 Hi, my name is Scott Johnson from the Low Technology Institute and today we're talking about harvesting wheat and other grains by hand. This is part two of maybe a three or maybe a four-part series on homescale grain and flour production. It's probably a week before harvest because I'm out here to assess whether or not it's ready for harvesting. And so industrial wheat, wheat that you probably get from the grocery store that you see out in the fields that are harvested by machines, they're harvested when it's called dead ripe. That means 14% moisture in the kernel and they can put it right into a silo. If I do that, I have two problems. Number one, when I go to cut this, all the grain will fall off the head onto the ground and it's hard for me to save. Number two, brand production. I want to grind this out for bread and I want to waste as little of it as possible and so I want the brand production to be minimal. If it gets dead ripe, that means there's a lot more brand. If you think about a kernel like an M&M, an M&M has a candy coating with chocolate in the middle. Right now, these are in what's called milk stage, which I'll talk about in a minute. They have very, very, very little candy coating and almost all chocolate. Over time, the candy coating gets thicker and as a proportion of the head, the chocolate gets less. So the brand is the outer covering of the wheat berry and if the riper this gets on the stem in the ground, the more brand there is and the more brand I have to sift out of my flour, the more energy I use, the more I waste. And so what I want to do is I want to harvest this at what's called soft dough stage or if you're an agronomist and use the FEEX scale, F-W-E-K-E-S, which is a more technical scale. I'm going at 11.3 instead of 11.4. And so kernels and I'll pull these out and come over and show you in my hand. They go from four stages. There's milk stage, mealy stage, soft dough stage, hard dough stage, and then I guess there's dead ripe, so maybe five. And I want to harvest during soft dough, maybe tending towards hard dough, but I aim for soft dough, but then I'm usually late because of other things. I'm also looking at the stem and I want to see when is it yellow, straw yellow, for two to four inches below the head. That's when I want to harvest. So let me grab a couple grains and I'll pop over here and you can look at them a little more closely. Okay, so here I have some wheat berries and I'm just getting the husk or the chaff off of it so we can look at the actual berry inside, come on you. At this stage they're very clingy, so you can see it's got that little bifurcation. That's your wheat berry. It's very green. Now, soft dough, if I were to push with my nail, it would leave a nail mark. It's not doing that. Instead, when I squeeze it with my finger, watch what happens. You can see this right? Milk tending towards mealy, those little chunks in there, that's starting to be a little more mealy stage. When it's milk, it just gushes out like, well, milk. So I'll try a couple of these, that's mealy and soft dough will not squish out moisture like that. Yeah, so that's more like a little more milk tending to mealy. So I know I probably have about a week depending on conditions until I harvest. And this is my barley and my oats. You can see the barley behind me a little better because here the deer browsed it, but here I'm also checking for what stage is it in. When I crush one of the heads here on my oats, they are definitely in milk stage. They are very, very wet, much more so than the oats, excuse me, much more so than the wheat and the rye, meaning these might be a week behind for harvest. Again, I'm going to look for that yellow two to four inches at the top and a good soft dough stage at least. Same thing with the barley, which is also at soft dough, excuse me, at milk stage. So this is also going to wait. This was browsed by deer, so it's so short here, it's a little better farther on. These are much shorter because they've only been growing since the spring. They spend less energy growing a significant amount of green underneath and put more energy into their heads earlier and quicker because they're a spring planted crop. And here we see a chart from the University of Nebraska, and this shows that it needs a little bit of water in the fall to establish the winter wheat, and then the primary water needs are during heading out. That's when a lot of the yield is produced, so we're getting up to two inches of water per week, and if you're not getting enough rain, excess irrigation through pipes like I'm about to show you would be really helpful. Now we can have a quick look at what makes up this taller field sprinkler. So we've got the regular normal head up here, screwed into that half inch coupler, so there's a half inch thread here, and then glued here for half inch, and this is of course that gray PVC pipe that's actually used for conduit because this is UV resistant whereas the white stuff isn't as much, and this goes down to a coupler. Down here it's an L that has the slip fitting into the pipe, and then a threaded half inch out that's hose clamped onto a hose that goes off from the distribution system, so the water comes up, flows right up the pipe, and out to the sprinkler, and obviously it's attached here to a U post, not a T post, I guess you could do a T post, and I just use zip ties, maybe I could do something more