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| Barley soaked for 12 hours |
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| Barley day 2 being flooded |
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| Day 4 sprouts... |
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| Day 5 We are watering this for 2 minutes every 4 hours, at 10,2,6,10,2,6 |
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| Day 6 getting green-getting mold, put a fan going and poured on 3% hydrogen peroxide, also sloped the shelves more so that the water would run off better, too much water standing. |
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| Day 8 before harvesting it. |
Our first harvest wasn't as good as we had hoped.
We got about 3-4 lb of fodder from 1 lb of seed. Our conclusion is that we have to get some better seed, this seed didn't germinate very well or grow very well. We bought it from a feed mill ($12.50 for 50lb very inexpensive), it was full of chaff and took a lot to get it clean (and I still don't think I cleaned it well enough.)
We fed 1/2 a tray to our little flerd and they were slow to eat it. They were not anxious to try something new, however by afternoon they had eaten it all up. We will slowly increase our production and feeding to the animals.
Today I started some food grade wheat seed that I have for making bread. It was a lot heavier seed than the barley.
I think that I must use bleach to sterilize the seed. I was trying to avoid it because I hate the smell, it bothers me, the vinegar I used to soak and clean the seed still had mold. We added a fan and also sloped the shelving more for better drainage. Mold is our enemy here, so I hope we can get it stopped. Good news is you can clean the mold out with hydrogen peroxide and not loose your whole tray to it.
We are just learning a brand new thing so we are not expecting everything to be perfect to start out with.
This week we will be on our way to Curtis & Curtis to buy good seed. I need some chickens to feed the feed-mill barley to, they can eat molded whatever and would love it!
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