threshing, winnowing, and roaming the yard

i harvested the wheat in my yard thirty-seven days ago...and since i have a few days off i felt the time had come to begin processing it...so i began to cut the ears of the straw...

i took the first one hundred and fifty ears...

and put them in a burlap bag...and, instead of using a grain flail or having the oxen walk on the ears in the threshing room...

i set the bag on a cinder block and whacked it with a stick...

until the grain had separated from the ears and most of the husks had come off...

no matter what day i choose to do this there never seems to be enough of a breeze to winnow the grain with so i brought one of the fans i use to ventilate the plant room in winter up and used it to winnow the grain by pouring it between tow containers in front of the fan until the chaff had blown away...

those ears rendered almost a quarter cup of "berries" which should mill to about a half cup of flour...

there is no uniformity of production in wheat, much less nature...

so i will simply have to process the remaining one thousand one hundred and thirty ears ( yes i counted ) to see how much flour the harvest will yield...stay tuned if interested...

elsewhere out back, tomatoes, jalepenos, and hot banana peppers are ripening...hot sauce?

in herb terms the borage and parsley are booming along...

sun flowers and their cousins the jerusalem artichokes are blooming away...

and the sunchokes, at least, are attracting visitors...

and other visitors are working on making a living out there as well...non-vegetarian however...summer is moving along and there are hints of autumn if you look...this season will be in the books before you know it.

july first

first of a new month and the season is coming along...there are hot banana peppers out there and there are jalepenos on the way...

in seventeen days the jerusalem artichokes have added height and foliage...there was lemon balm making a stab at moving in there last month...july first finds it utterly shaded out...the sunchokes have no pity...

the bush beans are blooming...

chinese yam leaves are being skelitalized by japenese beetles...still, there are a multitude of healthy leaves left ( although it may be time for some neem oil here )...

and the plants are preparing to bloom and produce aerial bulbs...

the egyptian walking onions ( my back yard is an international place ) are both blooming and producing aerial bulbs...

the spuds are blooming profusely as well but, unfortunately, not producing fruits...no seeds this season it seems...

the maize around the yard is easily knee high...

and the teosinte is tillering ( while i haven't yet seen any on the heirloom maize yet )...

the wheat...

and the rye are ripening...threshing, winnowing, and milling at month's end, if not a bit before...

the drupes on the mulberry tree are beginning to turn color...

the grapes are coming along too...

the girls have been busy too...they have already sealed up a few tubes in the bee house i retrieved from my daughter and son-in-law's garage and over in the new bee house i have found a sealed tube in the nesting block ( third from the left in the bottom row...not that easy to spot because of the critter net )...the news is fairly good back there...so far we have a season.

ancestors always look old in photographs

my rain gauge measured an inch and a half of rain in september and has measured nearly that much in the last two days...october has started with precipitation...it is warm, relatively speaking, for early autumn...the temperatures have not even nearly approached frost warning levels and are expected to reach highs near eighty ( fahrenheit ) this coming week...which means there is till a lot of movement out back...

the stand of northern trepehuan teosinte looks old...like an ancestor in a colorized daguerrotype...like it's october...

which is deceiving since the plants have invested their autumn energy in flowers, silks, ears, and seeds...the warm weather is a plus in their long season ( even if it is an index of worse things for humans as a species )...looking for another year of backyard viable seed production...

some ears on a descendant from earlier in the season for some morphology...

fungi seem to be enjoying the weather...another dryad's saddle has appeared on the elm at the back of the yard...the third one this season on this tree...

a hand for some scale...

there are still bean blossoms and beans making their way along the vines that have moved through the maize and teosinte...there will be beans fresh as a side dish for a while yet...

hot banana peppers are still ripening...

the winter rye and wheat are filling in...even if they have been pummeled by the recent rains...

not to be outdone by the beans the cherry tomatoes are still blooming furiously...the plants are producing still with varying stages of ripeness on display...

the heirlooms had exactly one bloom going...and a few tomatoes, which, as they have been all season, are reluctant to ripen...hopefully they will grow in size and, now that i have had the chemical mechjanism that drives it explained, i will put them in a brown paper bag to ripen when the time comes