formal, but that way I can set up the post nice and sturdy, and then attach this to it. Well it's a few days later now and I am going to begin to harvest this, since I'm kind of wall-to-wall here I'm gonna start with a sickle, I'll show you how I do that, and then I'm gonna move on to a side when I have a little more room, but first, the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna walk through, I'm gonna pick out the tallest, the tallest strands here, and I'm gonna individually harvest them and set them aside for seed next year. I am trying to grow taller wheat because I use it for thatch, but if you are just growing for wheat for flower, don't worry about collecting the tallest, maybe then you'd want to find the seed hedge with the most wheat on them, maybe selectively picking out some of the best to give you some good seed stock for next year, and I wouldn't do everything like that, I maybe pick like half of my seed stock for next year individually by hand, and then take a variety for the other half just so you get a bit of genetic variety in there, you don't want to put all your eggs in one genetic basket, so I'm gonna walk through now and pick out some of the tallest wheat and save that aside. One of the easiest ways to harvest, especially when you're starting out, is with a sickle. Here, assuming we have a nice stand of wheat, the way that I do it is I get an armful of wheat, I don't know about a yard, maybe two feet, and then I just go through and cut it at ground level, you don't have to cut it at ground level, I'm cutting at ground level because I want this for thatch, and then I lay it carefully so the heads are in one spot, the butts are in another, and then I take another two feet, bend down, and there we go. Now notice when I bend, I don't bend my back because that will hurt by the end of the day, I bend at my hips pretending like I have a tail or something like that, and I should feel a stretch in my hamstrings, believe me you got to do it this way, or it will hurt by the end of the day. If you see paintings or depictions of people doing this in the past, you'll notice they're bending the same way. It's called a hip hinge and it's essential. See those weeds in the bottom here? I can just pull them out because they're shorter. So now I'll do a little more, I'll get a bigger sheath, and then I'll show you how to bind it. Okay so now I have a bundle, and I'm going to make a sheath binding it with itself with its own straw, and so what I do is I take a handful of straw, which I'm going to knock it on its head to get the heads kind of near the bottom, then what I do is I hold the head side in one hand, and I give it one, two, three twists, and then I bend it and split it. It's hard to demonstrate this, it's easier to do it when I'm not demonstrating. You get the hang of it eventually, and I bend it and split it so it kind of makes a bit of a knot, right? So I've got the twist bent over with the heads down, and then these going out to either side. Then I lay it on the ground with the with the heads on top, right? Then I take what's going to be my sheath, my bundle, and I butt it so the bottom is somewhat flat, and I lay it down right on top of the knot, then I bring the two ends, and tighten it up by twisting, and I twist it more, and then tuck that twist underneath the band, so that it holds itself, and you got to do it as tight as you can, because this is going to dehydrate all week when it's standing up, and it'll lose some some of its mass, or some of its its thickness, and so it'll shrink a little bit, and there is one one sheaf, and you see here the twisted heads, and the twisted bottom. So here's a good example of weeds and wheat together, and why the sickle in some cases is better than a side. I can grab, you can see 90% of the wheat is above here, and all the weeds are below here, and so now when I cut here, I can pull out weeds real easy, and get them out of my straw, and I don't have to bother threshing them, they don't get in the way, and I'm left with just wheat above. Okay, so now I'm going to mow with a scythe, and in every video where I've done wheat harvest online, I get people in the comments saying, that's not how you use a scythe, you need to sharpen your scythe, all kinds of comments. Fine, that's okay. Please leave comments, or leave links videos showing, you know, how you want to use a scythe, that's great, but I will note that cutting wheat is very different than mowing hay, or mowing your lawn, or cutting weeds. When you're doing that, you're making windrows, you're just nice, smooth, big motions, big motions, and you're cutting all the vegetation, and it all gets kind of swept into a windrow, you know, one row of vegetation, and then you can scoop that up for hay, you can compost it, you can do whatever you want with it. There's one guy, Botan Anderson, from One Scythe Revolution, you should check out their YouTube page. He does windrow gardening, where he does his bed six feet apart, and then he just mows fresh vegetation on top of them to build up the soil, and to mulch them, great idea. I am not mowing, I am gathering. I want to gather this in an orderly fashion, unlike mowing, unlike anything else, so what I'm not only doing, yeah, I'm cutting at the bottom, but I'm also scooping. I'm scooping this entire thing, and then dumping it out, and that is different than mowing a scythe normally. Everyone says, oh, big, smooth