Formerly Known As the Plastic Cloche Emporium and House of Miscellaneous Pots

Everybody has probably experienced the feeling of seeing something that looks useful, or actually may be useful but not at that moment, then struggling with whether to get rid of it or not. Those of you with garages, attics, or barns each have the experience to a different degree. And those who have hobbies requiring large numbers of objects bigger than a stamp understand that stuff gets collected. Every once in a while, say during the cold and rainy winter months, you get a chance to step back and look at the past 20 years' accumulation of these objects. You have the opportunity to look at them with some sense of perspective. Especially if someone else put them there.

Let's get to the point now. You may or may not be familiar with the idea of season extension. Most often it involves greenhouses, floating row covers, cold frames and such. Back in the 1800's the French Intensive gardening method started using glass bells, each of which would cover one plant, to be able to grow earlier and later in the season. Here is a close view of one I found on a forum about how to start eggplants in Ireland.
One of these cloches for each plant in your garden. Are you starting to see how this could lead to the "large numbers of objects" I referred to earlier? For an even better visual, check out this blog post by Alexis Madrigal on the subject of British food raising in 1918. The photo shows women working with over 200,000 cloches, each covering a single lettuce plant. Wow, huh? You might ask why one would go to the trouble working with multiple tons of glass pieces that are somewhat expensive (especially now) and very breakable, not to mention need to be cleaned occasionally to remain transparent and have to be stored somewhere when not in use. And the answer, of course, would be because they work very well for the purpose, which is to get plants going weeks or months before they would ordinarily be planted. A gold mine for the savvy market gardener or the farmer trying to produce as much as possible.
Ah, but the times have changed, and plastic has altered the season-extension landscape. We have greenhouses covered with flexible and cheap alternatives to glass, and we have plastic milk jugs that are durable and cheap alternatives to the traditional glass cloche. A brief moment for the downsides of this revolution: when carefully attended, glass will last a long, long time, but plastic will turn brittle and opaque with but a few years' exposure to the sun. Then what? It is unusable and becomes junk, or gets recycled into an even less stable form of plastic.
Back to the theme: cloches are helpful, and empty milk jugs are plentiful. So why not collect as many as you can, just in case you might use them later for something? I have one good reason, which is that someone else will eventually come along and have to clean up after you. In this situation we had about 500 cubic feet of milk jugs, some already converted to cloches by having the bottom cut off, some not yet converted, and many so brittle that they broke into a disagreeable number of shards that then had to be swept up.
I'd like you to know that I am not bitter about this. I am writing from a perspective of wisdom, which I would like to share. That is this: don't stockpile useless plastic things for some hypothetical future scenario, no matter how well-intentioned. If you find you want, say, 1,000 plastic milk jugs, call up your local elementary school. Present your idea to a bunch of the classes, and let them know what you hope to achieve. Your cup of milk jugs will runneth over, probably in a matter of days, and you will have captured the imagination of a whole school of children that will be excited for at least a few days about your garden.
Next up are the miscellaneous pots. Anytime you go to the nursery to get a plant, whether it be tomato, spice bush, or maple, it will come in a pot. A plastic one. Somewhere between 2-24” wide and deep. It might be black, it might be red, white, or green. It may be made out of tough plastic, or possible the really weak kind. It may be smooth, or have ridges. In fact, it may have vertical or horizontal ridges. Maybe 8 ridges, or maybe 20 or them. Maybe it will have holes by which to hang it, or maybe flanges by which you can clip a tray on the bottom. It might have indentations set so perfectly that, when stacked with others of its kind, it nests without sticking. But this measure is useless, because whatever it looks like, whatever its attributes, you can be guaranteed that it will be at least subtly different from any other pot you have. As you can see from the picture, this makes for beautiful variety. For effect, I put them all in stacks according to their basic dimensions. And, for the record, there were as many as 8 pots that were actually identical in design. But for each of those matching pots there were three that absolutely refused to nest with another.
All this is great if you are displaying your diversity of potted plants, but if you want to store pots for some other day such variety of design is a waste of space. So we are getting rid of them, giving them to a local nursery that fosters out such pots to more willing owners.
We are finally clearing out all the unwanted and space-stealing plastic from our storage space!

ps.
I kept some of the potential plastic cloche jugs. Just the ones that are in better shape. You know, because somebody might want to try using them sometime in the next couple of years...

You Must Thresh It

A request was put in for me to hit on the topic of grain threshing by some fellow agricultural enthusiasts on the other coast, Ryanne and Jay, who, much more tech-savvy than I, have a website (RyanIsHungry.com) on the theme of sustainability and survival. They came out to a 3-Day Workshop a bit ago. Check out their site and, especially pertaining to our work here, Ryanne's post on their garden. This gardening stuff is addictive and contagious.

Having just put together my class on grains (Amaranth to Wheat, and all points between) and presented it to the folks up at Ecology Action I am both primed full of grainy information and in possession of time to write all about it. While I am now hyped to write a fiery treatise on the transformational power of growing one's own grains I'm going to save that for another time, when my head is clearer of self-righteous grain-cultivating fervor.

