Wheat & Whatnot

Fun happenings at the Farlow Farm. Our neighbor grew a small field of winter wheat and we've been trying our hand at threshing and winnowing it. Our chickens must have smelled the goodness as they were first to bolt to the trailer and hideout underneath while they munched on wheat berries

We're learning the terms as we go, so here goes. Threshing is what MB is doing against the sheet on our tobacco trailer. By beating the stalks of wheat, the stalk and husk will release the wheat berries.

 Now we were left with a large bowl of wheat berries with plenty of wheat husk and a pile of stalks (or a comfy dog bed as Ellie discovered)

How do we get from a bowl of debris filled wheat to clean berries we can process into flour? Lot of hands and several fans in a process called winnowing. EC gets most of the credit for this fun job. She found it quite fun to pick up handful after handful and as she'd drop it back into the same bowl slowly, the debris would blow out and the berries dropped down.

We now have a new appreciation for the work that goes into wheat processing. That one trailer load of wheat condensed down into one bowl of clean workable wheat! Coming soon, the flour and bread.


Interesting description of the parts of wheat and the difference between white and wheat flour:
http://www.conejobread.com/wheat_kernel.htm

And after all that hard work, there's nothing like a fresh pulled carrot to snack on..........

Apples and Peaches and Plums, Oh My!

 About 3 years ago we planted our first fruit trees: apple, peach, plum, cherry, and persimmon. For the benefit of the tree, we painfully pulled every fruit off each tree for the first 2 years. Now that the trees are well rooted and substantially larger, this is the first year we've allowed them to produce fruit! This is the second time Russell has pulled peaches off of our largest peach tree shown here.  We were afraid limbs would start breaking if we let all the fruit ripen. Needless to say, not much is wasted here on our little farm as an entertaining game of peach baseball and peach golf quickly ensued. Both kiddos tried several times to hit homeruns but ended up making peach salsa instead!  Ellie, the Great Dane, enjoyed some edible peach chew toys as well!

Digging for purple gold

If you live within 20 miles of us you could probably hear my squeals of excitement as we took a peak and ended up digging several hills of these purple beauties:

They are an early season variety of potato with purple skin and purple flesh called Adirondack Blue! As these are a new variety to us, we've yet to taste them, but they are supposed to be excellent cooked in any way you can imagine! What will we have for dinner tonight, hmmmm?