Growing Oats at Home

Growing a vegetable garden at home is becoming more common these days, and that’s fantastic news. It cuts down on global food miles. It opens up access to healthy, organic food to loads more people. It creates biodiversity for the environment and pollinators. It likely inspires many compost piles which keeps organic waste out of the landfill. That’s to name a few.

Perhaps the next step for successful vegetable growers is to consider cultivating some homegrown grains, and perhaps the easiest grain for a gardener to try is oats. Oats can come in hull-less varieties (Avena nuda) which are easier to process without machinery. Plus, they are extremely versatile in the kitchen, and the stalks are great for mulching the garden afterward.

While many gardeners are hesitant to try their hands at growing grains, oats are perhaps the most agreeable to small-scale production. So, why not give them a try?

Sowing Oats & How Much Space You Need

To break it down a little, a bushel of oats produces about 36 pounds of raw oats which breaks down into roughly 1/3 of that weight in rolled oats. Growing one bushel of oats requires about 400 square feet of garden space, roughly 1/100^th of an acre. This amount of space will require roughly a pound of oat seeds.

In most of the United States, oats are an early spring crop, but they can be planted in the fall for USDA Zones 8 and higher. Cool, wet weather is ideal for sowing oats. They can be broadcasted directly atop the garden and raked in, or they can be planted in rows, spacing them four inches apart in rows that are a foot apart. They’ll need plenty of water to germinate.

In general, they are considered an easy crop to grow. After all, oats are just a type of grass.

Growing & Caring for Oats

Young oat plants do well to not compete with weeds. Then, as the oats get taller (two to three feet), they’ll completely consume the garden and shade out other plants, particularly if the seed has been broadcasted. For oats planted in rows, it’s a matter of weeding now and again to ensure the oats win oats over the other stuff.

Water is going to be an important piece of the oat-growing experience. While they don’t want to grow in puddles, they do like the soil to stay moist, i.e. pretty close to muddy. Using drip irrigation is a good idea as it’s better to water them at the base as opposed to via a sprinkler because wet plants are more susceptible to crown rust, a fungal disease common to oats. (And, there are crown rust-resistant varieties to look out for.)

“Streaker” is a popular variety of hull-less oats. They take about four months to mature.

Harvest & Processing Homegrown Oats

Harvesting

Oats for eating are ready to harvest when the grain is firm but still soft enough to dent it with a fingernail. To get the timing right, it might require visiting those oats every couple of days to check once they get close to maturity (about 100 days after sowing them).

When the time is right, harvest the seed heads only, cutting them as high up the stem as possible. This helps when threshing because there will be less debris to clean away. Later the standing straw can be cut down to use as mulch.

Processing

The harvest seed heads will need to cure or dry out. To do this, they can be spread on a blanket or tarp in a cool, shady spot. Once cured, the oats need to be threshed to separate the hulls and other debris from the grains. This can be done by covering the seed heads with another cloth, stomping all over them, and then allowing the wind (or a fan on low) to blow away the debris.

After this, the threshed oats can be put in a pot or bath so that any extra debris floats away. Dry the grains on a screen, making sure they are really dry, and then they can be stored in an airtight container. At this point, they are “steel-cut” oats, or they can be rolled before use. They can also be ground into oat flour, used to make oat milk, or fermented to make oat yogurt.

The Oat-Growing Experiment

This is a great introduction to growing grains at home on a small scale. It’s a fun experiment that doesn’t cost much to try (a pound of seed is less than ten dollars), and the entertainment will last for months. Even better, it could result in pounds of food!

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• 10 Protein-Packed Overnight Oatmeal Recipes
• What You Need to Know About Instant Oatmeal and Your Health

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