Upcoming product review:Treadle-powered wheat thresher

Some of you may remember our wheat-growing experiment from a few years ago.

North Idaho is wheat country. Take a short drive anywhere beyond our property, and you’ll see vast swathes of cultivated Palouse prairie. In late summer, massive million-dollar combines rumble across the fields, cutting wheat at a precise height, vacuuming up the grain heads, threshing it, and spitting out the clean wheat from one side and the chaff from the other. These machines are awesomely efficient. Whenever you buy flour at the store, or consume pastry or bread products, you can thank the thousands of hardworking farmers who grow wheat for our country.

But what about growing wheat on the individual level? That was what our wheat-growing experiment was all about. Was it do-able from the standpoint of a small homestead? How hard would it be?

We set out to learn.

The first time we grew wheat, we plowed the field once in the fall, then sowed hard red winter wheat. This wheat sprouts in autumn, goes dormant over the winter, and grows again in the spring, then is harvested in late summer. It worked great except for one thing: we couldn’t control the weeds, notably cheatgrass. It’s not like we could plow the weeds under while the wheat was growing. We ended up growing half wheat, half weeds. The experiment was a failure.

So how do commercial wheat growers control weeds? Partly weeds are controlled with sprays; and partly they’re controlled by continuous cultivation. We wouldn’t do the former and couldn’t do the latter (yet).

So we switched to hard red spring wheat which, as the name implies, is planted in the spring. We plowed the field three times before planting: once early in the spring, a second time to kill any weeds that returned, and a third time to kill any more stubborn weeds that returned yet again. This crop of wheat was much more successful. (We may try winter wheat again after several years of weed control through cultivation.)

With the exception of plowing the field, everything else was done by hand. We sowed. We scythed. We raked. We bundled.

And we threshed. Or at least, we tried.

While the whole wheat-growing venture was challenging but otherwise fine (and repeatable), it was the threshing that did us in. Threshing wheat by hand, using flails, is inefficient, wasteful, physically difficult, and wildly time-consuming. In this respect, the experiment was, once more, a failure. Grrr.

One of the ongoing things we’re trying to do on our homestead is to figure out what works and what doesn’t when it comes to self-sufficiency. Wheat is an integral part of most Americans’ diets, yet threshing stymied us. We needed to find out how to grow wheat with the less-sophisticated hand-powered methods suitable to a small homestead.

We spent a lot of time wondering what a small family farm could use in place of massive combines. After a fair bit of research, as well as some suggestions from blog readers, we came across a treadle-powered wheat thresher:



So, in an attempt to continue our research, we decided to purchase this thresher and conduct a product review regarding its efficiency. How well does it work? What are its drawbacks? How efficient is it? How difficult is it to use? Can it thresh enough wheat to feed a family from year to year?

These are some of the questions we hope to answer. Backwoods Home Magazine has already expressed an interest in an upcoming article on the subject, and I suspect a number of other magazines would be interested as well.

The thresher we purchased came from a place called Back to the Land Store in Tennessee (which closed its retail location shortly thereafter and has plans to open an online-only store). The gentleman I spoke to told me the machines are hand-made by an Amish family living nearby. He said it will thresh about 1.5 lbs. of wheat per minute (at top speed); and the drier the wheat, the better it threshes. The cost of the machine as well as shipping it to Idaho came to around $1200, so it was not a purchase to undertake lightly and it took us awhile to save up for it.

The thresher was shipped in mid-November and arrived without incident. Right now it is being stored in the barn until we have a chance to put it to use next August.

Come May, we’ll re-plow the same field we used before. We’ll repeat the triple-plowing to control weeds. We have seed wheat ready to plant. We have scythes ready to sharpen. Now we have a thresher ready to thresh.

Stand by for a product review!

Threshing wheat

For those of you who were following our wheat-growing experiment last year, you might have wondered how much usable wheat we ended up with. Well, I couldn't tell you -- because we still hadn't threshed it.

All winter long, most the wheat was stored in a friend's trailer.

The remaining wheat was triple-wrapped in tarps. We hope it's okay but we haven't unwrapped it yet to find out.

Between cold or otherwise bad weather -- and no need to rush -- we just never got around to threshing anything. But now our friend needs his trailer back, so we have to get that wheat threshed ASAP.

Another reason for our delay in getting the wheat threshed was, quite frankly, we didn't know how to do it. Oh sure, we knew academically what we needed to do, but book knowledge and actually doing it are vastly different things. But since push had now come to shove (and, not incidentally, the weather was finally moderating), we decided to apply the book knowledge and see where it got us.

