From Weeds To Healthy Grains

2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38

A person divides plants into "useful" and "weedy", based on the accumulated experience at a certain moment. But, time passes, and suddenly it turns out that an annoying weed, which wasted so much energy, is a very useful plant for the human body. Such a magical transformation has fallen to the lot of some cereals

"Harrowing" Rye

Wild growing

Rye, wanting to attract the attention of a person, annoyingly climbed into the barley and wheat fields cultivated by the tiller. It reduced the yields of cereals grown since ancient times and which are the main foodstuffs. The inhabitants of Western Asia even called it "joudar", which translated into a language we understand means"

tormenting ».

This behavior of Rye was justified by the rich internal content of the aboveground parts of the plant and excellent unpretentiousness to the conditions of life. While drought or frost easily ruined wheat crops, rye endured the misfortunes of nature. The peasants reluctantly had to collect the surviving fruits of the weed.

Plant resistance was provided

rootspenetrating to a depth of 2 meters, and

high physiological activity, donated by the Creator and allowing to assimilate nutrients from such chemical compounds of the soil that other plants were "too tough", more precisely, not in terms of physiological activity.

Tolerance to soil acidity allows Rye to grow on podzolic soils, on which wheat refuses to grow. If you don’t be stingy, setting aside fertile black soil or light loams for growing rye, then a high yield of nutritious grain will be guaranteed.

Why is the grain of rye so attractive to humans? Gathered in a rather large grain

full set chemicals that a person needs for a fulfilling life. Eating black rye bread and drinking kvass made with such bread, epic Russian heroes such as Ilya Muromets, for example, were able to grow up.

This is how the annoying weed turned into nutritious bread, which became the main thing on the table of the Russian peasant.

Oats are a disaster for wheat

Wild

Oats was not inferior in its behavior to Rye, annoyingly littering the crops of spelled (an ancient variety of wheat). Lucius Columella, who lived in the 1st century AD and wrote more than a dozen books about agriculture that have safely survived to this day, was amazed at the peoples of Germany who sowed oats and ate exclusively

oatmeal … Lucius himself, who changed his military youth (during which he had to represent Ancient Rome in Syria) for farming, considered oats to be the first disaster for wheat.

Unpretentiousness to soil and cold resistance allowed oats to displace spelled crops from the fields of northern territories, gradually accustoming people to oatmeal for breakfast. In many European countries, oatmeal is still a traditional morning dish today. For some time now, healthy porridge has become in demand in Russia.

Although oats were grown in Russia before, they fed them to horses. Russians cooked for themselves from oats

jellywhose taste was sour. Later, when they began to make jelly from berries and fruits, adding sugar to them, the original name, which was based on the word "sour", was fixed for such dishes. I don’t remember that in my childhood they cooked oatmeal jelly, but we knew about the “jelly shores”, personifying the life of paradise, from Russian folk tales.

Even in the old days, oats were cooked “

oatmeal ”- special flour, which was obtained not by grinding grains, but specially processed grain was pounded, better preserving its taste and nutritional value.

Thus, Oats from the category of "weed" has been retrained into a useful and demanded for human nutrition Grain.

Summary

Do not rush to completely eradicate annoying weeds. Maybe their importunity is dictated by noble impulses to serve the good of man. Who knows, perhaps by looking more closely at the weed, you will become the discoverer of a plant that is most useful to humans. After all, there is nothing accidental on Earth.