I tried growing winter wheat as a winter crop last year. Here’s the experience I had.
I sowed it thickly into my garden beds, along with blue mustard and Austrian winter peas (both of which I’ve been growing through the winter as food crops for several years now).
I got . . . wheat. Just wheat. Neither of the other two. I kept on waiting to see the other two, but I didn’t.
I also sowed the wheat within a garlic patch. (Garlic inhibits the germination of legumes, so I plant it separately from my peas.) I got . . . wheat. Just wheat. I kept on waiting to see garlic shoots, but I didn’t.
All winter long, I had lots of grass sprouts in the beds. In spring, I started to see seed heads forming – and all of them were weed grasses. 
I was tempted to pull out all the grass stems, but I decided to do it one at a time, in case there really was wheat mixed in with all the weed grasses that looked exactly like it. Whenever a stalk flowered and it wasn’t wheat, I painstakingly removed it. One plant at a time.
The very last kind of grass in those beds turned out to be the wheat, and I did have a lot of it! About half of the stands had been weed grasses, but half was actual wheat.
It flowered. It made lots of seed heads. I was very pleased. It took longer to ripen than I was hoping, though; around early July, I harvested the finished wheat and brought it inside. It was too late to plant summer crops like beans and squashes into the bed by that point, although I put some in anyway, just in case they would make me some seeds before frost. (They didn’t.)
And then the threshing began.
Now, I probably made the process more time-consuming than it would have been if I’d tossed them all into a pillowcase and whacked them against my driveway or something. I started out by sorting all of the heads into “I want to save this for seed” and “I want to eat this.” It was the first year of my landrace, so selecting which were the best to keep for future crops and which were best eaten was an important step. (I wound up deciding I strongly prefer awnlessness, so I selected for that as well as for larger, plumper seed heads.) Still, I would say that only added an extra two or three hours to the process.
It took me over two hundred hours to weed, harvest, thresh, and winnow all that blasted wheat.
Perhaps it would have taken only a quarter of the time if I’d been willing to accept more chaff than wheat berries in my wheat flour. But I was trying to avoid that. And fifty hours would still have been an absurd quantity of time to spend.
I tried to grind wheat berries in a blender; it made a very, very coarse flour, not good enough to make bread with. So I bought a manual grain grinder. It was way more expensive than an electric grain grinder, and it didn’t even work properly. So, extremely annoyed by this point but determined to finish the process, I bought an electric grain grinder. That worked! . . . But it’s not going to help me make flour in a grid-down long-term emergency situation.
And then I found out, three weeks after I’d made the flour, that flour made out of the entire grain only stays good for two days before the fats go rancid! 
Apparently “whole wheat” flour isn’t actually whole wheat; they remove the germ. The germ is the part that goes rancid rapidly (and that’s why wheat germ that is purchased has to stay in a refrigerator). Actual whole wheat flour has about a two-day shelf life. If the oil in the germ goes rancid, it’ll taste bitter and not have as much nutritional value.
(Apparently in old days, people used to need to take a sack of grain to the miller every day in order to get flour to make bread. It wasn’t something they only did once a month or whatever.)
So then I had to stick the four cups of flour I’d made into a freezer of all places, and I’m hoping it is still edible, and it didn’t go too rancid in the two or three weeks it was sitting on a shelf. Seriously.
Now, on the bright side, wheat berries don’t actually have to be ground into flour. You can just soak them and eat them whole, in the same way that grains like rice and corn are often eaten. (Or soak them and then mash them.) And whole wheat berries have an excellent shelf life. So . . . I mean . . . that’s not so bad. They’re a good addition to your food storage.
And wheat is obviously convenient to grow in industrial monocultures; if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be cheap.
But as for growing it yourself in a small space . . . my evaluation is that it’s downright horrendous.
Apparently wheat is pretty strongly allelopathic, which is why it wouldn’t let any other winter crops grow near it.
It also looks exactly like grass weeds, which means the weeds can stay disguised for months and take up valuable bed space all that time.
It takes too long to finish ripening, and even after you harvest it, there’ll be allelopathic residue in that bed for a month afterwards, so you can’t get wheat berries and use that same bed for summer crops.
And the time taken to thresh and winnow it is absolutely appalling.
I assume the time taken to thresh and winnow it is going to be less extreme with someone who knows what they’re doing. Or who has expensive gadgets to do most of the work for them. I don’t have those gadgets, and I think most backyard gardeners won’t.
So . . . wheat was a mass monoculture in an agricultural setting? Probably great. Winter wheat doesn’t need any inputs or watering. It takes care of itself. The allelopathy seems to kill off almost all weeds except for grasses, and economics of scale mean that if you can buy big expensive machines that can do all the threshing or winnowing for you, you can get a vast quantity of wheat berries for very little effort per cup of flour.
I can see why wheat has been a staple. It’s easy to grow in very large stands that take up very large quantities of space, and if you don’t mind some other grasses growing in with it, it requires no effort at all until harvest. The threshing and winnowing are horrid, but that’s why humans have been inventing with big old machines to do that for them for thousands of years.
Probably awesome for growing at scale across very large fields.
Absolutely horrid if you have limited space and want to use it effectively to grow as much food as possible.
I’m going to keep my selected seeds, both because I went to so much effort to select them and because I may eventually be in a position where it may be more useful than I think.
But for now . . . I’m not planning to grow it again. If I have to choose between either wheat or peas, garlic, and blue mustard, the answer is incredibly obvious.
We gave up bread products from the grocery store a few years ago and I mill and bake all of our bread products from scratch, so I’ve been tempted to try growing the wheat too. Hearing your story, I think I’ll pass. That just doesn’t seem viable in my small garden.
. Can you tell me about this blue mustard you mentioned? Maybe you wrote about it elsewhere.
) your exemplary perseverance and the incredible amount of things you have learned.
