I see what it is like to harvest and process spring wheat the old way, by using sickle and flail and winnowing by hand. It is just a small plot but the process is the same. I make a flail just for the job!
It takes roughly 1/3 of an acre to produce enough wheat for a small family. Not hard to do by hand at all, you will get better with time. There are grain separators that you can make very easily that separate the berries with a fairly high efficiency and all you have to do is drop it into a hopper and keep the machine fed until it’s all done. You can honestly make one with cardboard and computer fans for free if you have them laying around. It can process all the wheat for your entire family for a year in an hour. Get a large tarp, fold your wheat into it, beat it thoroughly (probably will take an hour) just like you did. Remove the stems and larger stuff, then dump the rest into your simple homemade chaff separator. The harvest takes the longest, but it’s honestly not that bad to just go out into the field with a satchel and scissors and just keep emptying the satchel into a wagon or gator until the field is empty. If all you bring back are wheat heads, the process of getting the berries out goes a lot faster. Set aside your seed stock, the rest is yours. It’s roughly a 70x70 wheat field for one persons average annual wheat supply. 140x140 for a family of 4. This should also leave you seeds for the next year
Thank you for this comment! You know, I have asked many people how much land to grow enough wheat and no one could ever give me a reasonable answer, so this is great. I agree, there are easier ways to do what I did, but I wanted the by-hand experience. Thank you for taking the time to send out this thorough reply and instructional, if I do it again I will make the chaff separator for sure. I have to admit that I still have berries in my fridge from that harvest. I did not attempt to build a mill and I had a lot of trouble getting it fine enough to use with blender and mortar and pestle. It ended up being something that I added to processed flour to make it more interesting, but I never managed to get it fine enough to make bread from my own flour alone.
@@vocationcreations3149 if you end up buying a flour mill, they are fairly reasonable. Typically I would recommend grinding your berries on a medium setting, sifting the bran out, then grind again on fine. There are some mills made for this, they have a automatic sifter on top of the mill for you to pour your medium grind into. It will sift out most of the bran and send the rest back into the mill. If you use a bender or whatever, just sift the flour after and you will have some very nutritious flour that is perfect for making breads. You can also just eat the bran with raisins and milk for the healthiest Raisin Bran you have ever eaten.
@@vocationcreations3149 that’s crazy. Sorry to hear you still have so much snow. Thanks for the kind responses. If you do plant more wheat, give us a video. Take care
Fascinating, today in the UK I saw a huge combine and truck harvesting the mechanised way. I bet most people have no idea how to harvest wheat ! With this food crisis this could become a useful skill.
I bet they do know how. Farmers know the history of wheat production and could educate all of us on how to produce a substantial harvest and how to dehull the wheat berries. Don't mock a farmer. They know how things worked in the past to the present.
So how did your wheat turn out this year? I planted last October and harvested a few weeks ago. I planted about two pounds of seed on 577 square feet and harvested a bit less than 55 pounds of wheat (roughly 69 bu/ac yield--not bad for a home garden, from what I can tell). Just a few thoughts... a) If you get a solid stand, wheat does a wonderful job of suppressing weeds. b) That flail really looks like a terrible way to thresh. I mostly did mine just by crushing the heads by hand, and rubbing them over a piece of hardware cloth. One of the better methods I have seen involves putting the wheat in a container and breaking it up with a string trimmer. c) Winnowing is definitely easier if you catch the grain in a larger container so you don't need to be so careful with dropping it! Fifty-five pounds of wheat, by the way, is about 80,000 calories. Roughly six weeks of food for one person. I'm sure you grew yours mostly for the novelty, but I do hope to get good value from mine. It will go nicely blended with the corn I'm growing to make corn bread to go with the dried beans I'm also growing!
I agree, it was a tough way to do it, but I wanted the full pioneer experience. There are many other better ways, as you certainly see on RU-vid. I am in Canada, in zone 4, so we don't harvest anything until August. This year I planted a ton of pumpkins and gourds in that patch. You are right again, it was more for the experience and to gain the knowledge of "how to" in case I ever really need it! I still have some of the berries from last year since processing them into useable flour is also difficult without a proper mill. Your venture sounds like a real plot and a good stockpile for the winter. Congratulations! You will be a threshing for a while, easy way or hard way regardless! Anyone who is willing to put that kind of work in to their food deserves to eat well!