arc, dah, dah, dah, dah. You got to keep your heel, the heel of the blade. This is the heel of the blade. You got to keep the heel of the blade on the ground. This is not true for wheat. This is not true for rye. There, traditionally, if you wanted to reduce the amount of straw you were collecting, instead of mowing down here low, people would mow up high, and they would mow all the way up here to only reap the top half of the straw, because all they wanted was this. They didn't care about the straw, the straw was extra, or they could come by and mow the rest of the straw later, very quickly. So, this is not scything like you're used to seeing it, or maybe you're used to doing. This is harvesting. Now, what am I trying to do? I'm trying to knock this entire swath into one clean pile on the ground. And if you notice, the rows go this way. I'm facing, I'm going perpendicular to the rows. If I go with the rows, so if I stand here and mow this way across the rows, it will jumble much easier. Whereas if I mow here, I can slot my scythe in between the rows and run the blade down here, catching all of this in the cradle. This is the cradle of the scythe, right? So, there's the blade, and then I put this cradle on it. This is basically a finger or an arm to catch all the grain. So, what I'm going to do is instead of making a circular motion, I'm going to make a straight motion and catch and dump the grain. So, the first one might be a little funky as I get my groove going, but after that, it should pick up smoothly. So, I catch and dump, catch and dump. It's a little different motion than mowing. I actually slot my, slot it in and then, and you have to have a little bit of momentum or you miss the end of your row. If you're slowing down here, ugh, you miss it and sometimes you have to clean it up with a sickle. So, slip in and see how I'm dumping it, all the butts together, all the heads together. This takes a knack. It's not easy. So, don't be disappointed if the first time you do this, you make a big mess of it. I certainly did. There you go. Even with experience, it's making a mess. And see all the weeds in here? This is going to be kind of a nightmare to put apart, but for the purpose of the video, I'll continue on. I usually would switch to a side at this point, or a sickle. Again, this is too weedy to really be siding, but for demonstration purposes, I will side it. Slip that in. Drop. Slip it in. Drop. Slip it in. Drop. And see, I miss the end of it. I'm missing the end because I'm having to mow all this extra vegetation in the form of this weed. And you can see how I mow it and drop it into a bundle and I try and make each bundle about the size of what I would bind. And it's best if you make a false throw, see how these heads turn down to stop and put them right. So now this bundle may not be the best example because of all the weeds in here. Doesn't make it as easy to just do this, but if I do a really good job, I toss all these bundles together with the butts more or less in the same location. I can actually just pick up a whole thing. I'm picking up weeds underneath here. And there's my sheath. I just have to bind it. So that saves a heck of a lot of time. Here I got to pick out all this crap though. So this would have been a good sickle job. So bottom line, a side is a much faster tool, but it also takes a lot more skill. I've been doing this now. This is my third year harvesting wheat. My fifth or sixth year using a side. So I have worked on, you know, I have this, I have a very specific set of skills that is kind of pointless. No, that's not true. It takes a while. So don't be upset with yourself if it doesn't come out smoothly like this. It takes practice. Even if you're good with a side, if you've done a lot with a side, but you haven't mowed, excuse me, harvested wheat or rye, there's a bit of a learning curve. But if you have a good familiarity with the side, it will go easier for you. This is like stunt driving where, and if you're just learning to drive a car, you don't want to do stunt driving or dangerous driving. This, so this is not how you would learn to side, learn to side on a lawn, learn to side with weeds, learn to side with hay and then convert that skill set to harvesting wheat. Do not start with this. It's very, very difficult. So I did a quick study and I can do, if it's weed free, if it's weed free, I can do a bundle, both cutting it and binding it in about four, four minutes. With a sickle, it takes me six. But if there's weeds, the sickle still takes me six. And the, and the side takes me more like seven or eight because I have to sit and pick through all the damn weeds afterwards. So if there are weeds, best my recommendation is using a sickle. If it is clean, unlike this yuck, if it's clean, you're willing to learn how to use it. A side is much faster. There's a reason that people in Europe used it. And usually how they would have it set up is they would have one reaper followed by two binders, meaning I could, if I'm reaping, I could buy, I could reap twice as fast as people could bind. And the nicer you could drop it in a bundle, the more people like to bind for you. Because binding was a thankless, taskless jar, usually done by the women and the men would do the reaping, not always, but that was the usual gender division. This is not a how to video about siding. If you want to learn how to side, search up one