Making Bread Part II The Harvest

Once at a dinner party in Williamsburg we were offered turtle soup and one of the women who was seated with us asked a waiter how it was made. He said, "Fust yuz ketches de tuertle..."

I didn't know whether to roll on the floor or crawl under the table. He may have had his own question, "Why would a white woman want to know that"?

The lady's question was not impertinent. We all should know who we depend on and for what. So too, there's a reason I'm telling you things you already know. It will take me a while to get to the point. Please bear with me.

Back to harvest. Fust yuz cuts de wheet - the old way was with a sickle - and lay it nicely in bunches on the ground; all seed heads in one direction. Somebody else will come behind and using a few shoots which have been moistened by immersing them in water, a few moments in whatever creek is nearby does nicely, wraps those around that dry wheat remaining on the ground and knots it creating a "shock" which can be handled as a unit. This method pre-dates steel sickles. There are examples of sickles from the stone age.

I've cut some wheat like this myself, but there were never enough sickles to go around and I was so slow that they put me to tying up the shocks.


There are other ways. I think some might have been cut with scythes. But that isn't very satisfactory. It leaves the wheat helter-skelter and a lot of the grain is lost - so I'm told. In North America they used "cradles" which were basically scythes with an attachment to keep the wheat from going helter-skelter. I suspect this was brought to America from Germany.

Next prepare an "era". That's a Spanish word that I can't translate, but it indicates a flat workplace where they have allowed the sheep to graze the grass down as far as sheep can graze it - meaning golf-green short. Then sweep it with brooms, the "homemade" kind that are made from brush, to remove what the sheep leave behind.


And you are ready to pitch the shocks onto an ox cart, or whatever transport is available, and take it to the era where you can lay it out on the ground and open the shocks by cutting the ties.

Next you have to get the wheat seed out if the seed head. The process is called "threshing". If the wheat is dry enough you can release the seed just by beating it against the floor. Also, there are descriptions of hammering the seed out using flails dating to the times of the Egyptians. Here they used a "trillo". Trillar means to thresh.

top view


Imagine it without the stone weights, this isn't my trillo and I didn't remove them for the photo. I suspect someone had been pulling it with a tractor. Hitch it to the oxen, you can put a stool in the center to sit on, then around and around you go! If you're using mules you have to stand and ride it like a surfboard. The uhh... interesting part is that when the ox lifts it's tail you have to be ready with a coffee can or it will ruin the wheat. Somebody has to do it.


bottom view (detail)

Those are flint stones (no kidding) which are inserted into the wood. As the trillo is pulled around and around over the wheat the flints cut it up until the straw is chopped to about 3cm length and the seed falls out of the seed head. Assuming you were threshing a mound of wheat 25m in diameter and a starting thickness of about 25cm this would take a 2-3 days (using oxen). Almost nothing as compared to how long it takes to cut a field with a sickle. See also: this.

All that's left is to separate the wheat from the chaff - winnowing. Sweep it all into a mound. You can use grain rakes now, the ones with the wooden teeth, and wait for a windy day. Toss it into the wind and the air will carry the chaff away and the wheat falls back to the ground. Final cleaning is achieved by passing the wheat through a sieve.

Later, If you didn't want to wait for a windy day machines were available like this one.


Toss the threshed wheat in the top and the blower at left lifts the chaff out the front. The heavier wheat comes out the back under the blower. There were also models in which you could attach sacks to the machine and the wheat would fall directly into the sacks.

The first point I want to make is that a modern combine does all of this in one pass and it does it in exactly the same way.


That roll up front tucks the wheat into a "sickle bar" exactly like what you've seen in the hayfields and the wheat is fed into a thresher, called in this case a "crib" or sieve where it is passes through teeth spaced precisely so that the seed-head is broken and the seed is not. That's adjustable for working in different crops. The idea is exactly like the trillo. It just goes around a whole lot faster than oxen! The seed then passes though a sieve and there is a series of shakers and blowers that recycle all of the remaining heavy parts back into the crib where anything that didn't get processed correctly goes through again. The straw is blown up and out and wind-rowed (or not, if so adjusted) out the back where it can be bailed. Nothing wasted.

Here's what you get.


It's not yet ready to mill. It still contains weeds and other impurities.