Final Winnowing

Our seed cleaning screens from Siskiyou seeds came on Monday, so on Tuesday we completed the winnowing of the wheat. As it turns out, it was also the final threshing.

First, scrubbing the tomato out of the rubber tote. The kids were all about this because it involved using chlorox wipes. They love the smell of chlorox wipes. Weird, but useful.

Next we used the screens to remove any remaining large chunks of stalk, pebbles, or wood chips. They worked admirably for this. The screens are quite well made, with high quality stainless steel woven wire mesh. For what they are they seem high priced, but when you consider that in order to build the same thing I would have to special order stainless steel mesh in bulk (you wouldn’t want ordinary galvinized as the coating would come off in your food) and it would cost probably as much as the screens and I would have yards of the stuff left over, it becomes more reasonable. Still, if I ever have time and want to make some money, I will buy the materials in bulk and make a whole bunch of sets of these, and sell them at a farmer’s market or something.

We tried to use them to separate the seeds from the chaff further, but it turns out the seeds fit well enough through a 1/5″ mesh, and so does the chaff. Not surprisingly, since the chaff and the seeds are the same size. So it was back to the winnowing fan.

What we found was that while the fan blew away most of the chaff nicely, there was a good percentage that fell into the pail at the same angle, or very nearly, as the seeds.

On closer inspection it turned out that the reason for this is that they still had seeds inside them, so they had the same density, or very nearly, as the hulled seed heads.

We went back to the 1/5″ screen and scrubbed as much of this chaff across it as vigorously as possible, and this did a decent job of hulling them. We winnowed a few more times, but we were running out of time in the afternoon, so they will have to stay as they are. There will just be a little extra bran in the flour when we mill it. It’s good for you. Keeps you regular.