Oats by Paul May

Some time during last winter I had an idea. I have an allotment in North London where I grow vegetables and fruit and flowers. There's a wild flower meadow and a pond in an old bath that was once in the former mental hospital in Friern Barnet, but the bath is a story for another day. I say I had an idea, but it was almost a vision. I had a bit of space and I pictured it in my head as a field of oats.

Why oats? I don't know, but once the idea was there I had to run with it. I would buy some seed, plant it and watch it grow. How hard could it be?

Well . . . the first thing I discovered was that there were two main varieties I could grow, Avena Sativa, the normal, everyday oat, and Avena Nuda, also known as naked oats and mainly found in health food shops. The difference is this: Avena Sativa has an outer husk, and then a hard inner husk which surrounds the grain and is not that easy to remove. More of this later. Avena Nuda doesn't have this inner husk, making it much easier to process. So, naturally, I set out to find some Avena Nuda seed.

Avena Nuda is not widely grown in the UK. I found a seed merchant who had it. The minimum order was 500 kilos. I needed about 500 grams. I found people who could supply the seed, but they were in Ireland and couldn't supply the seed to the UK. So I bought a pack from a health food shop and tried sprouting those seeds to see if they would be useable. The germination rate was very poor. I tried several times with different conditions but in the end I gave up and went looking for seed of Avena Sativa. Lots of places sold small amounts of this for sprouting and making oat grass, to juice or put in salads, but I checked with the suppliers and it was suitable for sowing outside.

Oats are a cold weather cereal, which is why they're grown in the north, so I wasn't sure how they'd do in London where summer temperatures are high and getting higher. I planted them on March 5th, having first made a tool of which I was quite proud to enable me to space the seeds in rows three inches apart. They germinated quickly and I was soon fielding regular enquiries about what I was growing. I'd discovered during my initial research that oats are supposed to secrete something from their roots that suppresses weed growth. According to the books this effect is so strong that you shouldn't plant anything else where the oats have been until three weeks have passed. 

I am not convinced. Maybe the weeds grew less fast than they would have done, and they didn't grow as fast as the oats, but grow they did. And I'm glad about that because the poppies grew too and for a week or two looked fantastic. And the field of oats looked just as I'd imagined it, first green, then golden.

I started to worry about when to harvest. The tops of the plants seemed ripe, but there were greenish heads lower down. I cut a small amount before going away on holiday in July and left them to dry in the greenhouse. Then, when I got back, I tried to process them. It's not that hard to separate the outer husks and the straw from the grains, but those inner husks are really tricky. I tried various things, including putting the grain in a plastic bag and hitting it with a lump hammer, using a rolling pin, and grinding them in a blender. I managed to extract a small amount of oatmeal but it hardly seemed with the effort, except . . .

When I tried separating the grain in the oats that I hadn't yet harvested I noticed that they  popped out of their husks far more easily. And I had another thought. People were growing and harvesting oats for centuries before they ever had mills and modern machinery. I wondered how they did it and discovered via an interesting website that oats used to be widely grown by small farmers and in Wales where they were processed in small local mills that have almost all now vanished. 

Anyway, I persisted, and arrived at the following process—I've done it with a small batch and I'll see how it goes with the rest. 

First I separated the chaff. On this small scale I simply removed the grain from the stalks, then rubbed it hard then blew off the husks. This left me with the grain with the inner husk attached. I put this in the blender and ground it for about 30 seconds, then put it into a tray and picked the individual grains out by hand. I can imagine that this process might have been carried out by children in the past. I think light grinding between stones would separate the grains in a similar way, but at this stage if you blow on the mixture to try to get rid of the husks you risk blowing the lot away, as the grains themselves are not heavy, so you really need to pick them out carefully.

I rolled the grains with a rolling pin, made some porridge, and ate it. It tasted just like porridge.

Whether all this has anything to do with writing children's books, I leave you to decide.

Sad news that Alan Ahlberg has died. When I was teaching 6 year olds we made a joke book for the Ahlbergs and sent it to them. Alan wrote a lovely letter back, saying he'd keep the book on a shelf and take it down to read a joke or two if he needed cheering up. I hope it worked.