First thing we needed was a tarp, as a clean surface for threshing. For some time now, we've been collecting old vinyl billboard tarps, which will be used for weed control in the garden.

These tarps are very thick and sturdy (and colorful!). This particular tarp was advertising something for Burger King.

Don backed the trailer onto the edge of the tarp and opened the back.

The wheat was solidly packed in, very dry, with no water or rodent damage. Whew!

But now what? This was the part that had us stumped. Originally we thought we'd lay out a single layer of bundles, cover them with another tarp, then roll a heavy tractor tire back and forth across it to loosen the wheat. These tires weigh upwards of 300 lbs., so that would be a significant amount of weight.

But one look at the wheat -- and a few experimental stomps across the bundles -- and we knew this wasn't going to work. The wheat needed agitation, not weight. What now?

While we discussed our options, the chickens descended upon us, having concluded that we had spread a feast solely for their benefit.

Next Don decided to try an experiment: If he stuffed a sheaf of wheat into a clean garbage can and used a weed whacker, would that rattle the wheat loose?

It worked -- sorta -- but it also ripped the wheat straw to shreds (making it harder to separate from the chaff and kernels), and it also went through an extraordinary amount of weed whack cord. Back to the drawing board.

What we needed, of course, was a flail, but we didn't have one... nor were we sure how to make one. A quick search on the internet revealed lots of ways to make a Medieval weapon called a flail; but a lot less info on the farm implement. However a hasty consultation in our grain-growing bible...

...revealed this gem:

A piece of garden hose! Now that we've got. I knew just where a chunk of old garden hose was.

Without further ado, we cut the hose piece where it was already kinked, and gave that a try. We started by holding it in two hands, like an arc, and beating the wheat with that.

However we soon switched to the one-handed version. This allowed us to rest one hand while using the other, and we could swap back and forth. We'll probably duct-tape these for an easier grip.

And then we started flailing the wheat. The first thing we learned is we had to cut the sheaves (we originally thought we could keep the sheaves tied, but no). Then we learned we had too much wheat spread out on the tarp. It was too thick, and the top wheat cushioned the wheat at the bottom. We needed a thinner layer.

So we pitchforked most of the wheat into a pile at one end of the tarp, and just spread about two bundles at a time. Then we got down on our knees (or sat on a crate) and started whaling at the wheat. The hoses worked beautifully as flails.

When wheat kernels are released, the wheat head starts to look fuzzy or ragged. The head on the left is intact; the head on the right has the wheat kernels beaten out of it.

We beat the wheat until we saw that most of the heads were ragged. Then we forked up a bit of wheat straw, shook it gently, and pitched it to one side.

What was left was a mess of kernals, chaff, beaten wheat heads, straw, etc.

We scooped this up with a snow shovel and a shop broom...

...and poured it into a clean garbage can.

The chickens avoided our little threshing floor, but they took full advantage of the discarded straw.

Once the first sheaves of wheat were threshed, we spread more wheat out and repeated the process. Again. And again. And again. And again. By the end of about three hours, we had all the wheat we had initially pulled out of the trailer, threshed... and we were pooped. And sore.

This was our loot for the afternoon: about forty pounds of mixed wheat berries, chaff, wheat heads, straw, etc. We have a lot of cleaning and winnowing to do, obviously. But this only represents about one-eighth or less of the wheat we have to thresh.

Despite our efforts, though, we found that many of the beaten wheat heads still contained a couple grains of wheat. Hand-harvesting, we're learning, is massively inefficient next to the fanatical precision of mechanical harvesters or combines.

Out of the original 200 lbs. of wheat we sowed, what was our return? At this point, we have no idea since it's not all threshed (threshing, we're realizing, is going to take awhile). Hopefully it was "worth" it, meaning we recouped significantly more than those original 200 lbs we sowed.

One thing's for durn sure... I appreciate a loaf of bread a lot more than I used to.

Harvesting wheat by hand

This is a very long post, so grab yourself a cup of tea or a glass of wine and follow us as we harvest our wheat.

We've been keeping a strict eye on our wheat field because we knew harvest was imminent.

According to our reference book Small Scale Grain Raising by the incomparable Gene Logsdon, grain is ready to harvest when it's crunchy hard. If the grain is chewy-soft, it's not yet ripe.

Don tested the grain every few days. On August 16 it was still too chewy.

On August 23 it was much crunchier...

...and the field had turned a beautiful wheat-gold.

We have four scythes, which Don carefully sharpened. (Before I hear the howls of protest, please understand these are American blades, not European blades. Peening works with European blades but not American blades.)

