Miners in the gold rush used to put their gold in a sheet and - with a person each holding 2 corners of the sheet - toss it and let the wind blow away the dirt. This could work for wheat, too, in a light breeze. Oil paintings of winnowing also show women with a "cake pan" shaped dish pouring the wheat over the edge in a breeze. The breeze catches the chaff and takes it away with little effort on your part. Good for you for being stubborn. Thank you for this video!
I don't have a video processing the wheat into bread but grinding wheat is a time and labor intensive process too. I made a video, I can't remember what I called it, where I made biscuits from flour that I had vacuum sealed and stored and it was over three years old. The flour was fine, so you can keep a good amount of it for a long time :)
From UK I also wanted to make bread from sowing the seed to baking, I have the same grinder as yours which does grind the wheat to flour, but I hadn’t used it for threshing. I did make a small loaf in the end but I had to pick out all the grain that was still enclosed in the husk. Like you I wondered why people would for thousands of years spend their lives making bread by hand without machines. I did it to show my grandchildren how bread was made and they were interested. Thanks for the useful tips
My husband remembers cutting hay for cows with horses. It took between 9 and 18 horses to do it. I can't imagine what it would take to grow wheat and harvest it. Imagine the land you'd need to grow horse feed in a cold climate to feed them for winter. Holy cow!
I remember as a kid.. grinding the wheat.. and I believe it was with a corn grinder.. but then what we did was was layer it between two old window screens to separate it out..I'm thinking a loose weave basket or even a flour sifter might work..
I'm glad I have a gluten allergy and can't eat wheat. I don't believe I've ever said that before, but after watching that video, I have had an awakening. Thanks for the demonstration and the time that it took to share it with us all.
No, I tried that too. It's hard to believe how those grains of wheat hang on. It really is hard to thresh it by hand in a way that is quick and efficient.
Wow! I will never complain about the price of wheat again! 380 lbs stored another 620 lbs to go.... I'm not even going to worry about where to put it all! Thanks for doing this. I thought if need be, we could just plant some, Ha Ha,,,not now!
Thanks so much for sharing this. Really is an eye-opener. We are so blessed to be able to purchase wheat that has a long shelf life and only requires grinding as necessary.
the people I saw were using a hard wooden mallet. but anyway you work it, it is hard work and the grinder makes the most sense. Thank you for all your effort and information
you are very inventive to use the corn cracker! I have seen people bag the heads and use mallets. I am sure you heard of some of the animal assisted methods. But centuries ago anyone who was mobile (tots included) were expected to help in some way even gathering nuts, leaves and roots, and in poor countries they still are. We should consider ourselves blessed that we have machines to do the hardest part of the labor.
If farms aren't large, you're right, combines are often run on several different farms by whoever owns the combine. The farmer without the combine pays a per-acre charge, and sometimes yield related or partially yield related. It benefits the smaller farmer who doesn't have to buy a combine (supposing the owner of the combine is reliable) and it allows the owner of the combine to recover some of the cost.
the reason wheat was big in europe and asia instead of corn is because corn originates from north america, the new world. if the old world had corn, it would likely been a better choice, but they didn't have it until explorers brought back examples of maze(the old style corn, what you get as decorations for halloween and thanksgiving).
You could rig up a sieve with a mesh just large enough to allow the wheat kernels to pass through, and shake it back and forth in front of a fan. As you drop the processed wheat/chaff onto it, the wheat kernels will drop through into a bowl while the chaff stays on top of the sieve. And the fan will help blow away the finer material. While shaking the sieve back and forth you can hold it at such an angle which will allow the chaff to gradually fall off the end after it has had a chance to bounce around a bit on top of the screen. I use to farm and this is pretty much the way a combine separates the grain from the straw.
I'm about a 1/4 of the way into writing my third book about an end-of-the-world scenario and growing wheat is a big deal. The characters are trying to find a faster way to thresh. I'm thinking either windmill or water wheel, to power the (geared up) rotating shaft. "Black's Voyage" is book 1. Amazon has it for the Kindle. Book 2 is being edited as I write book 3. :) UA-cam has been a boon, as far as figuring out how to do things!!!!
I'm so glad you showed us all this. Makes me want to run to the Food Storage Center and gladly, even joyously pay them $50 for another 200 pounds of wheat! What a bargain, considering all you had to do to get 2 cups. Besides that, it has a 30 year shelf life. You just can't go wrong. (I know you'd have to order since there's no cannery near you.)
