Last week we harvested the wheat, so that it wouldn’t get rained on. Timing the harvest is a bit of a challenge. If you harvest it too early the sead heads are green and they don’t let go of the seeds worth a darn. If you harvest it too late the seed heads dry out and open in the row and dump the seeds on the ground. Complicated by the forecast of an unusual 2-3 days of damp, drizzly weather in late July, and a summer camp weekend, well… we did our best.
So there we had a giant pile of wheat and straw on a little tarp in the middle of the shop floor.
Winnie started by trying to pick the seeds into the bin with her fingers.
The other kinder jumped in on this, and it was fun, but slow, so we decided to change our method.
We spread the stalks out on the tarp, heads toward the center, stalks to the outside.
It was at this point that Winnie decided to ditch her shoes.
The rest of the kids clapped all the dirt off the bottoms of their boots and…
It knocked a suprising amount of seed and hull off the stalks, but only about a quarter or less of the total amount. We looked over our set up and realized a couple of things:
- We had the stalks piled too thick so they were not getting stomped hard enough. We needed a bigger tarp (Uncle went out and got us one later).
- The kids are pretty light, and it takes a fair amount of downward force. Shuffling, so the heads get rolled between the feet and the floor is more efficient.
- Probably the reason a lot of traditional European folk dances involve a lot of leaping and stomping is because they have their roots in threshing festivals.
We decided to try another method. Daddy quickly cobbled a flail together from an old tool handle and spare length of chain.
We took a whack at it with this thing, with even less success. Now I understand the descriptions of how much work threshing with flails was in the Little House book.
Ellie enjoyed whacking the pile with a stick more than she liked dancing on it (no surprise there) but it was not very effective, so we shifted gears and took a break to get the pigs slaughtered (more on that in another post) and then had lunch.
After lunch we sat down and started threshing by hand again, while listening to audio dramas from “Saints Alive!” Little Miss Methodical over here soon had herself quite a pile.
When Uncle brought the new big tarp we had to clean our work place a little. Winnie got very excited about this.
“Mine sweep! Me-me sweep! Mine sweep!”
I think the stalks could stand to be a little dryer, and since they are now spread out on a big tarp, we won’t loose anything by letting them sit and air out. Once this brief damp spell is over it should get nice and warm in the shop and they should dry out in a week or so and we’ll have another go at it next week.
Next year I think we are going to build a threshing machine.
Little Farm in the Big City 