Today marks the last pick-up for our Summer and Peak season CSA shareholders.

Our Full season shareholders have another two months of veggie boxes to look forward. While the next eight weeks of boxes will be choked full of fall favorites such as onions, potatoes and winter squash, today, we wanted to send off our Summer and Peak shareholders with a special fall treat – UW Farm Grown 100% whole wheat rye flour!
 

Last November, we embarked on our second consecutive year of experimenting with grain growing on the UW Farm. Each season, one of our plots at our CUH (Center for Urban Horticulture) farm site is designated as a ‘fallow’ plot. A different plot lies fallow from season to season as part of our crop rotation.

Letting a plot rest, or be taken out of production, every few years is an essential part of our commitment to soil health and regenerative practices. Although we are certified organic and we work each season to build soil health with compost, cover crops and more, growing annual vegetables is essentially an extractive process. Each time we harvest vegetables we are removing nutrients from the agro-ecosystem. Letting the soil rest for extended periods allows soil ecosystems to reboot after extractive disturbances. 

However, in order to stimulate soil activity and nutrient cycling, its important to have something growing – soil microbes have symbiotically beneficial relationships with plant roots. Additionally, organic matter from plants and other life is the basis of the soil food web. For these reasons, we grow cover crops on a majority of the farm to last over the winter. During previous seasons, we’ve planted our annual fallow plot with a summer loving cover crop blend including such plants as oats, barleys and clovers. 

A couple seasons ago, farm manager Perry Acworth began to wonder about growing winter grains as an alternative cover crop in our fallow plot. Luckily, our region is graced by the presence of a Washington State University Extension office in Mt. Vernon known as The Bread Lab. The lab is staffed by a group of WSU researchers and graduate students who are committed to ‘working outside of the commodity system on wheat and other grains”. Here’s a couple excerpts from the WSU Breadlab website highlight why we here at the UW Farm were excited to work with them: 
 

“One of our goals is to introduce the concept of affordability into our regional food systems—specifically to develop better tasting, healthier, affordable bread and keep the value where it is produced while not pricing people out of staple foods.”

“We create and breed different wheat, barley and rye varieties that are better for the soil and farming, way better tasting, and best of all, healthier for you. Then we share that knowledge with the rest of the world. We work with bakers, farmers, flour mills and basically anyone that wants to create healthier food through whole grains. Our goal is to change the way the world views and eats wheat.” – The WSU Breadlab Team
 

Perry began building a relationship with the Bread Lab team in 2019. In 2022, we grew a cereal grain for the first time. 2023 marked our first harvest of grains. The seed blend of over 200 heritage wheat varieties was coined ‘Climate Blend Wheat’ as a nod to its climate resiliency through biodiversity.

The lab generously donated the wheat berries. We watched the wheat grow all winter and spring, experiencing a dazzling diversity in the developing of wheat head shapes and sizes across the plot. After the harvest in July and August 2023, we worked with students to thresh and winnow the wheat berries by hand. Threshing and winnowing is essential before milling it into flour. Luckily, an anonymous donor donated an electric flour mill.

This enabled us to give 100% whole wheat flour to all our CSA customers with plenty left over for us to make dough for pizza bakes. The farm team agreed that the wheat blend created a delicious flour. When telling students that the pizza crust they were consuming came from the farm, they were amazed. 

After this initial success, we decided to try a different grain this season. After visiting the Bread Lab for a second time and meeting Rye-focused PhD student Laura Valli, rye seemed like the obvious choice because of its amazing properties regarding soil health as well as flavor and nutrition. 

Last November, after receiving another generous donation of berries (this time rye berries) from the Bread Lab team, we tilled Winter Rye into the soil of this year’s fallow plot. Since then we’ve watched the rye grow, first as a lush green grass and then transforming into six foot tall stalks with sagging, berry-laden heads. For the last 10 months, the roots of our rye have infiltrated the soil below and stimulated soil life, free from any human disturbance. As with the wheat last season, growing a grain over the winter in this way has allowed us to forgo any need for irrigation, cutting down on our overall water usage.