Thank you for sharing your experience :) I'm trying to get into this as a prepper sort of thing and this video really helped me out. I might be mistaken but i think wheat has much more fiber than corn so that may be a reason to keep growing it.
the ancients had methods of processing wheat faster. instead of a single person working it was a whole family or two. so a few would thresh the wheat while others would clean and remove impurities and the rest would dry and grind the wheat. So while it seems like a harder and less yeilding task for them.
Thank you, I don't like to leave a lot of things to chance. I'd rather find out what works and what doesn't when I have time to do something different.
Thanks because you have asked the same question I did and answered it! I don't know how we ever got going on something which required so much effort! Maybe in earlier times our digestive system could handle a courser mix and we refined it over time. Thanks.
Please don't let the world fall apart before I can buy some more wheat ! That looks like a LOT of work, for just a little return. Gotta hand it to ya, you're persistent. ;-)
Experiments are educational. We learn what works and what doesn't. This was one female's way of trying to grow, harvest, thresh, winnow, etc. a little wheat. Not a failure, for sure, but also not a huge success either. And she didn't even attempt the hardest part which she left undone. That was milling the wheat kernels into flour. Basically, at the stage where this video ends, you have nothing more than a quantity of wheat seeds. That would be good for planting next season but not too useful for food. People don't usually eat intact wheat seeds but usually crush and grind the seeds into flour. To convert that cup full of seeds to wheat flour BY HAND is a big effort that is not easy. Unless she wants to pound the seeds with a stone mortar and pestil my guess is the alternative she would be reduced to using is a steel mill grinder of the type used to manually grind coffee beans. So to finish off this project, she would have needed to grind all the seeds at least once, if not multiple times to produce a decent flour. That's another whole video that is missing. But if she had done that, the flour would have been excellent for bread baking. I've used natural wheat flour made from wheat straight off the farm before and it is wonderful. One point I will make for anyone else attempting to follow the steps in this video. DON"T DO IT THIS WAY! She skipped an important step that complicated what she actually did. Traditional hand harvesting methods include the step of threshing the wheat which separates the wheat seeds from the awning covering the seed. This is the part she describes as beating with a baseball bat or any other physical effort that whacks the wheat stalk and heads against something to cause the seeds to loosen and fall out. She didn't do this separation step. By running the entire heads through the grinder she essentially created ground up chaff that fell in with the wheat seeds. She then had to make multiple passes trying to remove all the ground up chaff she just created. NOT a good idea! The proper concept is to separate the chaff from the wheat as much as possible; not grind up the chaff into smaller pieces that become intermingled with the wheat seeds. Using the grinder was, as I said initially, an experiment. It doesn't produce a good outcome. Put the corn grinder aside. There are better methods that, if used, would have likely cut her processing time in half. But what did she know about wheat threshing? Apparently not all that much nor did she bother to do much research on traditional methodology. What this video really shows is that if you are persistent enough and dedicated but unaware of how to do the process in a more efficient manner eventually you can hand process a small quantity of wheat. Her experiment however does NOT justify a conclusion that it would be a full time job year round for someone to hand process enough wheat to feed a family. That's a completely false statement based on the illogical assumption no one could do it faster than she just did. For thousands of years people have processed wheat without a human having to work at it as a full time job year round just to feed one family. Most of those primitive people, of course, didn't do it her way!
An easy way to thresh by hand is by foot. Yip; simply put the wheat into a wooden box with a few slats put in the bottom. Start stepping on them and rubbing them with your shoes. Then, get an air hose and put the wheat in a five gallon bucket. The chaff will fly away in seconds.
In the book, I am considering using a longer shaft, more chains and a longer tube. With a wide gap between the bottom of the tube and the area to collect the grain, I'm hoping the chaff has enough distance to float away on breezy days (which, as the writer, I can make happen, at will... which is pretty dang awesome, I can tell you!).
Q. WHY grow wheat if it's so labor-intensive? A. Wheat stores forever & won't go bad. If you can amass a multi-year stockpile of it, when a famine strikes, the wheat will save you. Consider Joseph from the Bible --Egypt was the only nation to survive because they were the only nation that planned ahead & stockpiled wheat. They became a mighty empire at the expense of other nations that came begging for food. Wheat shouldn't be a staple food, but is a GREAT emergency fall-back food. (Go paleo!)
