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..........