Wheat

Most of the grain that was planted was hard red winter wheat, the kind one uses to make bread. There was a bed and a bit of that. Plus half a bed of three other varieties. Today we threshed and cleaned the wheat that Sara and I had harvested a few weeks ago. We also harvested the three other types of grain.

The wheat we processed today filled two wheelbarrows with its straw when we carried over the bunches from the garden to near the common house where we could work on it in a flat place in the shade, it was hot today. Then it needed to be threshed, the wheat berries knocked out of the chaff, this was something of a hassle. We basically used three methods, walking on it and rolling it under ones feet/shoes, rubbing it in ones hands, and hitting it with a plastic hose or pipe. They all had their pluses and minuses. We had to make sure the grains didn't go flying off the tarp and into the grass, and hitting it tended to make it fly, the rubbing it between ones hands method worked but took a long time, the walking in it method was quite good but the straw which had already been threshed easily got mixed up with the unprocessed wheat stalks.

My father came over with his seed cleaning machine to help separate the wheat from the chaff. You dump the wheat berries and small husks from it into the feeder of the machine, and turn the crank. That causes part of the machine to shake which feeds the mixture through a number of screens, it also makes a fan spin which blows lighter material, chaff, out the side. We mainly had one size of wheat, but there was some smaller wheat coming out a different shoot, which had fallen through another smaller screen. We didn't care about the different size grains but it could be useful, say if we had a lot of weeds which had also gone to seed but had smaller seeds, or if we wanted to plant only the larger wheat berries so wanted them separate.

From all that wheat we only got a bowl full of grain in the end, a large bowl but still not a lot.