Let's talk about threshing instead! Threshing is technically the act of removing seed from its stalk, though it gets more complicated with some grains. The trouble comes with the hull, a protective layer around the seed that, in the case of a few wheats, most barleys, and all oats and buckwheat, is a particular pain. These few grains, once threshed, remain in the iron grip of their hulls.

But let's leave this unhappy bit for a while to dwell simply on threshing.

Violence is the only answer when threshing. I don't know about Dr. Martin Luther King, jr., but I think Ghandi and Jesus would be with me on this one - they were in touch with their agricultural roots. Back in the day grain stalks were tossed on the threshing floor and beaten thoroughly with flails. It is energy intensive, but it works. The importance of this technique is shown by the fact that one of the pharaohs' symbols of leadership was the flail. At this point there are as many ways to thresh as there are grain growing inventors, and since Ancient Egypt people have developed many machines and techniques to achieve one simple result. I am expert in none of them except the marvelous device we use here in the Golden Rule garden. Before we delve into that one, though, I'll mention the other equipment I have used - two small-scale threshing machines. One is foot powered (with a treadle), a simple metal box holding a cylinder which spins on a horizontal axis. The cylinder has metal projections, which do the work of threshing. You get it going and, holding onto the stalks, put the heads against the spinning cylinder. The grain and chaff are, together, knocked out the open back unless you rig up something to catch it.

The other machine is similar in function, except that there is an electric motor to power the cylinder and a fan that blows away the chaff, and there is a chute to collect the grain in one place.

Both machines are produced by CeCoCO, a Japanese company, and must be purchased through an importer. The company is kind of hard to figure anything out about, so if anyone reading this does, let me know. I am told the machines cost around $2,000 and $5,000, respectively. They both look very nice and work well, but I wouldn't buy one because I am cheap. Also because I am completely happy with the setup we have here which is cheap, good and with more tweaking could be even better.

Our thresher was envisioned by a past intern, Tom, and constructed by Garden Manager Ellen and her husband. Patent pending, I'm sure :)

They started with a 4x8' plywood board, 3/4" I think, nailing it to a frame of 2x4's laid flat to make the whole assembly around 2" tall. In each end are pounded two big fat nails, about 1' from the corners.

Next they took a 4x8' piece of hardware cloth with 1/2" squares and sandwiched each end with two pieces of 3/4" plywood, 2"x4'. Finally, they drilled two holes in each end of the sandwich to correspond with the "big fat nails" in the platform. Hopefully the photos will be helpful.

What you end up with is a platform with hardware cloth stretched across and held in place, a state-of-the-art foot-powered threshing device. Spread your grains, imagine playing Dance Dance Revolution, and thresh away! When you are finished, take one end of the hardware cloth off the nails and pick it up to clear off the bigger material, sweep off the grains and chaff underneath, and winnow it to reap the cleaned grains.

Here are a couple of pictures from when friends Shawn and Ryan visited. They were, understandably, excited about grains and threshing. You'll see the feet of Shawn and me threshing Jet Barley and then of Ryan winnowing the chaff from another grain in front of a box fan.

So an ordinary person, especially one who has threshed with a machine, might say "well, that looks fun for a while, but generally is an inefficient use of time and energy." To which I would ask "Where are you getting the energy to power your machine, and what better do you have to do than spend some quality time creating your own fresh food?" But only if I was in a feisty mood. More likely I would say "In my experience, this technique can be almost as fast as one of the machines, when assisted by a couple of friends, and is so much cheaper it's almost funny. Almost."

If I may stand on my soapbox for a moment: Agriculture was never meant to be done individually, and suffers from being done in the fastest way possible. We're talking about food, here. It is work, yes, but can be a joy when done with others. Agriculturally there is nothing more important than creating the highest quality stuff possible. It is not about fast, and when you get stuck in that rut farming becomes a ball and chain.

Whew, I feel better now!

Ok, so now we have hulling, which I have put off to last because I have no easy answers. Similar to threshing the answers all involve either lots of time, money, or ingenuity. Probably a combination of all three. Here is a photo of one of the older varieties of wheat which, though they have less of the protein that causes wheat allergies, also have some wicked hulls. As I said, many varieties of barley are thus cursed, as are all oats and buckwheat. Mind you, all grains have hulls, some are just not as persistent. There are "hull-less" varieties of oats, which are simply a little less difficult to extract from their hulls.

How do we remove the hulls? Often by hand, though not by peeling them. That would be waaaaay too tedious, even for me. Rolling them between your hands can work, rubbing them between pieces of rubber can, too. I have seen some pretty cool hulling machines that have two big rubber-coated cylinders that spin against each other. That's all I know about that, except that you shouldn't try hulling oats with the above-mentioned hardware cloth thresher. They are soft enough that they get ground to a pulp. Very difficult to separate from the chaff...

Sorry about that lack of answer. I have bags of Early Stone Age wheat, Farro wheat, and two varieties of oats that I have threshed but not hulled, saving them for last because I'm not sure what to do with them. I'll let you know when I do.

One last little bit - that grain seed I had in jars? I checked the silica gel three days later, and it had already turned pink. Now I'm changing it out every couple of days until it remains blue and dry.

August 2011 Update:
Ecology Action has begun to put up a series of Self-Teaching videos on Youtube, and the one on harvesting shows the process I use above. The link to that video is here.