“MUMMY” WHEAT.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIV, Issue 304, 21 November 1934, Page 12

“MUMMY” WHEAT.

Judged by the frequency with which the subject of “mummy wheat” crops up in our newspapers and magazines it might well be listed as a hardy annual. However, tho limits at which different cereals germinate is accurately known to specialists. It may interest your readers to know (says a correspondent of the London Times) that in the year 18S4 my father sent me some ears of wheat—a sample of tho seed he was using that season—to experiment with in Minnesota. This crop for two seasons yielded 52 and 49 bushels an acre. The wheat was not suitable to our environment because of the weight of the ears and poor milling quality. We were pioneers with the famous hard red “Scotch Fife” wheat which found a habitat in the Red River Valley and from there spread westward over the Canadian North-West.

Long after my father’s death I found in an envelope in his desk some of the identical sample which he had selected in 1884. I tried grains from these ears in 1923 under various methods. Not a berry germinated. One of your correspondents mentioned that “mummy wheat” sown in England produced “miracle wheat,” some of the plants carrying as many as seven ears. There is nothing remarkable about “miracle wheat.” Among soft varieties of wheat thci'e is a tendency to form a multiplication of spikelets. Still the yield is small and the quality inferior; hence those varieties are not cultivated. Some years ago when living in Argentina I was given a few ears of “miracle wheat” which came from Australia. From these I obtained excellent results, and gave samples from _ that planting to renew the exhibits in the Cereal Museum at Buenos Aires, which, I might add, ranked second to the Cereal Museum at Bucharest, said to be the most complete in the world.