Thanks for sharing this. I’m planning on planting an acre or 2 for my chickens. So hopefully I won’t have to separate too much of the husk trash from the seeds
Really? It's a variety of winter wheat? That's fabulous! Please name the variety of wheat. I have a message forum acquainatnce who wants to plant winter wheat and he's asking for suggestions on varieties. And can you say where you live in? Or at least your growing zone? Thanks.
try a pasta strainer that the seed fit through or get a mesh and nail it to a wooden rectangular frame. then just slide back and forth until most of the grain falls through.
Ahh what a great idea, I think my grandmother has a small meat grinder, I wonder if that would do any good. My mother received a small amount of in un touched wheat in a gift basket, so she gave it to me to start growing, it took sooo long and I ended up only using half of the bunch, but now I have about 30-40 seeds, tomorrow I'll start to plant them :) it's my first time using wheat..
Thank you for your video! Now I can appreciate how much work is done for me when I buy a flour in a store.:) Liked the idea about a corn - maybe it's more efficient to grow it or wheat. The only problem is that it has no gluten, so you're unable to make bread from it.
Instead of grinding into flour, could you cook this into a cereal or add it whole to a bread recipe? A way of stretching your ground wheat flour and making it more nutritious?
YOU ARE NO JOKE. I WAS CURIOUS AND THOUGHT ABOUT DOING THAT BUT NOW I HAVE SEEN ENOUGH TO KNOW, THAT IS NOT FOR ME. A VIDEO IS WORTH 10,000 WORDS. THANKS FOR THE VIDEO.
I guess European's didn't have corn till they came to America, but once they did, they didn't have the machinery we do today to make it a practical main food source...Doesn't seem worth the trouble, like you said. Maybe they were just stubborn, but I agree, corn seems the way to go. Thanks for posting. Subbed!
Regarding the corn vs wheat question of why people were growing wheat and not corn. Corn was introduced to Eurasia late during the medieval era from, back then, was called, the Americas. Simply put people were growing wheat because there was no corn back than in Europe/Asia/Africa
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Thanks for the content. As to why people grew wheat... A few thousand years ago corn was only in the Americas and hadnt been discovered by people from most of the world. It also doesn't contain gluten. If you return the bits that didn't give up the grain back to your threshing stage again, it would probably come out, or you can just keep it as next year's seeds, or even animal feed for winter. I know nothing of this stuff, so it was really interesting to see how it's done. I wonder if you could burn off the husk (just a random thought) , but I guess they would have done it if it worked.
Yep,corn was never in the old world and once it was interduced wheat had already been around for thousands of years.Humans are creaturs of habbit and tradition,the people from the old world just couldent give up there wheat.as for the time and effort you put into threshing and winnoing I commend you.
Corn was only introduce to the east when the Pilgrim was introduce to it from the Native American Indian. Corn is a seed from South America. Wheat and Barley was use mostly because it was mostly use for BEER and Bread! BEER was use a lot for currency too. It's how the Egypt pays mostly their worker to create the Great Pyramid. BEER is also safer to drink then Water because it contain Alcohol. BEER also last longer in Wooden Barrel and it contain calories.
How many cups of wheat does it take to make a loaf of bread? Interesting experiment. Also, interesting to know that the vacuum sealed wheat still grew. How long had it been vacuum sealed? I know it's best to load up on it and pray it never gets to a point where we can't buy it. Still we will run out so it's good to at least know what we will be up against. Thanks for sharing this with us. Janice
jksatte When you grind wheat, you end up with a little more flour than the grains you start with. For example, 1 cup of wheat grinds up to make a little more than 1 cup of flour. We were at the fair a few days ago and a sign said that 1 bushel of wheat yields 42 loaves of bread. That wheat had been vacuum sealed for about 2 years, if I remember correctly.
Please don't harvest your wheat by yanking up the entire stalks all the way down to the roots. I realize that it's loads easier to yank the whole plant out of the ground than it is to use a scythe or sickle. However, the practice of yanking up the whole plant can lead to soil erosion. But leaving the stubble behind in your field will help keep the soil anchored down for the duration of the winter months. Then in the spring you can plow the stubble under and plant afresh.
