Sourcing Heirloom Wheat Seed

We would like to try growing a years worth of wheat and figure we need to plant around 50lbs to get what we need. I'm looking at Turkey Red right now, and found a source in IL, but want to ask you folks for input on varieties of heirloom (pre-1900) hard winter wheat and where to source it in sufficient quantities for our planting needs. I keep finding it by the 9gm or 50 seed packet, but really don't want to wait a few years to be able to use the harvest!

I have grown thousands of heritage wheat varieties.

They multiply from 0 to 300 times. How any particular wheat grows in my garden is totally unpredictable. Can't tell based on it's history or story if it will grow well in any particular garden.

I'd suggest that you spend a year learning how to grow wheat. Get a bunch of those 50 seed packets, and plant them to see which thrive with your habits and ecosystem.  Then re-plant what did well for you.

Joseph Lofthouse wrote:
I'd suggest that you spend a year learning how to grow wheat. Get a bunch of those 50 seed packets, and plant them to see which thrive with your habits and ecosystem.  Then re-plant what did well for you.

You do make a good point about finding which varieties do well here. I have only planted one packet of White Sonora wheat that seemed to do well despite less than favorable conditions, but it was soft winter wheat not a hard variety which is what I really want (I'll continue growing the Sonora to increase my seed, but it's for flat breads not the sourdough I like to make.)

My purpose for asking is that we want to become self/ community sufficient as quickly as possible so we are trying to source larger quantities of wheat for planting since people just don't grow cereals around here anymore and we've got a field without a fence that we want to grow stuff other than grass and briars in.

I also suppose that we could buy that 45lb bag of turkey red wheat and discover that it doesn't grow well here and we're out the money and would be a year behind on the self sufficiency journey. On the other hand, a neighbor from a nearby community has grown this variety in the past and recommended it to us when he found out we were thinking about trying to grow wheat so that suggestion makes me think it's fairly likely to succeed here.

Check out the greatamericanseedup.org’s baker’s bundle. They also have a great video about exactly what y’all were discussing. Each bundle includes a good amount of seed so you could certainly harvest enough (assuming good growth cycles) for a field very quickly, I’m counting on it.

Just realized I needed to update! We ended up buying 50lb of turkey red wheat from https://qualityorganic.net/
in IL. We also bought hulless oats, and popcorm. They aren't seed sellers, but rather grain sellers. They had the best prices that we could find.

We've got wheat and oats up. Of course we'll wait another month or two to plant the popcorn. Our plan is to save enough seed from all three crops to give us the seed needed to feed our family/ livestock next year. Hopefully we'll have enough to eat some too. We definitely have enough popcorn (if we can get it to grow!)

We get all of our chicken wheat also known as gravity grains, whole wheat flour, oats and heirloom cornmeal from Brian and his wife. They are good people and are doing really great things with organic heirlooms in the middle of conventional corn/bean country.

Laura Trovillion wrote:We get all of our chicken wheat also known as gravity grains, whole wheat flour, oats and heirloom cornmeal from Brian and his wife. They are good people and are doing really great things with organic heirlooms in the middle of conventional corn/bean country.

I was impressed by their selection and pleased with their pricing. I would have loved to find a place more local to me here in the Missouri Ozarks to buy from, but as you say, we live in the middle of conventional crop country so all the grain sellers I found in Missouri sold conventional seed, with one or two having organic options, but no heirlooms. We are toying with the idea of selling organically raised, heirloom grain in a few years when we get grain growing figured out.