Townie goes against the grain with home harvest

All Guy Roth wanted was better grass on the verge outside his northern NSW home — now he has 20kg of wheat grain.

Viktor Roth, above, finds the wheat crop outside his home in the northern NSW town of Narrabri to be eye-high.

All Guy Roth wanted was better grass on the verge outside his northern NSW home — now he has 20kg of wheat grain.

An agricultural scientist, Mr Roth lives with his wife Ingrid and children Christian, 8, Leo, 7, and Viktor, 5, in Narrabri. In May, he decided to plant wheat when he saw how many weeds and bindies had taken root in the thin strip between his house and the road.

With the help of his sons and two young neighbours, Mr Roth hand-planted a local variety of the crop. Despite setbacks — the first seeds almost immediately were snapped up by birds — a second batch took to the town setting surprisingly well.

“Growing a crop puts a lot of organic matter into the ground,” Mr Roth said. “I was going to green mulch it and mow it all back down, but when it went up to head we ­realised there was quite a bit there.”

Cars slowed and people stopped to see the micro farm, which was ready to harvest last month. A local agronomist, Denis Harvey, offered the use of his small plot header, normally used for small, test areas of different grain varieties.

“I asked, ‘what would that cost?’, and he said ‘a carton of cold ones’. So that was that,” Mr Roth said.

It took longer to unload and load the header onto the trailer than it did to do its work, he said, but about an hour later, the harvest was in. Now the Roth family has a 20kg bag of grain in the pantry. “We’ll probably get it milled and make a couple of loaves of bread and batches of scones,” said Mr Roth. “We’ll see what the quality is like then.”

His sons were intimately involved in the process, which involved several rounds of weeding and fertilising.

“I mowed a footpath and passage to our front gate,” said Mr Roth. “Didn’t have any problems from the council — they’re pretty relaxed. I just have to be careful of the road.”

The soil is still cracked and hard, and Mr Roth is now looking to plant sunflowers, which could come in handy to decorate a friend’s wedding venue next year, and cotton.

“I thought I’d go back to turf, but sunflowers will look great around mid next year,” he said.