Meet George

George is a curious student who loves food!

Anything to do with food he wants to know about, so he’s here to help us find out everything we can about baking!

Watch this video…

After that you should have a good idea about how wheat is grown.

What do we use wheat for?

Wheat is a grain that is super important to our diet.

It’s used to make flour which is what we use to make bread!

People eat bread all the time whether it be as a sandwich or as toast in the morning. That means that we need to grow a lot of wheat so that everyone gets their bread!

So how do we grow wheat?

Wheat is grown all over the place but, in the UK, a lot is grown in the East of England because it has conditions that are great for growing wheat.

Wheat grows best in good, rich soils and needs lots of sun and warmth in the summer.

East England has these conditions so there are lots of farms there that grow wheat.

Step 1: Plough the fields

The first thing a farmer will do is plough the field in autumn.

This means that they crush all the weeds and old plants that are on the field already into the soil. They will break down and release lots of nutrients into the soil that the wheat needs to grow.

Step 2: Sow the seeds

Next the farmer will sow his wheat seeds in the field.

They will quickly start to grow but they don’t look like wheat straight away. They start off very small and look like grass.

If you drive around the countryside in autumn you might see these wheat fields.

Step 3: Help them grow

The wheat is growing nicely but farmers will do a couple of things to help them.

One is to use fertiliser on the crop.

Fertiliser helps the wheat grow as it has lots of elements (like nitrogen, phosphate and potassium) that the wheat needs to grow.

Poo is one of the best fertilisers you can use! You can make fertilisers but most farmers just use poo from the animals they have!

Step 4: Harvest the wheat

By June the wheat should be ready to harvest.

The wheat will now be about 60cm tall and at the top of each stalk you should see the ear.

The ear is just the feathery bit at the top of the stalk that contains the grain.

Each ear has about 50 grains of wheat.

It takes 350 ears of wheat to make just one loaf of bread! That’s a lot of wheat we need to grow.

Your mission is to complete this quiz…

Check back tomorrow for another mission all about baking!