side revolution, one side revolution on YouTube, I'll link to their page. They have all kinds of instructional videos. This is slightly different. So this is a half inch copper tube. I've soldered a 90 and then two teas. And then I curbed it here with heat and a bender. And I've attached it as a cradle. You could take these apart. It doesn't need the fingers. And I'm still prototyping it each year. I changed it a little bit. But for this so far, this year, this has worked really well. You have to get the teeth. You have to get the teeth and the fingers lined up. Otherwise, if they're this way, you cut, and then you're grabbing things over here that are not cut. And if they're this way, you cut things that fall off the side. So they have to be perfectly aligned for when you're cutting. That's another reason that mowing down the rows like I did makes it easier. I have more wiggle room because there's wheat here and wheat here. It's a lot easier to catch it all. Another option for a grain cradle is something called a turkey wing. This is based on an American design. And it basically is three sets of wood that are shaped like the blade itself in good alignment with it. So that again, I can smoothly go down the row. This is more of a historical design than the copper tubing one, which honestly isn't as strong as this. But this is a lot more work to build. I'm prototyping this one. This one's just made out of plywood. But I'm going to make one out of ash. And I will glue laminate it to make it very light and very strong. You can see instructions for that at a place called Anarchy Acres. If you Google Anarchy Acres grain cradle, you can find instructions how to build one that way. And I highly recommend that. So this works just like the other one. But because it's so heavy, the center point of the weight is here. And I'd like to put an upright handle here. But right now, I'm going to hold it with my hand here and then use a slightly wider grip than I usually do for mowing. Usually I'm here. But because of the excess weight, for more control, I'm holding it at the pivot point. This gives me a lot more control. And if I'm holding it down here and trying to muscle it around, it is heavier. So it will take more work. But it is overall better. And now this is too short to use for rye. If I mow rye with this, half of the weight is above this point. And it will tip off and make a mess. So I have an extension, which is just another set of these that comes up here for when I'm mowing my rye. So it has to be variable depending on what you're mowing. Let's talk about stooking. Stooking is when you take your sheaves and you lean them up against one another to make this stook. There are a couple reasons that we do this. Number one, if you leave your your sheaves laying on the ground, they get dirty. And also you get a lot of mice and other critters. This at least makes it slightly more difficult for the critters to get to it. It also lets them dry out when we harvest, right? We're a little bit before a full dead rye. And we don't want to thresh it until it's dead rye. This keeps everything up off the ground. It lets air flow through it. It lets the sun beat on it. It dries it out in a way. If you pack these too tight, or if you have too many weeds in there, you can get mold inside. So you don't want to make them too tight. But you also want to make them too loose and they fall apart. You might get birds that come and eat your grain. So you can use netting, like a deer netting, and put it over there. That'll help keep the birds off. And today it actually looks like it's going to rain. So I've gone ahead and I've covered some of these with with with plastic. And as long as you keep it loose and so the air can flow up and underneath, it's not going to mold. Do you want to cover with plastic? You don't have to. There are some really great diagrams in Steven's Book of the Farm, which you can find online. I'll link to hopefully in the show notes here. Where there are ways to basically make a roof and you can patch up a large stook and then you put a couple of bundles on top and that sheds the water off a little better. Those are the ways to do it before plastic sheeting was available. Let me show you what I did with plastic sheeting. So here I've just used some old plastic sheeting from a different project, some scrap. And I used twine to keep it from blowing away off of this. And this is my wheat that I harvested the other day. And it will just there's plenty of room for air to flow up and through here. But it will keep most of the rain off, which will help it dry out. So one question is how long do you leave it in the stooks? You'll leave it here until it's dead ripe. That's it. But you can leave it longer. The longer you leave it though the more critters are going to eat it. So once it's dead ripe there are a couple options. One of them, which I'll show you in a minute, is taking the heads off and then you can thresh them at your leisure. But then really what you need to do is you need to move on to threshing kind of as soon as possible. In the olden days they would store these stacked up in haystacks, or sorry not haystacks I guess, stooked up on rodent resistant piles where they had mushroom shaped stones on which they would place boards and then they would stack all these and then throughout the winter they would take them and thresh them as they need to. But now since we have