Winter Barley Varieties

Trying to hunt through all these seed company websites and find the right barley varieties to start my landrace breeding trials for early ripening yields is producing a bit of a headache.

If anybody has any awesome winter barley varieties you know [or obscure seed companies you'd like to suggest] please advise. Especially if they're known to do well in the Pacific Northwest.

The forum software doesn't allow edits to be made to a post after someone else has replied, otherwise I'd keep a running list of suggestions here in the OP for the sake of future readers.

For clarification, the reason I'm aiming to breed such a short-season winter barley is to set up a dual-crop grain rotation ala Fukuoka.

Salt Spring Island Seeds has some great barley for the Wet West Coast.

I've talked with Dan before, and all his varieties overwinter here.

His Winter Barley does exceptionally well for me. I plant it before the end of Oct, and it just blows me away it does so well.


I too have the goal of a short season, over winter, Fukuoka style grain. I need one that can be planted before the end of Oct, and harvested before the end of May to suit my rain schedule. Fukuoka had one that he planted in Sep and harvested in April... but I've never seen one that matures that fast here .... yet. A landrace is definitely a good idea.

I don't know if Salt Spring seeds ships south of the 49th (well, 48th and a little bit). If he doesn't, I might be able to post some of the barley seeds I saved last summer for sale on my etsy site. I have the winter barley, and the barley I saved from my landrace project. It's the 10% of my crop that matured the earliest.




rareseeds has some grain as well, but I don't know if they have any short season one. It seems to me they are a bit too far south for the grains to be much use where I am.

Kurt, Have you tried perhaps contacting Pat Hayes at Oregon State U. for any pointers? See background at http://barleyworld.org/

Thanks Ranson. Yeah, I read your project thread start to finish before I posted in it [or, knowing my posting habits, I *might* have posted before I finished reading but did still finish reading it.] That is indeed one of the sites I was looking at.

'Overwintering' in and of itself isn't a huge problem, it's the dormant cycle that winter barley has. If I throw down seed on the first of September, and I get blessed with very early september rains [it's pretty variable whether the rains start early, mid or late] I don't want it to get ahead of itself and try to hurry up and flower. I've heard that's a problem Spring Barley can have when sown early fall [or late summer, as weird as it is to me the first half of September is technically summer.]

John Weiland wrote:Kurt, Have you tried perhaps contacting Pat Hayes at Oregon State U. for any pointers? See background at http://barleyworld.org/

I have not. I HAVE come across that site and read a great deal, but at no point did it occur to me to contact the people of that site directly.

Thanks for the advice.