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Color and Small Grain Maturity
With uneven maturity common in many fields, you may have to wait for late grain to mature. While hoping ripe grain does not shatter. Looking at head color and kernel color will enable one to cut as soon as late grain is mature.
Here's how it works:
Lack of green in the flag leaf - the uppermost leaf - indicates that a wheat or barley plant has reached 95% of its ultimate yield and that the final stage of development is under way.
Green disappears from the glumes (bracts at the bases of the spikelets) about 1 1/2 days before maturity.
Lack of green in heads and the darkening of a pigment strand in each kernel, seen most easily when kernels are cut open crosswise, signal 100% maturity. The pigment strand begins to appear about a half day before physiological maturity.
A whole field won't lose its color at the same time, so check thoroughly. Also, check bottom kernels on heads because top kernels lose green first. For color pictures see http://www.smallgrains.org/TECHFILE/Phys2.htm#wheat
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