Winnowing the Buckwheat: Lessons Learned.

Last week we finished our buckwheat project. Alas, it was not fit for human consumption, and the effort necessary to make it so was not worth while.

We identified a few things to fix for next year. For one thing, it went into the ground too late in the year, so that it reached maturity just as the rain was starting. This meant we were in a rush to get it off the field. We could not let it dry on the stalk, and we didn’t have a place were we could lay it out on to dry on the stalk.

As a result, the grain was still green, and didn’t all come off the stalks as easily as we hope, which made hand threshing time consuming, and one of the things we don’t have an excess of right now is time.

So we tried chopping it up with the lawn mower, then winnowing out the chaff, but this mixed a lot of sand and pebbles in the mix, that were challenging to separate out; put a lot of stress on the ripe seed heads which started dumping their innards out into the bucket; and filled the chalk with bits of stalk that were the same density as the seeds and therefore would not winnow out.

But by far the most important discovery is that we do not have weed control on that field, not by a long shot. So we will have to delay wheat planting another year, do another round of cover crop, occultate the field next spring, and try the buckwheat again, shooting for an early May planting rather than a late June planting.

What can I say. We are learning.