Fri. 09/02/10 Wheat Harvest

Today I harvested wheat. I got about 2/3 of it cut. The wheat is grown in our old corral and I cut it by hand. It was a beautiful, dry, fall day, perfect for grain harvesting.

The wheat is so ripe that the kernals are practically falling out of the heads. That's okay...it's reseeded itself for 3 years now just with what falls to the ground before harvest! Lazy man's farming?

I had the goatling out there with me, too, to graze on the other part of the corral.

Steven was up in the woods cutting another load of firewood.

I cut just the tops (the "heads") off the stalks, then dump them in feed sacks as the bucket gets full. I'll hand-thresh some for use in the house, but most of it I'll dump a bit at a time in the chicken pen over the winter and the chickens will happily scratch it and thresh it themselves and eagerly eat the grain. There's some rye mixed in with it too, which self-seeded from what I missed last year when I planted and harvested rye next to the wheat. I'll just leave it all together.

It's labor-intensive to grow grains on a small scale and to harvest and thresh by hand, but it saves money on chicken food. And if I ever have to, I know what it takes to grow wheat, oats, and rye, because I've done it. I wish we could grow field corn in this climate. If a person has to buy their chicken food, it's not cost-efficient. However, you do get a better egg than what you can buy at the store. In the summer ours free-range the yard, which reduces feed requirements and keeps the bugs cleaned up!

The raspberries are still producing. It was fun while my sister was here, grazing on the berry patch every day!