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Harvest summer 2024:

The knowledge of how to grow grains makes you feel, not only closer to the cycle of life on our planet, but also directly connected to the culture of our ancestors, most of whom would have grown and harvested grain by hand in more or less the same way as this for thousands of years.
Everyone should grow a small bed of grains at least once. There is no better education i can think of (along with growing your own clothes/flax for linen), to bring us down to earth and teach ‘the meaning of, life, the universe, and everything’ (even if, maybe especially if, we already know the answer is 42).

At first i separated the chaff from the grain by hand, which worked well when the grain was very dry. The Solstice wheat was partly still not fully dried (green) so was more difficult by hand (i literally just rubbed the heads with my hands). I then winnowed all three grains using a shallow bowl (a large plastic mixing bowl) by shaking and blowing off the chaff with my own breath. It actually worked very well for small quantities. After trying a few other methods of threshing (my boots/a flail etc..), and winnowing (throwing in the air on a windy day/a leaf blower…), i settled for the methods shown below (a drill with a chain to thresh, and a fan and large plasterers buckets, pouring from one to another, to winnow) which sped up the whole process considerably. The results are a few kilo of grain from a few very small beds on an allotment plot garden, not much more than six metres square, and more straw than i know what to do with yet. I was especially impressed by the rye straw, which was well over a metre long and such a beautiful strong material. This season i am planting an old ‘long straw’ wheat variety still used for traditional thatching of roofs in England, which produces (a by-product for the thatching trade) a good bread wheat.