Wow. What a very informative video. I am suddenly showing interest in growing wheat and threshing it too. I like that you did it all by hand and did not use electricity...Will you or have you continued the video for processing the wheat into bread? I know it seems silly but I want to learn as much as I can. I think doing it all by hand is amazing. We should be teaching this kind of stuff in schools.
lol? What planet do you hail from? Most wheat has the beard on the kernel (the "hairs" you're talking about).... beardless wheat is called awnless wheat... they're both very common types
I tried REALLY HARD just to post a link to the message forum conversation thread where we are discussing winter wheat and where your vidoe is coming up in the conversation. I think maybe UA-cam has filters that block replies which include links. Let me try to fake-out that filter. it's "thesurvivalpodcast" with the dot and then the com. slash forum slash index dot php ?topic=36744.0
When our laptop crashed everything was recovered because unbeknownst to me Hungry Hubby subscribed to Carbonite! Billions of recipes recovered! Well, thousands anyway. Not to mention all those photographs and videos. Hope this helps.
I don't mean to be a jerk but I think you take a little bit too long getting to the actual content of the video, that is the actual threshing wheat by hand. Folk didn't come here to hear your life story. Sorry if I sound rude but if you make a video called "threshing wheat by hand" then honestly that's all we wanna see. Yeah it's fine to add your own little spin on it but really it just sounded like you were making excuses in the beginning. Leave that stuff in the description box or at least the end of the video. I hope you do not take this comment the wrong way as I am honestly trying to give you some constructive criticism. In conclusion my point is Get to the point Stay on point Make your point
Make your own video. You do understand that your opinion is simply that right? YOUR OPINION. I happened to enjoy the whole video. So not to be rude or anything, I'm not trying to be. Your opinion really only matters to you.
@ cocoonbreach So what I'm not allowed to share my own opinion? I'm only allowed to post praises for the video? Is criticism a crime now? Look, I hate to burst your bubble but I wasn't exactly talking to you. If the author of the video wants to tell me to buzz off then that's on them but please mind your own beeswax.
I think I'd rather starve than subsist on cornbread. Ok, so not really, but think if it ever comes to subsistence farming I'm going to grow Sorghum and live on a diet of sorghum pancakes and sorghum syrup.
People only ate wheat in Europe, Africa and Asia for thousands of years because it’s not native here, there was initial resistance to the potato as a food staple in Europe, it was seen to make you stupid…
Thank you! :) And check out our discussion at thesurvivalpodcast (dot com). We're in the thrad called "Winter wheat (for flour)" talking about your accomplishment. :)
a lot of you methods were sub optimal beating it and the scraping the chaff of can be a lot faster its largely slow because of scale and sub optimal methods
Hallelujah !! You taught be a biblical lesson. Threshing wheat by hand takes a long time to get to the final product. Judges 6:11
Miners in the gold rush used to put their gold in a sheet and - with a person each holding 2 corners of the sheet - toss it and let the wind blow away the dirt. This could work for wheat, too, in a light breeze. Oil paintings of winnowing also show women with a "cake pan" shaped dish pouring the wheat over the edge in a breeze. The breeze catches the chaff and takes it away with little effort on your part.
Good for you for being stubborn. Thank you for this video!
I don't have a video processing the wheat into bread but grinding wheat is a time and labor intensive process too. I made a video, I can't remember what I called it, where I made biscuits from flour that I had vacuum sealed and stored and it was over three years old. The flour was fine, so you can keep a good amount of it for a long time :)
I think your way of testing things so that YOU know how it works is great. Thanks for the time you put into this, very informative.
great video, and thanks for the link to the other vid. They used wheat because corn is from the new world.
From UK I also wanted to make bread from sowing the seed to baking, I have the same grinder as yours which does grind the wheat to flour, but I hadn’t used it for threshing. I did make a small loaf in the end but I had to pick out all the grain that was still enclosed in the husk. Like you I wondered why people would for thousands of years spend their lives making bread by hand without machines. I did it to show my grandchildren how bread was made and they were interested. Thanks for the useful tips
Pro tip: 5 gallon bucket or 55 gallon drum + weed eater = whole box thrashed in about 5 minutes. :)
My husband remembers cutting hay for cows with horses. It took between 9 and 18 horses to do it. I can't imagine what it would take to grow wheat and harvest it. Imagine the land you'd need to grow horse feed in a cold climate to feed them for winter. Holy cow!
I remember as a kid.. grinding the wheat.. and I believe it was with a corn grinder.. but then what we did was was layer it between two old window screens to separate it out..I'm thinking a loose weave basket or even a flour sifter might work..
I'm glad I have a gluten allergy and can't eat wheat. I don't believe I've ever said that before, but after watching that video, I have had an awakening. Thanks for the demonstration and the time that it took to share it with us all.