@@vocationcreations3149 Thanks for the response! I did plant in the fall, mostly because I see that as a more efficient use of the space available. I'm just barely in zone seven (Arkansas Ozarks), so after harvesting the wheat, there's still plenty of time to put a crop of beans in that same plot before (possibly) planting wheat again in the fall. I replanted it with a mix of kidney beans and grain sorghum the day after I harvested the wheat. I finished threshing--it took about three weeks of 2-3 hours a day. The grain is in two five gallon buckets in the freezer. it doesn't need freezing, of course, but I wanted to make sure that any insect eggs are killed. I'll remove it from the freezer when I need the space. My mill is a fairly inexpensive hand cranked one. If I grow grain regularly, I'll likely upgrade to a more expensive electric one. It's quite an arm workout grinding enough grain for bread (or brownies!) by hand. As it is, I'll have to break up corn in a blender or coffee grinder before I can mill it, because the mill only handles small grains.
Zone 7... I am a tree guy and very jealous of your zone 7! Up here the best we can do is apples, plums and pears.. I wish I could have a season as long as yours! Hats off to you for making such good use of your sun! It is nice to know that there are still other people out there who value an honest hard day's work and the rewards that it can bring!
@@vocationcreations3149 cooking whole wheat berries is more nutritious than making flour and the berries keep longer. You probably knew all that but some viewers may not.
That was a neat experiment. I’d probably get a cement mixing tray and dump the bowl into that so you are less likely to loose the seeds. But now I want to try doing this. I remember when I lived in TN I used to see wheat growing wild. I wish it grew wild in SC.
Thank you, yes, there were many ways this could have been easier but I am a glutton for punishment..! I like your channel, I will be looking through your videos when I can! And I am jealous of your farm and your hardiness zone... I am up in Canada and in Zone 4, so not much of a growing season. I always wanted a farm, but we ended up on an acre and a half. It is enough for me to have chickens and some gardens, but no other livestock. I feel your idea of the forest garden. I am a tree guy and if I had the hardiness zone for it, all of my plantings would bear edible fruit.. I have always read permaculture books and tried to apply what I could to our situation. It takes planning, patience and a ton of work, but the feeling of accomplishment when reaping the rewards can not be replicated.
@@vocationcreations3149 yeah I’m in zone 8 and I can grow a lot. I don’t get alot of chill hours though. I’ve recently started looking for stuff that grows naturally in my area. Native fruits, nuts, berries and vegetables. A buddy of mine just gave me a bunch of wild persimmons and I harvested the seeds out of them. I have a little more than 8 acres. Most of it is timber. But I got it pretty cheap back in 2014 and moved onto it about 2 and a half years ago. I want to buy more land but money is tight right now. We moved from our 1 acre homestead and basically started from scratch.
@@rickershomesteadahobbyfarm3291 Oh, the trees I would grow in Zone 8! And all the other things of course. It sounds great, good luck to you. I hope your forest grows into what you wish for it.
You know, I never though to do that... Thanks for the idea! It is still on the grinder, just abandoned... A rookie mistake to catch the thing in the first place. I kind of deserve it for turning my piece the wrong way...
Thank you for your comments! I have a new job that is keeping me too busy to pay attention to youtube these days, so no new videos for a while now.. good luck with your wheat, it is a rewarding bit of hard work! Let me know if you need to borrow a flail! ;)
@@endtimesareuponus8930 couldn't agree more. I just made this as a side salad rather than macaroni salad fur a family BBQ. Even the fussiest of eaters loved it
How many hours was that total labor and how many sqft of planting for what yield? if you had to feed yourself through the winter with wheat, do you think it could be done with one middle aged person? It looks like you might have resulted in a full day of labor for maybe two full days of bread in this video, but I could be wrong. I'm interested in this process for the survival aspects. So many people do the threshing with electricity, but I wonder how it goes without any. Also I hear a lot about "hull", after winnowing, is the part you grind for flour still encased in a hull? Do you have to remove it? Or do you grind the whole thing up into flour? Hard for me to tell without seeing the result up close.
@@vocationcreations3149 Yeah I already told my wife I expect maybe 1/3 loaf of bread outta it. lol. (flexes imaginary farming prowess, and immediately sprains something) 😖😋 Definitely not quitting my day job.
Thanks! It makes me Alert every time I use it! Just a cross cut saw at this point, it is so old that I am afraid to loosen anything to change the cutting angles.
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