We devoted 100 square feet of bed space to our lentil trial this year. In that space, we seeded about 1500 lentil plants giving us an average spacing of 15 plants per square foot. This density seemed to provide good ground cover without causing too much competition between plants. Beds were irrigated with the same drip irrigation system we use for all of our vegetable garden beds.
What was our total yield? When the threshing was all wrapped up we had 3.56kg or 7.83 lbs of lentils. There was some loss from a few mistakes in the drying and threshing process this time around, so I’m confident we can beat those numbers next season. For now, it’s just nice to have a benchmark to use for our production estimates going forward.
If you’re curious how these harvest numbers compare to large scale agriculture, average yield for large green lentils in our province is 1546 lbs/acre. Our yield from this 100 square foot test plot equates to 3412 lbs/acre.
Lentils are obviously not the crop to grow in your garden if you want the highest economic return. We’re getting into grain and pulse crops now because we’re already growing all of our own vegetables and these threshing challenges keep things interesting. We also want to eat grains and pulses but there are no sustainable sources in our area from which we can buy these products.
If you have experience growing lentils by hand, please leave a comment and let us know how it went.
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12 окт 2023
