Wheat Harvest

Last fall I planted a quarter-acre of wheat. Last week it was ready to harvest.

You can see how nice and green it is under the wheat. My original plan had been to plant this to pasture once the wheat was harvested. Last month, I decided to try overseeding the wheat with grass seed in hopes that the goats wouldn’t have to wait to start grazing after we harvested.

It worked! After we hauled off the wheat I turned the girls in to graze.

We didn’t get it all, and quite a lot of the wheat heads remained behind.

Wheat is easy to grow but not so easy to process, i.e. thresh or separate the wheat grains from the heads. That’s important for making flour, but fortunately, goats, chickens, and ducks don’t need it threshed. The goats eat the entire wheat head and the chickens and ducks peck out the berries from the chaff themselves. That means we only need to thresh and winnow it for our own use.

I wanted to let the chickens in here too, because they would love gleaning the wheat as well, but to get there they’d have to go through a newly planted area of pasture. I didn’t want to risk them eating all that seed!

Every year we experiment with threshing, and I think we’ve finally figured out a way that works well for us. I’ll show you that soon.