No, I tried that too. It's hard to believe how those grains of wheat hang on. It really is hard to thresh it by hand in a way that is quick and efficient.
Wow! I will never complain about the price of wheat again! 380 lbs stored another 620 lbs to go.... I'm not even going to worry about where to put it all! Thanks for doing this. I thought if need be, we could just plant some, Ha Ha,,,not now!
Thanks so much for sharing this. Really is an eye-opener. We are so blessed to be able to purchase wheat that has a long shelf life and only requires grinding as necessary.
the people I saw were using a hard wooden mallet. but anyway you work it, it is hard work and the grinder makes the most sense. Thank you for all your effort and information
thank you for the video i love stuff like this and i love knowing theres still people out there who can do this stuff and have knowledge of it
Wow! Lots of work! I will make sure I stock up with as much wheat as I can. Thanks for sharing. :)
you are very inventive to use the corn cracker! I have seen people bag the heads and use mallets. I am sure you heard of some of the animal assisted methods. But centuries ago anyone who was mobile (tots included) were expected to help in some way even gathering nuts, leaves and roots, and in poor countries they still are. We should consider ourselves blessed that we have machines to do the hardest part of the labor.
If farms aren't large, you're right, combines are often run on several different farms by whoever owns the combine. The farmer without the combine pays a per-acre charge, and sometimes yield related or partially yield related. It benefits the smaller farmer who doesn't have to buy a combine (supposing the owner of the combine is reliable) and it allows the owner of the combine to recover some of the cost.
Have you ever watched the PBS showed called Tales of the Green Valley. They show growing and threshing wheat and how it was done "back in the day"
i love how you did the fannign of it with the plate, simple but effective, awesome
Corn hasn't been relatively available for thousands of years and the plant that corn evolved from was about the size and trails
Good job and you convinced me to buy my wheat berry and put in sealed packages
Loved your video, and i was going to try it but i think i'll order mine and leave this to last resort
the reason wheat was big in europe and asia instead of corn is because corn originates from north america, the new world. if the old world had corn, it would likely been a better choice, but they didn't have it until explorers brought back examples of maze(the old style corn, what you get as decorations for halloween and thanksgiving).
What a nightmare. It really makes you appreciate what the power of mechanization and the steam age had on human development.
It looks like the bucket and chain method is the way to go! Wow that was fast!
My gosh, I knew it was work, but that is a lot of work. Now we know why farmers had large families!
You could rig up a sieve with a mesh just large enough to allow the wheat kernels to pass through, and shake it back and forth in front of a fan. As you drop the processed wheat/chaff onto it, the wheat kernels will drop through into a bowl while the chaff stays on top of the sieve. And the fan will help blow away the finer material. While shaking the sieve back and forth you can hold it at such an angle which will allow the chaff to gradually fall off the end after it has had a chance to bounce around a bit on top of the screen. I use to farm and this is pretty much the way a combine separates the grain from the straw.
Kevin F
@gardenvespers777 Ummm..when you get there, I'll be right behind you ! This looks just a little bit like work. I try to avoid that stuff. ;-)
I'm about a 1/4 of the way into writing my third book about an end-of-the-world scenario and growing wheat is a big deal. The characters are trying to find a faster way to thresh. I'm thinking either windmill or water wheel, to power the (geared up) rotating shaft. "Black's Voyage" is book 1. Amazon has it for the Kindle. Book 2 is being edited as I write book 3. :) UA-cam has been a boon, as far as figuring out how to do things!!!!
Thank you for making this video. Very eye-opening!
wow so happy you did this video. I am planning to grow wheat on a small scale..
I'm so glad you showed us all this. Makes me want to run to the Food Storage Center and gladly, even joyously pay them $50 for another 200 pounds of wheat! What a bargain, considering all you had to do to get 2 cups. Besides that, it has a 30 year shelf life. You just can't go wrong. (I know you'd have to order since there's no cannery near you.)
Thank you for sharing your experience :) I'm trying to get into this as a prepper sort of thing and this video really helped me out. I might be mistaken but i think wheat has much more fiber than corn so that may be a reason to keep growing it.
the ancients had methods of processing wheat faster. instead of a single person working it was a whole family or two. so a few would thresh the wheat while others would clean and remove impurities and the rest would dry and grind the wheat. So while it seems like a harder and less yeilding task for them.
Fantastic video, thank you!! I want to grow wheat as a sustainable way to feed livestock if nothing else, so its an excellent skill to have.