Meanwhile we had spent the last couple years on the lookout for a cradle for a scythe. A cradle attachment catches the grain and pushes it over in one direction, making it easier to bundle into sheaves. Without a cradle, the grain falls every-which-way.

Scythes are fairly easy to find, but not cradles. I took a screen shot of a scythe-and-cradle for sale on eBay some time ago (no, I have no idea who these gentlemen are). But because they're so bulky, scythes and cradles cannot be shipped.

Last year I made inquiries at a local antique/junk store. The store owner said she had a cradle she would be willing to sell for $50. Last week we asked if she could bring it in.

We brought along one of our own scythes to see if it could be attached.

However, knowing my interest, the woman said the price was now $75 instead of $50, so we said thanks but no thanks.

So early one morning before sunrise, Don and I got to work. (He wore his Hawaiian shirt so, he told me, I wouldn't accidentally scythe him.)

Here's what the first two passes (one for each of us) looked like.

Meanwhile the sun rose.

It took us awhile to decide which scythe worked best for us. It's one thing to take a few whacks in an overgrown lawn. It's something entirely different to scythe a half-acre. I'm shorter and needed a shorter snath (handle), for example.

Also, being older, the grips on the snaths needed to be duct-taped into the correct position, otherwise they slid around too much.

But once we got those difficulties ironed out, we were on our way.

It takes about ten minutes to become an expert with a scythe. It doesn't leave you breathless and panting. It's not physically hard -- it can't be, otherwise farmers from an earlier age couldn't keep it up all day as they did -- and once a rhythm is developed, it goes rather rapidly.  It took Don and me ten minutes to scythe one row the length of the field. It's rather soothing and satisfying. The scythe does the work -- that's the important thing to remember -- and as long as you allow your body to go with the flow, you can keep it up for a long time.

We stopped after every second row to re-sharpen the scythes. Dull scythes merely push the wheat over. Sharp blades slice right through the wheat stems like butter.

Then it was back to work.

Although we didn't (thank God!) have the cheat grass problem we had last year, we did have a few thistles. At first we didn't think much about them -- we scythed through them just as easily as the wheat -- but later seriously regretted it. Those thistles hurt our hands all out of proportion to their size when it came time to bundling the wheat into sheaves.

One thing we discovered during the scything process is the importance of even seed distribution. When we planted the seed late last May, there were times when seed got dumped rather than broadcast (one of the perils of amateurs trying to broadcast seed -- broadcasting is truly an art).

Well, this is what that dumped seed grew into. Can you see the darker, shorter patch?

Doesn't look like it would be any big deal, but in fact the seed heads were smaller and less mature, and the stalks wouldn't slice. They just pushed down in front of the scythe and wouldn't cut at all. This meant that when we finished scything the field, we had lots of little dense patches of uncut wheat. Oh well, live and learn.

This is what the bases on better-spaced plants looked like -- much easier to cut.

Rocks -- the enemy of scythes. Trust me on this.

When we finished cutting, it was time to start raking and bundling. Here's where the girls' help was essential.

But we only got a small start on this process before we called it a day. It was brutally hot and none of us felt like working under that blazing sun.

Besides our muscles were starting to ache. And ache and ache. Scything isn't bad over short spurts, but several hours of it brought out muscle groups I never knew I had. By evening I was horribly stiff and sore, and even my hands were seizing up with cramps while using a knife and fork.

Early the next morning -- shortly after the girls stumbled out of bed -- we hit the wheat field again. I'd already been at it since 6 am, when it was light enough to see. There was a chance of rain coming in, so we had a lot to do.

It took us awhile to figure out how to do things, but we finally fell into an efficient rhythm. The girls were the rakers, and I was the bundler.

The wheat field is roughly triangular in shape, so we started at the apex and worked our way down. Can you see the sheaves?

Hour

after hour

after hour

after hour we worked. The girls were absolute troopers.

We broke at noon to pack about a hundred tankards for shipment to our booth at the Kansas City Renaissance Festival, which necessitated a trip to Spokane. When we got home in the evening, we tried shocking some of the sheaves (just a fancy way of saying we stacked the sheaves against each other in an upright position). In theory shocks protect harvested wheat from rain and allows it to dry faster.

Very picturesque to be sure, but the reality was we needed to get this wheat under cover.

But first we had to finish raking and sheaving it. So early on the third morning we were back at it.

Working our way down the triangle, the girls raked the wheat into long rows, like windrows, while I followed and bundled.

To make a bundle, I took hay bale twine and cut it in half...

