I did it! I finally managed it! As I type this I am eating not just home-made bread, but bread made using home grown wheat! And it's blummin' lovely!
It's moist and dense because it was soft wheat. It didn't rise much, but it's really, really tasty.So here's the story....
I decided to grow my own bread last October but couldn't find wheat seeds anywhere except on eBay. So that's where I got them. 960g of seeds for £5.59 including p&p. Now in the John Seymour book, he says it's best to sow in September, but I'd already missed that, and I didn't have the weather/time in October, so it got sown in November. I covered as much as I could with cages to keep the birds off, but couldn't cover it all, so the wheat grew only where the cages were and nowhere else
Anyway, I forgot to cut it back in Feb/March, so it didn't send out extra shoots, only one per seed. I kept forgetting to water it and the ground dried hard and cracked. I didn't have the experience to know when it was ripe, so I tried to use judgement basded on what I'd read - decided to leave it a couple more days to be sure, went back 2 days later and most of it was lying down in the mud..... Basically, I did a rather pathetic job of growing wheat, and from the 960g I bought, of which I sowed about 900g, I harvested.......
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800g!
Ah well. It might be the most expensive loaf of bread I've ever eaten, but it's a home-grown loaf. I've used 400g to make this loaf that I now want another slice of, and I think I'll save the other 400g to sow next month. Anyone want to have a guess at how much I'll harvest next year?
Now how long did all the threshing and grinding take you? 
And how DID you grind it up? Tell us more!
(thanks)
To get it home on my bike trailer, I wrapped it up in a towel and tried to avoid the bumps on the road. Then I stood it on its end on a shelf in the shed at home. I think you're meant to stand it like this outside to allow it to dry a bit more in the sun and wind, but we weren't allowed any sunshine, so it went in the shed. I left it a few days (in hindsight it might have been better to leave it longer, but I was too excited). Now, here's where I made life really difficult and tedious for myself: I came up with the crazy idea that cutting off the wheat heads would make things quicker and easier 
Erm, I couldn't be more wrong. It took forever to do that because I hadn't stacked it very well and the heads were all at different levels. It was the first nice day in ages, so I sat on the path outside to do this. 
Did I say it was the first nice day in ages?), that sort of thing. So it took me all day Friday and half of Saturday to do it, which is why I didn't get to eat the bread until late on the Saturday night. 
and am on the lookout for a decent basket for winnowing, because the smooth surface of the bowls I used didn't help remove the little bits of chaff at all. I'm quite pleased with my first attempt. I don't think I can call it a success, but it wasn't a failure either. Most importantly, I have learned a lot. And that's what it's all about. 
