I have been doing lots of homemade bread making, home brewing, and home gardening recently and realized that I could try growing rye. Does anyone have experience with this? Does it seem worth it for ~400-500 sq ft? Will people think I'm just neglecting my lawn? Vegetable gardens are common, but I don't know about grain gardens. I'm located in the suburbs of Minneapolis.
I doubt if it's worth the trouble. Yes, your neighbours are going to think you just didn't bother mowing the lawn. I just looked up some stuff on growing rye. One website says that a good yield in a well-managed commercial crop is 50 to 60 bushels. If you have 500 square feet, you have about 1/87th of an acre. You will probably, therefore, get a little more than half a bushel of rye out of your plot, maybe 30 lbs, if you do everything right. And unless you buy a milling machine to turn it into flour--some of those are rather expensive, and even the cheap ones are a couple of hundred bucks--all you'll get is the whole grain that has fairly limited uses. By all means, try it if you like, but to me it doesn't seem worth the effort except to satisfy curiosity.
Unless you can plant a lot bigger patch than that, not worth the effort. Takes a lot of land to produce enough rye seed to grind and use. You will spend way more time and effort on watering than what you will get out of it. Certainly you could try it; but just don't get your hopes up you'd get enough rye to make enough flour for a single loaf. If you want a higher yielding crop, might try buckwheat. It is easy and fast, just takes more processing due to the hard outer seed hull.
Neighbors would just be jealous that they weren't doing with they felt like doing.It won't look like an unkempt yard. It'll look like a farmer's field in miniature. A handmill could do 30 lbs and you'd get the satisfaction of growing your own.
