I'm not a Coward

In my reply to Jay's comment on the last post you'll notice he asked how people dehulled back in the day and, more notably, I gave suggestions that I had never tried and asked him to let me know if he learned anything. This was cowardly, which I realized shortly after posting it. I'll seek to redeem myself with this post, after a day of experimentation.

In her invaluable book on homesteading skills, The Encyclopedia of Country Living (which I would recommend to anyone who wasn't alive during the depression), Carla Emery talks about hulling wild rice. She quotes a description by the USDA in 1885 on the "parching" process Native Americans used to loosen hulls: "It [the grain] is laid on scaffolds about four feet high, eight wide, and twenty to fifty long, covered with reeds and grass, and a slow fire is maintained beneath for thirty-six hours, so as to parch slightly the hull, that it may be removed easily." Wow. Then they would put it in a skin-lined hole in the ground and stomp on it. Commercially wild rice is parched in bushel quantities in big metal cylinders over a fire.

Under hulling in other grain sections she refers to this parching procedure and recommends following this with a once-through in a grinder set at 1/16 of an inch. Garden Manager Ellen says she has often put it through our electric grinder, set wide-open.

This is all I knew this morning.
I started with a very small quantity (~4 ounces) of Perfectly Awnless (but obviously not hull-less) Wheat, and divided it in half. One half I ran through the grinder, set wide open. The other half I parched in a cast-iron skillet over a gas stove, stopping as some of the hulls started to seem scorched and some of the grains started popping. This I followed by putting it in a box with hardware cloth on the bottom and grinding it with my foot. I can say, from trying both, that the grinder worked fine, though it broke many of the grains and ground some flour even though it was set to its widest. The parching went well, and clearly loosened up the hulls, which allowed the grains to leave very easily. I secretly decided right then that I preferred the parching method because, though it required flipping grains smallish amounts at a time, things come out tidier and whole. The fact that the grinder produced flour, cracked grains and whole grains all at the same time seemed a bit sloppy.
This was educational, but it was on too tiny a scale to mimic even the small amounts of grain that we grow, let alone the amount someone would grow for sustenance. So I went a step further. I had a bag of Farro wheat, which has tenacious hulls paired with nasty awns, those pin-like things sticking out of picturesque wheat heads. It was about 24 ounces of material, so I divided it in half and went at it.
Notes:
First of all, each half had a number of grains that had come out during threshing, so I tried to remove as many of those as I could before proceeding. I set them aside (after weighing) as the seed stock to plant next year.
Grinding was frustrating for a couple of reasons. The awns did a good job of blocking the hole, so I had to keep poking at it. Once through the grinder I took the results outside, sifted the flour, then winnowed the chaff. I was left with plenty of broken grain of different sizes, some whole grains, some still in hulls, and a bunch of awns that were too aerodynamic to blow away. After spending a lot of time separating the remaining hulled grain out, I ran it through the grinder again. And then separated it out again. A point about growing your own food: you will never get all the dirt off, and you will consume a few more bugs and a little more fiber than store-bought stuff. I'm ok with that. I'm not sure about 1.5" awns in my flour, but maybe that's good for me too. The thing that would have made this a better possibility is using a hand-powered grinder, since then you can feel the resistance and work with the grain better. Being able to open the stones wider than our grinder permits would have been nice, too.
Parching was not as smooth as with the Awnless, probably because there was more of it. After trying to toast the whole thing at once I divided the batch into two, and it was still a lot. I am not sure I toasted it enough, as it was. When it came to the crushing with my foot many grains came out easily, but some were persistent. I parched these once more and they became easier. The nice thing about the parching vs. grinding was that after parching the awns all broke off completely and became a non-issue. Hooray! The resulting grain looked a lot nicer, because it was mostly clean and completely whole. The parching process took a lot longer than the grinding, but that was because This American Life came on in the middle, and I had to listen intermittently. It would have taken a little less time than grinding, I think, because I didn't need to spend as much time sorting it.
Starting out with 12 ounces of each I ended up with 7 ounces of "grinder-hulled" and 7.5 ounces of "parching-hulled." Not sure what that means.
Conclusion
It seems like it takes a long time to process a little grain this way. I'd imagine that practice and a perfected process would help some, but it is not a speedy thing. Something else to note is that hulled grains store much better in their hulls, so you might do this kind of procedure on demand. Maybe set all those farm kids on it. Also keep in mind that both processes affect the viability of the grains (they won't germinate after being cracked or heated up in a skillet) and the grain will germinate straight out of the hull when planted, so there is no need to hull the seed you want to grow out.
Why bother with hulled varieties, then, if they are such a pain? Because they are pretty and we love them. Also because you'll lose much fewer mature grains to birds, wind, and whatever else, since they are locked in. The last reason was mentioned in the last post, too, which is that some of the hulled varieties have nutritional benefits not available in hull-less varieties.
Whew. I think I'll take a break on grains for a while. They wore me out today! So let it not be said that I shied away from a challenge. I may be silly, but I'm not a fraidy-cat.

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.