I loved this video!! I learned so much. Thank you for taking your time to teach us.
I wonder if you put a rubber disk in there, it would actually do double duty as a friction dehuller of hulled wheat varieties.
Wow thank you so much So educational. I am putint my next order in for wheat now.LOL Thank you
I think I missed this the first time around. Now we know why each community had a grist mill to do part of the work.
Thank you, I don't like to leave a lot of things to chance. I'd rather find out what works and what doesn't when I have time to do something different.
Thanks because you have asked the same question I did and answered it! I don't know how we ever got going on something which required so much effort! Maybe in earlier times our digestive system could handle a courser mix and we refined it over time.
Thanks.
Believe me, growing your own wheat and threshing it isn't as easy as most folks would think!
Fantastic video, thank you!!
Please don't let the world fall apart before I can buy some more wheat ! That looks like a LOT of work, for just a little return. Gotta hand it to ya, you're persistent. ;-)
Experiments are educational. We learn what works and what doesn't. This was one female's way of trying to grow, harvest, thresh, winnow, etc. a little wheat. Not a failure, for sure, but also not a huge success either. And she didn't even attempt the hardest part which she left undone. That was milling the wheat kernels into flour. Basically, at the stage where this video ends, you have nothing more than a quantity of wheat seeds. That would be good for planting next season but not too useful for food.
People don't usually eat intact wheat seeds but usually crush and grind the seeds into flour. To convert that cup full of seeds to wheat flour BY HAND is a big effort that is not easy. Unless she wants to pound the seeds with a stone mortar and pestil my guess is the alternative she would be reduced to using is a steel mill grinder of the type used to manually grind coffee beans. So to finish off this project, she would have needed to grind all the seeds at least once, if not multiple times to produce a decent flour. That's another whole video that is missing. But if she had done that, the flour would have been excellent for bread baking. I've used natural wheat flour made from wheat straight off the farm before and it is wonderful.
One point I will make for anyone else attempting to follow the steps in this video. DON"T DO IT THIS WAY! She skipped an important step that complicated what she actually did. Traditional hand harvesting methods include the step of threshing the wheat which separates the wheat seeds from the awning covering the seed. This is the part she describes as beating with a baseball bat or any other physical effort that whacks the wheat stalk and heads against something to cause the seeds to loosen and fall out. She didn't do this separation step. By running the entire heads through the grinder she essentially created ground up chaff that fell in with the wheat seeds. She then had to make multiple passes trying to remove all the ground up chaff she just created.
NOT a good idea! The proper concept is to separate the chaff from the wheat as much as possible; not grind up the chaff into smaller pieces that become intermingled with the wheat seeds. Using the grinder was, as I said initially, an experiment. It doesn't produce a good outcome. Put the corn grinder aside. There are better methods that, if used, would have likely cut her processing time in half. But what did she know about wheat threshing? Apparently not all that much nor did she bother to do much research on traditional methodology.
What this video really shows is that if you are persistent enough and dedicated but unaware of how to do the process in a more efficient manner eventually you can hand process a small quantity of wheat. Her experiment however does NOT justify a conclusion that it would be a full time job year round for someone to hand process enough wheat to feed a family. That's a completely false statement based on the illogical assumption no one could do it faster than she just did. For thousands of years people have processed wheat without a human having to work at it as a full time job year round just to feed one family. Most of those primitive people, of course, didn't do it her way!
An easy way to thresh by hand is by foot. Yip; simply put the wheat into a wooden box with a few slats put in the bottom. Start stepping on them and rubbing them with your shoes. Then, get an air hose and put the wheat in a five gallon bucket. The chaff will fly away in seconds.
In the book, I am considering using a longer shaft, more chains and a longer tube. With a wide gap between the bottom of the tube and the area to collect the grain, I'm hoping the chaff has enough distance to float away on breezy days (which, as the writer, I can make happen, at will... which is pretty dang awesome, I can tell you!).
Q. WHY grow wheat if it's so labor-intensive?
A. Wheat stores forever & won't go bad. If you can amass a multi-year stockpile of it, when a famine strikes, the wheat will save you. Consider Joseph from the Bible --Egypt was the only nation to survive because they were the only nation that planned ahead & stockpiled wheat. They became a mighty empire at the expense of other nations that came begging for food.
Wheat shouldn't be a staple food, but is a GREAT emergency fall-back food. (Go paleo!)
