Flailing away

Last year, you may recall, I grew some oats as an experiment. I have plenty of room, and I like to eat oats -- especially the steel-cut kind. None of this Quaker oat stuff, processed within an inch of its life. Or your life, if you believe in dietary sanity. However, I am now processing last year's oats. The thing about grains is that there are two steps involved -- sometimes only one. First you must thresh (or thrash) your grain. This step involves separating the grain from all the plant infrastructure. Second, you may have to hull the grain; remove the protective (and inedible) husk or hull from the grain.

The big boys ("Big Agro") use megabuck equipment for this task. Once upon a time you could buy hand-powered equipment to do these jobs. No longer. For the small-scale agroperson, the choices are (1) buy equipment made for experimental farms, at very high prices or (2) make it yourself. Well, said I, let's go back to primitive methods first.
So here is the really primitive way of threshing grain. The yogurt container is the receptacle for the final product. Just above it appear two sticks tied together with cord. This is your flail. Above, the raw proxuct. In order to avoid the hulling trap, I grew "naked oats," AKA avens nuda. It doesen't have to be hulled. The stuff you don't want is called chaff and it is recommended that you do the thing on a windy day, so's it blows away, but that day there was no wind and I used a (kaput) hair dryer to simulate it. Not that I use hair dryers, but they are useful for many purposes, such as blacksmith forges. Oh yes, and the blue thing is a Royal Mail postal bag, courtesy of Camden Miniatures, a wonderful place to buy books. Her Majesty's bag keeps the grain from going away. Thank you, ma'am. At the top (12 O'clock) of the picture is some of the raw material, i.e oats. But this winter I separated off the straw and tossed it on the compost heap. The straw is that part of the oat plant that you don't really want. The stem of the plant. A real thresher gets the whole plant and produces grain at the end.

The procedure is this. You place the oats on top of H.M. bag. You take the flail and beat the tar out of it. This will deconstruct avens nuda into grain and chaff. If there is a wind blowing, the wind will blow the chaff away. No wind? Ply your hair-dryer to blow the chaff away. Be careful, because you can also blow the grain away!

OK, after about two hours of this megillah I have come to the conclusion that the labor involved in the primitive procedure is not just excessive. It is impractical for one person. Need to build a thresher. Some pointers on the net (try googling thresher and homemade). Yet another project into the queue.

And, to forestall some objections: in Asia (India in particular) they build exactly what I want. But not for me. These things are not exported. Not enough market. I understand that exactly, because nobody is in business to lose money! But esteemed manufacturers in India, nowadays we have the Internet. Put up a good web page, and the world will beat a path to your door. The homestead market in the US alone might be worth it. Do be prepared to cope with the problems of international shipping. Put the word "homestead" in your web page. Just a thought.

The Oat Patch

With Manfred on hand, I returned from my bike ride to Corner Farm and tackled my oat patch. I have determined that oats grow well in Alaska -- better than any other grain. Close seconds are wheat and rye. So I ordered some Naked Oats from Johnny's Selected seeds in Maine. Let us see.

I decided, in a complex decision process that involved my own endurance, the condition of the ground, the obliquity of the ecliptic, the SU(3) symmetry group, and plain old guesswork, that 5 meters by 5 meters would be OK. The original plan was for 10x3 meters. That's 30 m2, and is based on Gene Logsdon (The Contrary Farmer) and his book, Small-Scale Grain Raising. If you Google on Gene Logsdon, you will find his refreshing blog, and all his books. Gene says that this is adequate for one family ( translating gringo units to something human). OK, 30 square meters it should be.

So, thought I, 25 m2 isn't too far off ; this ground is awful; it is full of stumps, roots, junk, and for all I know dinosaurs. That's 5x5. Good enough. Gas up Manfred and we are off.About 45 minutes later, we have an oat patch. You can see it behind Attila and Manfred, parked side by side. Tillers are marvellous. But they require quite a lot of muscle. My tractor has wheel brakes and can turn in its own length; a tiller has no such convenience and you have to horse it around turns. But it did it. It would have taken (literally!) years to clear this much by hand, at my age anyway. I was quite wiped out when I finished.

No rest for the weary. Time to do the beds in the garden extension. This, I must report, is hoe-and-shovel work. Exhausting. But the nice thing is that the tiller has broken up a lot of the sod, roots, and old boots -- so not quite so exhausting. More follows.

At the end of the day, I am bone-tired but happy. We humans must be wired up for working the soil. Why else would anyone work so hard? But I am satisfied.