Avena nuda
L.
Hull-less oat, Naked oat, Sand oat, Peelcorn, Pillcorn
Wikimedia Commons - Daderot
Wikimedia Commons
Wikimedia Commons - Jose Hernandez @ USDA-NRCS PLANTS Database
What to Eat
Edible parts: Seeds, Cereal
Edible Parts: Seed Edible Uses: Coffee Seed - cooked. The seed ripens in the latter half of summer and, when harvested and dried, can store for several years. It has a floury texture and a mild, somewhat creamy flavour. It can be used as a staple food crop in either savoury or sweet dishes. The seed can be cooked whole, though it is more commonly ground into a flour and used as a cereal in all the ways that oats are used, especially as a porridge but also to make biscuits, sourdough bread etc. The seed can also be sprouted and eaten raw or cooked in salads, stews etc. The hull is incompletely attached to the grain, yielding a naked seed easily upon threshing. The roasted seed is a coffee substitute.
Where to Find It
It is a temperate plant. It is cultivated between 2,300-3,300 m above sea level in China. In Yunnan.
Asia, Britain, China, Europe, Russia, Slovenia,
How to Identify
A grass. There are several named cultivated varieties. It grows each year from seeds. It grows 45-90 cm tall. The leaves are 20 cm long by 3-7 mm wide. The flower panicle is 25 cm long. The spikelets are 1-3 cm long. The grain is 6 mm long.
How to Grow
Succeeds in any moderately fertile soil in full sun. Prefers a poor dry soil. The naked oat is occasionally cultivated for its edible seed which is easily separated from the husk by threshing. It is therefore suitable for cultivation on a small scale, though its yields are lower than conventional oat species. There are some named varieties. Oats are in general easily grown plants but, especially when grown on a small scale, the seed is often completely eaten out by birds. Some sort of netting seems to be the best answer on a garden scale.
Propagation: Seed - sow in situ in early spring or in the autumn. Only just cover the seed. Germination should take place within 2 weeks.
Medicinal Uses
None known
Other Uses
Fibre Mulch Paper Thatching The straw has a wide range of uses such as for bio-mass, fibre, mulch, paper-making and thatching. Some caution is advised in its use as a mulch since oat straw can infest strawberries with stem and bulb eelworm. Special Uses
Wikipedia
Source ↗Avena nuda (hulless oat, naked oat) is a species of grass with edible seeds in the oat genus Avena. When threshed, the hull separates quite readily from the grain. Naked oats are thought to have originated in China where they have been grown for centuries and used for both feed and food, and then migrated from China to Europe, where naked oats were grown in Britain as early as the middle of the sixteenth century. Rather than being a variant of common oat, analysis of sequenced genomic data of 100 oat plants from around the world provides evidence that hulled oat (Avena sativa) and naked oat diverged around 51,000 years ago and were likely domesticated independently in Europe and China.
Other Information
It is a cultivated food plant.
Notes
There are about 25 Avena species.
Names & Synonyms
Goli oves
References (12)
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- Demonstr. pl. 3. 1753
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- Holden, J.H.W., 1979, Oats, in Simmonds N.W.,(ed), Crop Plant Evolution. Longmans. London. p 86
- Plants for a Future database, The Field, Penpol, Lostwithiel, Cornwall, PL22 0NG, UK. http://www.scs.leeds.ac.uk/pfaf/
- Uphof,
- USDA, ARS, National Genetic Resources Program. Germplasm Resources Information Network - (GRIN). [Online Database] National Germplasm Resources Laboratory, Beltsville, Maryland. Available: www.ars-grin.gov/cgi-bin/npgs/html/econ.pl (10 April 2000)
- Wiersema, J. H. & Leon, B., 2013, World Economic Plants. A Standard Reference CRC Press. 2nd Ed. p 87
- World Checklist of Useful Plant Species 2020. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
- Zeven, A. C. & de West, J. M. J., 1982, Dictionary of cultivated plants and their regions of diversity. Wageningen. p 36
