Red Fife wheat makes a royal return
20.05.12
The adage that everything old is new again has perhaps never been proven quite so royally as with Patricia Hastings and her heritage wheat.
Hastings, who has a farm near Stirling, Ont., which is north of Belleville and (just) within a 100-mile radius of Ottawa, got her hands on a small bag of heritage seeds of Red Fife wheat about a decade ago.
âI think I got it from a fellow in the prairies who got it from a researcher,â she says. âIt was nearly non-existent then.â
And yet Red Fife wheat once made Canada famous. It was brought to Canada from Scotland by David Fife, who farmed in the 1840s very near where Hastings farms now. In the mid-1800s, its use spread from the Peterborough area to the prairies and helped make Canada âthe breadbasket of the world.â
It took Hastings four years of growing, harvesting and replanting the heritage seed before she had a big enough crop of Red Fife wheat to make it worth milling.
âAnd then I discovered that it has a unique flavour and that it really is very well suited for growing in this area.â
Source: Ottawa Citizen