a lot quicker methods to thresh it's better just to thresh them as soon as you can and store the grain itself. Try not to store it like this. It just gets contaminated with pest problems. So this is a dry bundle. These have been drying for a week or two so they're dead ripe. And so what I can do now, so you can thresh directly from here. You can lay this down on a tarp and beat it with a flail. You'll see a couple different options for threshing here in a minute. But the way I harvest this because I want this for thatch, I measure where 30 inches is which is just above this band and in this case I used twine because yes you can do a bundle or you can do a binding out of the straw itself and that's perfectly fine and traditional. I used this because I'm going to use this for thatch and I found that when I bundled it with itself when I bound it with straw it tended to come loose and then I ended up with a huge mess up on my roof and I didn't want to deal with that. So I've been binding it with twine lately. So what I do, I have a trash bucket that I use just for this. This is a food trash bucket. I'd never put trash in here and I stick the head in. I hold it under my legs and I use loppers and then I just cut the top off. And yes internet, I know this looks dangerous for anatomical reason. Make the comment. It's pretty safe as you can see I'm cutting from here. I have pants on and this is a family show so yeah obviously I'm not going to be cutting anything that I wouldn't want to cut. Now for me because I'm using this for thatch I throw another binding on here just to keep it tidy. This is extra superfluous step that 99 percent of you don't need to do but for me this just makes a tidier bundle for me to get up on my roof for thatching later. Absolutely superfluous and not necessary. Now I have my thatching bundle and I'll set that aside and then I'll just repeat and I will fill this bucket with heads and this what this does is it reduces the amount of straw that goes through the thresher. The more straw you put through the thresher the smaller of a percentage the heads are and that's where your grain is coming out of right. So you want to reduce the amount of crap that you're putting through there. I could even just the way my thresher works one tip to make it a little better on you a little easier on you is to take your bundle put it up here and then do a couple of cuts. This will reduce the length of the straw the longer your straw the more likely it is to get tangled up in the thresher so I'm cutting here maybe eight inch bunches and this will make my life easier in the next stage as you'll see. It's really important if you're gonna put a lid on this that this stuff is dry and I mean dead ripe so it should be as hard and dry as it's going to get because if there's a lot of moisture in here and it's still drying out you will get mold so yeah here's a kernel oh it's like a rock okay so this is hard enough I can't make an impression with my fingernail that's dry enough it can be stored in here pretty much indefinitely if I have critter safe storage if I have enough of these tubs I could cut all of my grain and pop it right in here no problem and then I can thresh it when I need it I wouldn't recommend it I just thresh it all at once because it's a big messy job get it done with if you can but I understand that's not always possible so there we go all right after harvesting and drying I am now threshing threshing basically involves beating the seeds out of the heads and this is rye and I will say I really like threshing rye rye leaves the head intact and knocks all the seeds right out so you can see here a lot of seeds falling from the bottom this though is probably overkill for what you're doing when you're starting to do home scale wheat rye or other grains this thresher was based on a design on farmhack.org for a bicycle-powered thresher and winnowar threshing of course is removing the grain from the heads and this uses flails this is good if you're doing anywhere from five to 20 bushels a year after that maybe you'd want to upgrade or bring it somewhere else because that would be a lot of time I can do a bushel in an hour or so here a bushel is about eight gallons of of of wheat or rye and so how it works is I put sorry I wear a dust mask no matter what flailing method or threshing method you're doing but want to wear some sort of dust protection and ear protection potentially so I put in the heads that I've cut off put in these heads one more handful might be too much we'll see close it up turn on a motor over here and it's going to get loud up to in the bottom but if you notice the fan is blowing a lot of the chaff the chaff is the little little bits that fall out not the heads just a little waste material I guess not waste material but material that's not seed it gets blown away in the first course of winnowing winnowing you probably know the term winnowing chaff winnowing the chaff means to remove the unwanted portion in colloquial speech and here and here it means literally separating the chaff the little bits from the seed another option is using a mortar mixer with a tub method because I have a big mixer but if you don't this is one option some people attach little flails to the end of this and use a bigger bucket that'd be fine yet another option is to flail with a wooden flail or a stick I use this it's got more weight on this end than this end