• Automatic chicken waterer
• Microbusiness ebook
• Homemade deer deterrent
• Cosmic cookout
• Appalachian ecology

We certainly aren't going to jump to the level of growing all of our own grains immediately, but I wanted to crunch the numbers and see if that would even be feasible.  The first step is to figure out how much of each type of grain we eat.  That part was pretty simple since we started buying our flour in bulk last year, and thus know that we go through about 100 pounds of wheat flour, 5 pounds of cornmeal, and 25 pounds of oats in a year.  Here's my estimate of how many pecks of whole grain those pounds of flour and rolled oats are equivalent to:

As you build your own estimate of how many pecks of grain you eat per year, you might find the following conversions useful:

• 1 cup of wheat converts into just a little more than a cup of whole wheat flour, and that weighs about a quarter of a pound --- this might help you convert from the five or fifty pound bags of flour you buy to cups.
  
• A peck is equivalent to about 37 cups (and is also a quarter of a bushel.)  So if you go through one five pound bag of cornmeal each year, like we do, you're probably eating 0.5 pecks of corn, very roughly.

How much land would you need to grow your own grains?  Basically, to provide our current near monoculture diet of wheat, corn, and oats, we'd need about a fourteenth of an acre.  That's an area about 56 feet by 56 feet --- pretty big, but not unfathomable.  It would simply mean expanding our garden by about a quarter.