Farm Friday

This week was fun, exciting, and very busy. On Tuesday we helped a farmer friend, Josh, cut and thresh wheat by hand. It was a fun learning experience but very hard, slow, hot work. Hard, hot work is normal, but the "slow" part was too much of a setback, so Josh is going to borrow a mower and is looking into more mechanized methods of threshing. But if case you want to grow and thresh your own wheat by hand, here's how we did it.

In December, Josh planted soft white winter wheat. Spring wheats and hard wheats don't grow well in the South, which is why our country region is well known for biscuits, made with soft wheats, rather than yeast breads, which are made with hard wheats. After planting, he did nothing with it until harvest. It's a very low-maintenance crop.

To harvest, we first cut the wheat stalks. Some of the harvesters used giant clippers like you prune shrubs with, but I preferred to use a machete like a sickle, taking a bunch of wheat in my hand near the heads and then cutting it near the ground. Then we laid the wheat on a tarp with all of the heads facing in the same direction. When we had a big load, we slid it over to our threshing "floor". This was a tarp that was flat in the middle and rolled up on all sides but one, to keep the wheat from flying out. You can use a flail for the next step, which is basically two sticks with the ends tied together, one of which is long and round with the other being short and preferably flat. We just got on our knees and used two short sticks to beat a small bunch of wheat at a time, laid out on the middle of the tarp in front of us. We'd beat the heads with the sticks, occasionally rotating the bundle, until most of the wheat berries had been beaten out. Then the straw goes into a big pile and the wheat remains on the tarp until it is poured into a bucket for winnowing, which Josh did by simply pouring the wheat between two buckets in front of a fan. We brought some wheat home and ground it, and Esposa made some peach quick bread with it.

We harvested the first squash from our garden this week and some more beans, as well as a couple of banana peppers. Sorry, I still haven't got any pictures, but the garden just looks better as summer progresses, anyway.

On Wednesday, we helped Josh pick blueberries from a 20 year-old orchard of blueberry bushes. They were about 8 feet tall, and were loaded with berries. This was the early picking, so most were not ripe yet, but we picked about 6 and a half gallons. The man that owned the orchard was a friend of Josh's. He acts as Santa Claus and was formerly a firefighter. That's what he says anyway- if you saw him you'd agree that he is Santa Claus. ;)

Tuesday morning I'm picking up eighty laying hen chicks from a local hatchery, so I'll post pictures of them then, as well as pictures of some adorable little goat kids which Mocha finally had.

Have a great weekend,

Sherlock