Harvesting Wheat and Garlic

Tuesday was the day we got around to harvesting our wheat. It was a bit disappointing.

If you look closely at the picture above you will see that a significant number of the wheat stalks are missing their seed head. In this section it was 50% or more, most other sections were not hit quite so bad.

Also, there is a run trail right down the center of the wheat row, and if you look closely at the ground in this trail…

It is littered with the hulls and husks of wheat seeds. Almost certainly a vole, or a rat.

I estimate that pesky wee beastie cost between 30 and 50% of our wheat crop this year.

It also meant that we couldn’t cut the wheat off and bind it in stooks to dry like I was planning. The vole would just have climbed up them to eat. Also, the stalks had been bent over to the point that getting them cut with the scythe or sickle would have been problematic.

Instead, we left it standing and harvest the heads themselves by hand. The two older girls cut the heads off with scissors and dropped them in buckets. I went behind them and broke the stalks off, plucked the remaining heads and put them in buckets, pulled the weeds, and crumple the whole mess of stalks and weeds up, to form a base of organic matter under the row which is (hopefully) going to be our winter root crop row.

Once again, Ellie proved to be very good at this sort of work. She can work meticulously and thoroughly, for a seven-year-old, especially if we have an audiobook playing on the speakers. I think at this point we had finished Rakkety Tam, and started listening to Doomwyte.

She was still pretty anxious to break for lunch when 11:30 hit.

Nothing like a picnic for lunch. We take pictures to send to Mommy at work, and we usually call Grandma to talk as well.

Evie served us some applesauce, but forgot to bring out spoons. Not to worry, Ellie has a solution.

She had saved a handful of wheat straws which she used as a… straw.

And sucked up every drop of that applesauce.

Hollywood plums! The first year we have gotten a real crop off that tree.

Around 2 o-clock we finished harvesting the wheat. 210 square feet, 5 Lbs of seed, produced about 11 gallons of seed heads.

Dumped into the tubs to dry in the garage.

One of the unintended consequences of harvesting wheat this way, snipping the heads, is that it takes up far less space in the garage. They should be a lot easier to thresh this way, but we still need to improve our winnowing procedures.

After the wheat was harvested the kids went to play and I tried to weed the cannellini beans. They did not get off to a good start, and then they more recently got overgrown with bind weed. Didn’t get very far on this.

Poor Winnie fell off the horse… swing.

Nothing one of Uncle’s bandaids couldn’t fix. Two made it better still.

Afterwards, she was ready and willing to help harvest the garlic.

“Winnie, do you know what Garlic looks like?”

“YES!”

“Which is the garlic?”

“I don’t know.”

Here is a garlic.

“That’s a darlic?”

Yes it is!

Quite a large garlic, actually, probably the largest garlic head I have ever seen. We planted it last October from cloves we had harvested from our garden.

Most of the cloves didn’t survive, but the ones that did survive are beautiful.

Last job on the farm is a fun one. About three in the afternoon we pull some weeds (bolted radishes and clover) and put them with some willow cuttings and some hay into the wheelbarrow and take it out to the pasture.

The sheep love the willow leaves.

But Iris prefers the radish pods and clover.

This is not strictly necessary because we are feeding them hay on pasture right now during the dry season, but it is nice to hang out with the cow and sheep for a little bit and it makes them more used to us and less skittish over time.

Our neighbor gave us some salmon, which made a delicious main course. After that day, everyone was starving and tired (just how we like them).