today is a day off so i brought the two sheaves of wheat i harvested five days ago up out of the basement to begin the...there is no other worjd for it ...laborious process of utilizing the harvest and the first step is separating the ears from the stems...
which i did utilizing a pair of scissors and a paper bag...cutting off each ear...
which left me with a bag of eight hundred and sixty-six ears of wheat...which incidentally dwarfs my last winter wheat harvest by more than double the number of ears...
and a pile of home grown straw i can use for mulch come autumn...in conjunction with thre straw i already have it eliminates a trip tot he feed store this year...a bonus...
wandering off into the rest of the yard ( but still on topic for a minute ) the einkorn and emmer wheat are moving their season along well...mostly grown a s a seed crop to propagate another generation next march...
bush beans, zucchini ( there is no stopping them ), and spuds are blooming...
there is good new growth on the yacon...
and it appears there will be tomatoes and grapes ( despite the appearance of japanese beetles...no worries...i have neem oil )
finally the grain workload shows no sign of easing...one reason for starting on processing the wheat today is that the rye is about due for harvest and that means more threshing and winnowing...i heard some british academic holding forth on the bbc yesterday about the "midden heap theory" of the origins of agriculture ( interestingly he maintained that the development our system of social stratification had nothing to do with the advent of agriculture...remind me to avoid his books and views )..and the midden heap may have given neolithic peoples the idea that they could actively plant seed to grow food however they were not doing it as hobbyists ( which you could say is what i am doing...even thought the work seems more serious than that at times )..one supposes some other sort of dire circumstance ( perhaps the diminution of carrying capacity by population growth ? ) was involved in the acceptance of so much labor by formerly foraging communities...more on the bread from scratch project as it moves along.
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