Thanks for sharing this. I’m planning on planting an acre or 2 for my chickens. So hopefully I won’t have to separate too much of the husk trash from the seeds
Really? It's a variety of winter wheat? That's fabulous! Please name the variety of wheat. I have a message forum acquainatnce who wants to plant winter wheat and he's asking for suggestions on varieties. And can you say where you live in? Or at least your growing zone?
Thanks.
great video! It's amazing that millions of people do this full-time, I couldnt imagine that!
goodness girl you have patience ..
try a pasta strainer that the seed fit through or get a mesh and nail it to a wooden rectangular frame. then just slide back and forth until most of the grain falls through.
Ahh what a great idea, I think my grandmother has a small meat grinder, I wonder if that would do any good. My mother received a small amount of in un touched wheat in a gift basket, so she gave it to me to start growing, it took sooo long and I ended up only using half of the bunch, but now I have about 30-40 seeds, tomorrow I'll start to plant them :) it's my first time using wheat..
A meat grinder might work but it would probably clog
Thank you for your video! Now I can appreciate how much work is done for me when I buy a flour in a store.:) Liked the idea about a corn - maybe it's more efficient to grow it or wheat. The only problem is that it has no gluten, so you're unable to make bread from it.
Instead of grinding into flour, could you cook this into a cereal or add it whole to a bread recipe? A way of stretching your ground wheat flour and making it more nutritious?
YOU ARE NO JOKE. I WAS CURIOUS AND THOUGHT ABOUT DOING THAT BUT NOW I HAVE SEEN ENOUGH TO KNOW, THAT IS NOT FOR ME. A VIDEO IS WORTH 10,000 WORDS. THANKS FOR THE VIDEO.
I guess European's didn't have corn till they came to America, but once they did, they didn't have the machinery we do today to make it a practical main food source...Doesn't seem worth the trouble, like you said. Maybe they were just stubborn, but I agree, corn seems the way to go. Thanks for posting. Subbed!
Regarding the corn vs wheat question of why people were growing wheat and not corn. Corn was introduced to Eurasia late during the medieval era from, back then, was called, the Americas. Simply put people were growing wheat because there was no corn back than in Europe/Asia/Africa
What zone are you in, and what time of year did you plant your berries?
Thumbs up for Hillbilly know how.
it occurs to me that the rolling pin over a single layer will crush the chaff, no?
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Thanks for the content. As to why people grew wheat... A few thousand years ago corn was only in the Americas and hadnt been discovered by people from most of the world. It also doesn't contain gluten. If you return the bits that didn't give up the grain back to your threshing stage again, it would probably come out, or you can just keep it as next year's seeds, or even animal feed for winter. I know nothing of this stuff, so it was really interesting to see how it's done. I wonder if you could burn off the husk (just a random thought) , but I guess they would have done it if it worked.
Yep,corn was never in the old world and once it was interduced wheat had already been around for thousands of years.Humans are creaturs of habbit and tradition,the people from the old world just couldent give up there wheat.as for the time and effort you put into threshing and winnoing I commend you.
Great vid, thanks. How about you try it with modern electric gadgets now? Or have you had enough and just going to stock up from the store?
Thamesuser marcel I've been looking forever for a video in which it is done by hand. I was just wondering how hard it would be without power.
Corn was only introduce to the east when the Pilgrim was introduce to it from the Native American Indian. Corn is a seed from South America.
Wheat and Barley was use mostly because it was mostly use for BEER and Bread! BEER was use a lot for currency too. It's how the Egypt pays mostly their worker to create the Great Pyramid. BEER is also safer to drink then Water because it contain Alcohol. BEER also last longer in Wooden Barrel and it contain calories.
How many cups of wheat does it take to make a loaf of bread? Interesting experiment. Also, interesting to know that the vacuum sealed wheat still grew. How long had it been vacuum sealed? I know it's best to load up on it and pray it never gets to a point where we can't buy it. Still we will run out so it's good to at least know what we will be up against. Thanks for sharing this with us. Janice
jksatte When you grind wheat, you end up with a little more flour than the grains you start with. For example, 1 cup of wheat grinds up to make a little more than 1 cup of flour. We were at the fair a few days ago and a sign said that 1 bushel of wheat yields 42 loaves of bread. That wheat had been vacuum sealed for about 2 years, if I remember correctly.