...and used it to tie the bales. Traditionally sheaves were tied with wheat strands and couldn't be more than about eight inches in diameter (limited by the length of the wheat strands), but I could make the sheaves bigger by using twine.

It was tough work on my fingers, the constant and repetitive jerking and pulling the twine tight, so I wrapped them in duct tape to cut the pain. (Can you see where the term "farmer's hands" comes from?)

I don't know if this was the "right" way to make sheaves, but here's how I did it. Since we weren't using a cradle and therefore the wheat fell every-which-way, I piled wheat into a pile big enough that I could "embrace" it. Here I'm running twine below the pile.

I pull the ends of the twine around to the top of the pile...

...and yank the twine into a half-hitch.

Then I pick up the bundle and give it a good shake to shake loose all the wheat strands that didn't get gathered by the twine (the girls would then come behind me and rake up the fallen wheat into the next windrow).

Then I stepped away from the loose wheat and put the bundle on the ground, where I completed the knot.

Gradually the girls and I worked our way down the field until by about noon of the third day, we got everything raked and bundled into sheaves.

It may not look like much from this perspective, but I assure you it was a massive amount of work to harvest a half-acre of wheat.

But what to do now? Last year we didn't have a rodent-proof place to store the cut wheat, and ended up losing every last grain kernel to the @&%$ chipmunks. After all this hard work I was darned if I would let that happen again.

We seriously thought about buying a giganto cargo net and suspending the wheat from the rafters in the barn (which we may yet do). But for the moment we decided to use a friend's trailer, which he had loaned us a couple of months ago, to store the wheat.

This trailer isn't huge (about 6x8 feet) but it's entirely rodent-proof.

We laid a brand-new clean tarp on the floor, then I brought sheaves while Don stacked them tightly. Wheat kernels were rattling down during this process, giving us hope that when it comes time to thresh the wheat, it won't be too arduous a task.

Don packed those sheaves into the trailer more tightly than I could imagine. We knew we couldn't fit all the wheat into the trailer, but we wanted to fit as much as we possibly could.

Can you see the wheat that has come out of the seed heads?

Don did a remarkable job, packing it in.

This left us with about one-quarter of the field still full of sheaves. Where to put it?

For the time being, we decided just to pack the back of the truck full, hoping that chipmunks are unlikely to scale the sides of the truck to access the wheat. Not a great plan, but about our only option at the moment. So we opened another clean new tarp and spread it over the truck bed.

I handed up the sheaves to Don, and he packed them as tightly as he could. He paused to strike some manly poses, which had me laughing my head off.

It felt good to laugh and be silly after such long days of hard work. After 22 years of marriage, this man can still make me laugh and feel silly.

After the truck was full and the field was empty, we threw another tarp lightly over the top...

...and Don carefully ratcheted it in place to hold everything down while he drove to the barn.

In contrast to the long and back-breaking work of harvesting, raking, and sheaving the wheat, loading the trailer and truck only took about an hour. While it was a relief to get the bulk of the wheat safely picked up, there was unquestionably still a huge amount of loose seed heads scattered on the ground. Don estimates about 20% of the wheat simply fell.

As time permits (ha!), we may carefully rake the field again and try to gather it up. It's hard to waste grain we worked so hard to grow and harvest.

Nonetheless as Don drove out of the field, it made me realize how much we'd accomplished. We'd also done something few other people in America have ever done: hand-harvested a field of wheat.

For the time being, we parked the truck under cover in the barn...

...and parked the trailer off to the side.

As the sun set after these three days of harvesting our wheat, I remarked to Older Daughter how glad I was it was done. She replied, "That's why they used to have harvest parties." Suddenly her words made perfect sense. During a time when a good harvest meant the difference between life and death, who wouldn't want to pause and celebrate God's bounty?

It's important to remember that this is only Step One on the road to flour. We still have to thresh, winnow, and grind the grain before we can make bread.

But that will come later. We're too busy right now to do anything more.

Will we grow wheat next year? Probably not. Not necessarily because of the work involved, but because harvest falls at exactly the same time we're at our peak of busyness with our woodcraft business. The woodcraft business takes precedence since that's our source of income.

It remains to be seen how much wheat (in pounds) we got from this experiment. We started by planting 200 lbs. of seed wheat. If we didn't get a significant amount more in return, then the experiment wasn't worth it.

On the other hand, we grew wheat. That's saying something.

By the way, it never did rain. But that's okay. It gave us the motivation to get the job done. And if we hadn't gotten the wheat under cover, it would have rained buckets. Ain't it the way it always works?