Do you have what it takes????

Rural Revolution has a great piece on their winter wheat project..

Currently I think most of us would have a hard time come harvesting to do it the old way.

Use others experiences, success & failures, so you can stay ahead of the curve.

Just something to think about.

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We've always wanted to grow wheat; and since northern Idaho is wheat country, we decided to plant an experimental wheat field and see what happened. (The back posts listed above will guide you through what we did.)

Some of the issues we had with this experiment had to do with boggy fields, cheatgrass, pests, and the timing of the harvest.










I learned a scythe isn't hard to use, when done properly. In fact, it's rather soothing and gratifying to feel the stems of the wheat cut like butter before the blade. The blade must be kept very sharp, of course. And the trick is to let the weight of the scythe do the cutting -- you don't arm-wrestle it.





It's hard to tell from this photo, but the wheat is lying in swaths, sort of. Unfortunately the cut wheat is not all facing the same direction












My fantasy is to get a scythe with a cradle, which catches the wheat as it's cut and deposits it on the ground in neat swaths, ready to tie into shocks. (This is a photo of some gentlemen selling a scythe with cradle on eBay. I wish. Cha-ching!)














 


Yes, the chipmunks had discovered our wheat. And they nibbled, nibbled, nibbled at it until it was all gone.

Chipmunks, we learned, are nothing if not wildly efficient. And we have hundreds of them around here.