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08/10/2009: "More Wheat Threshing"

The threshing process for the wheat continues, although at a slower pace. The photo above is from more than a week ago (the family kidnapped me for a vacation, so no farm activities last week). The day this picture was taken was in the midst of a giant-sized heat wave we had here in the Pacific Northwest, with about a week of temperatures in the 100's. Luckily, I had thought of the idea of setting up an awning, which was the only way that I could have been doing any of this work at all on an afternoon where the mercury hit 105 degrees. I would work for about 45 minutes, then go sit in the shade for ten minutes. Everything had to be slowed down: move carefully, deliberately, slowly.



In the photo above you can see the pile of straw off to my left; I'm holding the sheaf of wheat in my gloved hands to keep it from being drawn totally into the thresher. Once the heads, or tillers, have been knocked off I pull the sheaf of headless stalks out and toss them over onto the straw pile.


However, as I mentioned I have been away from the farm, and Lou and his family have been doing most of the work.



One of the crucial things that Lou learned was that if you added a screening step between the rough threshing and the seed cleaning step you got much cleaner product out of the final chute.



This allowed him to put the screened product into the hopper and just let the machine nibble it down steadily in the cleaning step.



The other thing that Lou learned is that in the future we should manually cut out all the thistle from the wheat field before harvesting the wheat. The thistle isn't too bad to handle when green, but once it dries out it tends to pierce any leather palm glove that we've tried. It's nasty!

This final photo shows a mostly full 55 gallon drum of wheat; we've collected two full drums so far, and may get another half drum out of the remaining unprocessed wheat. In reality there is still a lot of wheat still on the ground, but it is just too time-consuming to deal with the bindweed.