really just for this it might be better to leave the stocks together leave the heads on the stocks but I've already separated them so I'm doing it this way some people will even take just and hold the the heads like this and they will just just beat the head I can actually feel the weight decrease each time I do that beat the heads inside and look at that all the all the grain is basically the grains come right off another way so that's three ways for you four ways for you you can beat these with a stick you can put them in with a mortar mixer you can step just against the side of a tub this is probably the most effective and easy way that I found okay now comes winnowing winnowing is when we separate the grain from the chaff the chaff is heavier uh the grain is or excuse me the grain is denser and so when the wind hits it it blows the straw and the chaff away leaving just the clean grain behind you can totally use um the traditional thing to use is a is a shallow pan that you toss in the air and the wind blows the chaff away it's this beautiful process um with the volume that I'm doing I use uh a fan I could build I built a winnowing tower but it didn't work so well for me um so I just go this way route keep this multiple times until it's clean um until it's just clean grain um other people I've seen use leaf blowers like an electric electric leaf blower I wouldn't use my a gas-powered leaf blower because that would might leave a gassy exhaust flavor but if you have um if you have an electric leaf blower you can put them in a drum or a a trash can and blow and agitate and blow uh batches of this at a time and it will blow the chaff out and if you're careful it won't blow the seeds out that's another good option I don't have a leaf blower I I used to and I've done it that way and it's it works fine um so yeah it's just blowing down here and blowing up everything that's not green all right one more pass one thing you're going to want to do is check on the moisture content of your seeds and now you can buy a hundred dollar meter that you stick into your your seed uh into your into your um pail of wheat berries uh when you've harvested everything to see what the moisture content is but there's a more accurate way that is probably uh more cost-effective to you as a home grower and what that is is basically um measuring the weight of the seeds as you have them in storage or about to be stored um dehydrating the seeds and then measuring them again to see how much moisture was let off because you want to have your seeds down below 20 really in the area of 15 16 17 percent moisture um otherwise you're going to get mold um or other things growing uh in your seed containers and that's a real disappointment when you open up your your five gallon bucket of seeds that you painstakingly grew and they're full of mold uh so why don't we go through that process real quick it's real straightforward and simple so first i'm going to take some of my harvested seeds now the official iso way to do this is to measure out five grams but i don't have measuring equipment that does five grams so i'm going to do 50 grams now i'm going to grind this up into a fine powder then i'm going to put it in an oven safe container one of these white ramekins works perfectly now this is going in the toaster oven uh for two hours at 300 degrees okay it's now in two hours i'm going to grab my samples out of the toaster oven and uh we'll see how much they weigh smells nice toasted grain whoo don't want to spill too much okay what the originally weighed 50 grams now weigh 35 grams so what i do and i'll put this on the on the screen here i divide what it weighs now 35 grams by 50 grams um i subtract one so i get the uh so i can multiply that by 100 30 30 is the percent of moisture that my original sample had and this is my rye 30 percent moisture way too high and i will tell you when i held that grain i could tell it was moisture heavy it felt too heavy it felt a little um almost oily as it slid between my fingers that means the temp the moisture uh is too high so is that 30 percent i want to see that down closer to 20 percent so um so we got a wild weight on that so that's my rye now let's try my weight 40 grams so what what weighed 40 grams now weighs or what weighed 50 grams now is 40 grams so i take that 40 i divide it by 50 what it started with um minus one times 120 so i'm at 20 percent moisture with my wheat which is the absolute bare minimum of dryness that you would consider storing it and even then that's that's pushing it so what am i going to do i'm going to try a couple things um i have some screens outside um where the air can pass around and dry out the the seeds putting another screen you could also just unroll some window screen over it that would work too um although you know if your humidity is high that's not going to work so well i also have um seeds or i also have berries on a flat tray in my oven at with the pilot light on so it's just at you know 90 degrees almost no humidity and that works as a dehydrator um so just a couple of days in there and then and then i can retest um it's also possible to measure a finite volume and the weight at getting a proper cement moisture amount although that isn't necessarily as accurate or safe um as this method here so i'll probably do another assay in a few days once i feel like my grains have dried out sufficiently so that's how you test