The Craftiest Workshop

Last year I ended up cutting some wheat that had been left on the field on the other side of our tree line. I pulled off the seed clusters then removed the wheat buds and separated the grain from the chaff.

This year farmers on two sides of us planted canola…”the cash crop”. Growing up in Saskatchewan you know that canola is the bright yellow fields that you see in July. I always had only a bird’s eye view though, driving by or flying over a canola field.

This year, I got to walk right beside it as it grew seeing the progression it took from planting to harvest. The field is quite beautiful when it is flowering.

All those flowers started turning into long green pods.

The pods, at the height of maturity, were heavy and the plants on the edge of the field toppled over. As the summer went on and those pods matured, they began to dry out until the entire field was a light beige.

On Monday of this past week, during the night, the field was harvested. We walked there the next day to see how it looked.

The stalks are quite thick and made a knocking sound when I hit them with my walking stick.

The rows on the very edge didn’t get cut again. Some had been snipped but not picked up by the combine. I grabbed a handful of those cut stalks and brought them back to the house.

I started pulling individual pods off and removing the seeds but the wind was picking up so I decided to just remove all the pods into a bucket.

The pods were very fragile and the slightest twist had the seeds pouring out. I am sure many seeds would be lost during the combining.

Here is what a pod looks like inside. The stem runs down the center of the pod forming a thin membrane to separate two rows of tiny black seeds. These seeds are about the size of a radish seed.

I sat on our small deck in the sun removing the seeds from the pods. I wanted to see how much I would get with the 10-15 plants I brought back.

My two hours of work yielded about a 1/2 cup of canola seeds.

I had to figure out how these tiny seeds could create the canola oil that we use in our kitchens. Apparently 40% of each seed is comprised of oil. If you put one in your mouth, you really can’t tell.

The seeds are heated and crushed to extract the oil.

One bushel of canola or 149 cups would make 11 Litres of canola oil. If my math is correct, my 1/2 cup of seeds would only make 36ml of oil or 2 Tbsp.

The price for a bushel of canola right now is around $16 a bushel. My 1/2 cup of canola seeds that took me about two hours to procure was worth about $0.05.

In my web search, I found a teaching resource all about canola from Manitoba.

https://canolagrowers.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/CanolaGuide_2010bw.pdf

If my few plants were a good indicator of the whole crop, then this canola would be number one canola. I only found two green seeds in all. There needs to be less than 2 green seeds in every 100.

I like learning a little bit each year about the different fields around us. Canola is a bit different from the wheat I got last year. The only thing I can do with the seeds is add it to a salad or granola as a topping.