*****
Please don't harvest your wheat by yanking up the entire stalks all the way down to the roots. I realize that it's loads easier to yank the whole plant out of the ground than it is to use a scythe or sickle. However, the practice of yanking up the whole plant can lead to soil erosion. But leaving the stubble behind in your field will help keep the soil anchored down for the duration of the winter months. Then in the spring you can plow the stubble under and plant afresh.
ALSO they say Barley is easier to thresh. But I've never grown Barley, only wheat.
Wow! Thank you for sharing all the information!
Wow. What a very informative video. I am suddenly showing interest in growing wheat and threshing it too. I like that you did it all by hand and did not use electricity...Will you or have you continued the video for processing the wheat into bread? I know it seems silly but I want to learn as much as I can. I think doing it all by hand is amazing. We should be teaching this kind of stuff in schools.
Fell asleep waiting to see you thresh some wheat. Did you ever get to the threshing part?
Going through life's trials aren't easy to deal with. It's a slow process.
Where did you get the wheat seeds?
Thank you so much for this video. You've mentioned that your plot was 13x18 is that in feet?
....shift the wheat around by hand to gather the husks by hand
What you have in that box isn't wheat. It's either barley or rye. If it tastes sour it's rye. Wheat doesn't have those long hairs on it.
lol? What planet do you hail from? Most wheat has the beard on the kernel (the "hairs" you're talking about).... beardless wheat is called awnless wheat... they're both very common types
Tried sifting it once threshed?
Well. I'm convinced: I'm not growing my own wheat.
When you grind your wheat berries to make bread what kind of a grinder do you use?
13:46 Chafe is what happens when your thighs rub. 'CHAFF" is the dried husk of the wheat
where did you get that cron grinder from ma'am
nice window!
I tried REALLY HARD just to post a link to the message forum conversation thread where we are discussing winter wheat and where your vidoe is coming up in the conversation. I think maybe UA-cam has filters that block replies which include links. Let me try to fake-out that filter.
it's "thesurvivalpodcast" with the dot and then the com.
slash forum
slash index
dot php
?topic=36744.0
Your wheat certainly looks like barley!?
Thanks for sharing.
yield of a wheat plant
I think beating the wheat would be faster.
You amaze me... you are the Proverbs 31:10-31 Woman !
When our laptop crashed everything was recovered because unbeknownst to me Hungry Hubby subscribed to Carbonite! Billions of recipes recovered! Well, thousands anyway. Not to mention all those photographs and videos. Hope this helps.
Wow!!! You are amazing. Ty!
@imstillworkin Thanks!
corn was not available, outside of South America, until the middle of the 14th or 15th century,
I don't mean to be a jerk but I think you take a little bit too long getting to the
actual content of the video, that is the actual threshing wheat by hand.
Folk didn't come here to hear your life story. Sorry if I sound rude but
if you make a video called "threshing wheat by hand" then honestly
that's all we wanna see. Yeah it's fine to add your own little spin on it
but really it just sounded like you were making excuses in the beginning.
Leave that stuff in the description box or at least the end of the video.
I hope you do not take this comment the wrong way as I am
honestly trying to give you some constructive criticism.
In conclusion my point is
Get to the point
Stay on point
Make your point
Make your own video. You do understand that your opinion is simply that right? YOUR OPINION. I happened to enjoy the whole video. So not to be rude or anything, I'm not trying to be. Your opinion really only matters to you.
@ cocoonbreach
So what I'm not allowed to share my own opinion? I'm only allowed to post praises for the video? Is criticism a crime now?
Look, I hate to burst your bubble but I wasn't exactly talking to you. If the author of the video wants to tell me to buzz off then that's on them but please mind your own beeswax.
You are correct, your opinion means squat. Sit down and be a gentleman, or I'll put your nose in the corner.
Lol
I vote to sever his nose, just kidding :)
Thanks for such an inspirational, informative video.
I think I'd rather starve than subsist on cornbread. Ok, so not really, but think if it ever comes to subsistence farming I'm going to grow Sorghum and live on a diet of sorghum pancakes and sorghum syrup.
People only ate wheat in Europe, Africa and Asia for thousands of years because it’s not native here, there was initial resistance to the potato as a food staple in Europe, it was seen to make you stupid…
Thank you! :) And check out our discussion at thesurvivalpodcast (dot com). We're in the thrad called "Winter wheat (for flour)" talking about your accomplishment. :)
a lot of you methods were sub optimal beating it and the scraping the chaff of can be a lot faster its largely slow because of scale and sub optimal methods