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>>I’m still trying to get back more than what I planted.<<

Other seeds fell on good soil and produced grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.

How are you planting? Drill; broadcast; something else?

I've used my tiller to shallowly till in broadcast seed--HRW--with good results.

Better result was deep tilling, then using a hand-push grass-seed spreader, set to a recommendation from the manufacturer; I think it was an old Scott, with about a 3' width. That was for a 40 X 110' plot: never again!

Hand harvesting; hand threshing; hand winnowing...then raking & stacking the straw. From that, we ended up with several gallon jars & some 5 or 6-quart ice cream buckets full of clean wheat seed. I still have a 32 quart plastic tub full of mostly unthreshed heads left.

This year, I did thresh out a bit over a quart of seed, enough for a 25 X 40' plot. I used the tiller to plant that into a 20 X 35' plot as mainly a green manure crop. It germinated ~75%, which is fairly well, considering the seed was several years old & had just been left in the plastic tub in an a open faced barn.

I plan on letting enough to mature for new seed, but will plow the rest under in the spring, while still growing. So far, it's about 3-4" tall. I've also used the tiller method to grow both small amounts of rye & barley with goo0d results & return.

How are you planting? Drill; broadcast; something else?

My first attempt was broadcast and raked in. It did worst. I'm pretty sure that was partly due to using too low a seeding rate. They just couldn't compete with the weeds.

My second attempt was companion-planted with garlic, and was dug in pretty well using a trowel. It grew well but had poor pollination, and the dwarf plants were painful to harvest by hand. My back does NOT like crawling on the ground!

My third attempt was planted the same way as my second, only without the garlic, and it was a taller variety. But, it got planted kind of late. It was a spring wheat and didn't get planted until mid-summer. So far it still looks like grass. No seedheads in sight.

I hope to test a bunch of winter wheats alongside each other, so this time will probably involve short (1-2 feet long) rows planted with a hoe. I want to find the variety/varieties that work best for me. After I find the best one, I'll probably switch to broadcasting the seeds, then running over them with the tiller. That worked well for field peas this year. I'm actually thinking of doing that with the majority of my crops next year, it just takes too long planting them by hand.