're really getting it started in the greenhouse and giving it some extra nitrogen tends to help. But it's a little bit trickier here on the harvest end. Yeah, well, I really like the suggestion simply of mixing quinoa with amaranth.

I wish I had done that the winter we had it because, yeah, I just found that cooking up amaranth as a porridge, it just was not nearly as enjoyable as doing the same thing with quinoa. So that's a good suggestion. Yeah. So anything else you want to say about either of those crops? I mean, it sounds like you're still struggling to find the right varieties of each for your oyster climate. I'm still trying to get them to cooperate as well as these other these other crops um i'm

still working with them but they seem to be a little trickier to find the right variety but there's a lot of folks working with them and researching them these days so it shouldn't be too long into the future we have it figured out a little a little better uh and back back back to one last general question kristaista. Are there common mistakes that newbies make when they decide to get into this in the backyard? A couple things that I see. One is with storage, which we didn't talk about yet. But before I store any of these dry crops, I make sure they're nice and dry. And usually they get extra drying time after harvest before I thresh.

But then after they're threshed, I usually have them in paper grocery sacks around the house for maybe another month, even if they're stacked up. But some are dry. And I don't use any fancy moisture absorbent or anything else in my storage, but I think that extra drying that I give them helps a lot so that I either put those paper bags in Rubbermaid type bins or even in glass jars for my seed packing. And I hear a lot of people mentioning that their beans got moldy in the jar over the winter. And that would be that they didn't let them dry good enough, either on the vine or after threshing. And then they put them in an airtight container.

So if you have any concern about whether or not it's dry enough, just don't put it in an airtight container. And they won't mold because that's a lot of work to lose to to come back a few months later and kind of it's moldy um and then the other the other main mistake is just not not planting in in the good planting windows you know not getting stuff in soon enough so that it's maturing when our rains have already come back as opposed to when it's nice and dry. And folks harvesting before crop is mature. So really, if at all possible, let that crop fully mature

and fully dry down in the field. And they can get rained on a little. It's usually not a big deal to have a few rainstorms. It's just when it's cold and dewy every night and raining every day that you start to think about pulling things a little early. Well, I was laughing as you just described the moldiness in the pantry because that first season when we grew amaranth, we grew quite a bit of it, at least for our purposes, we probably had 10 pounds or something

of seed. And, uh, I mean, most of it ultimately was, went moldy. And I, I, I, I shudder to think about how we stored it. I mean, we, we, we, we Ziploc it, you know, in plastic bags. And, uh, I mean, I, I, I now realize that was just asking for trouble, and that's what we got. We even did a trip to the Grand Canyon from up here in Canada that winter, and I took some down. I took the risk crossing the border with it, and we ate moldy amaranth porridge in the Grand Canyon. Oh, no. We were down there. It was still great, though.

Still, it's like you said, it always tastes good when you grow it so um can i pitch a couple of crops that i think are overlooked that are super well suited for us here uh i would i would that that that would be delightful please do okay um and just a second on wheat and barley since we didn't talk about those grains. There's a lot of research currently being done on those crops with Washington State University down here at the Mount Vernon Research Center. So people that are especially interested in those crops should get a hold of the folks there at WSU and see if they'll share some information on varieties with them. They're going to have the most up-to-date information for organic systems. And then the crops that we didn't mention, the legumes, that I think people need to pay more attention to in a cooler, shorter climate

are soup peas and fava beans. Fava beans are something that if you're in a temperate enough zone, like we are on the water here, you can plant them in the fall and they'll overwinter. So that's great to have something green on the soil over the winter when it's getting pounded by rain and fixing nitrogen at the same time. And it also puts your labor at a different time of the year. So you're planting in the fall and your harvest is ahead of everything else in the summer when you're not already busy harvesting

all of your other legumes and grains. And the soup peas, we used to grow lots and lots of peas around here. They also thrive during a cooler spring and dry down right during our drought season. So really just learning how to cook with those types of legumes, just learning how to cook with those with those types of legumes uh either remembering how or learning from from from fresh and teaching others how to use them i think uh will go a long way towards improving our local food system right on krista well i think uh i think with with more guests like you i could just start a self-service podcast where you just phone in and do the whole thing yourself. Clearly, you're passionate about this stuff. And that's great. Thank you. So I want to just close by telling everyone listening that I'm looking at a page of Krista's

book. And each page in the book, once you get into the crop section, which is the main section of the book, each page is a different crop. And it tells you there's a little introduction to each one. So yeah, each crop has one page, which means you don't get overwhelmed with info and you get a little bit of introduction. And then there's information on planting, maintenance, harvest, threshing, seed saving, cooking, yields and labor, research varieties, and then suggestions for additional information. And Krista manages to get this all very succinctly in one page and even include a photo. And I think you've done a great job, Krista, so thank you for writing it.

Please tell us how people can get your manual and how people can get seeds from you. Okay. Well, I have a website. It is www.backyardbeansandgrains.com. And on there are all of my seeds as well as the manual. And you can get the manual, the hard copy is $20 or you can order the PDF I sent you by email for $10 if you want to save some paper and some money. I also sell locally in Bellingham, Washington,

and I'm at our farmer's market here on Saturdays. And I also am happy to talk to folks over the phone that have questions that the website doesn't answer. And, yeah. Well, great. That's it for answer. And yeah. Well, great. That's it for now. All right.

Well, Krista, thanks a lot for coming on the Ruminant Podcast. Thanks for having me, Jordan. Always fun to talk on the subject. So that's it, folks. Hope you enjoyed it. And remember, you can find all kinds of content, past episodes of the Ruminant, as well as some pretty interesting photo-based posts at theruminant.ca. Go check it out. Thanks a lot. And don't forget, if you have something you

want to share via a voice recording, something interesting you're doing on your farm that you can explain in one or two minutes, leave me a voicemail. I'll put it up on the podcast. 250-767-6636. Thanks folks. See you next time. Because why would we live in a place that don't want us A place that is trying to bleed us dry. We could be happy with life in the country with salt on our skin and the dirt on our hands. I've been doing a lot of thinking, some real soul searching, and here's my final resolve.

I don't need a big old house or some fancy car to keep my love going strong. So we'll run right out into the wilds and graces. out into the wilds and graces. We'll keep close quarters with gentle faces and live next door to the birds and the bees and live life like it was meant to be. Bye.