The Craftiest Workshop

We were out for a walk around our property on Sept. 1. A wheat field was planted on a small portion of our property just across the creek. We decided to take some photos of the field.

A few days later, the farmer leasing the land combined the field so we were glad to have snapped some photos.

I went back to see how a field looks up close after combining. There were sporadic wheat stalks still standing which the combine had missed.

I decided to go get some pruning shears and a bucket. I wanted to cut some of the stalks to see how easy it would be to get the wheat kernels off the stalk.

Threshing or getting the head of the wheat separated from the stalk isn’t too bad. You just run your fingers backwards and pull off the seed pods. You end up with a mixture like this.

The difficult part is separating the chaff from the wheat kernels. I tried shaking the pan and skimming off the chaff.
We watched a video about how a combine actually works; the inner workings of the machine. Like inside a combine, a little blast of air is the best method to get rid of the chaff. We had a gusty wind on this particular day and I was able to shake the pan in such a way that the majority of the chaff blew away in the wind. Apparently, this process is called winnowing.

I still had to do a bit of picking out pieces of chaff or rolling a kernel still caught in its pod. In the end after emptying about 20 wheat stocks, I was left with only this.

I really hope that the early settlers farming wheat had a better process for separated the grain from the chaff. I started the process and told myself I needed to finish it. After about four hours of repeated pulling off the stock, shaking in the pan and picking away, I ended up with this…about 1.5 cups.

To put this amount in perspective, a bushel of wheat is 60 lbs or 149 cups. The flour from a bushel of wheat can make 90 one pound whole wheat loaves of bread. In Northern AB, as I write this, a bushel of wheat is worth $10.49/bushel. That would make the wheat I cleaned worth about $0.10 and I could potentially make one loaf of bread (after grinding down the wheat into flour).

At this point, I was done trying to get wheat kernels. I did decide to go back out to the field and cut some more stocks to dry for decoration though.

I bundled the stalks into handfuls and tied them in two places.

Next I hung them upside down in the garage on a railing.

I am thinking about incorporating some wheat into a future art project.

I am happy to have spent some time with the wheat. It makes me more appreciative of farmers and I have a better understanding of how much grain they need to harvest to turn a profit. It also made me think about how much work the early settlers would have had to do before heavy machinery did a lot of the work.