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Community Wheat Harvest
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Early December, of last year, I planted a 1/4 acre with wheat,  as a fast growing covercrop, before the winter rains were about to start. By January, the wheat had all germinated covering the soil like a lush green blanket.  My first intention was to let it grow and plow it back into the soil come spring, but never having planted wheat, I was unaware how much I would enjoy it's lifecycle.  I let the wheat grow to maturity watching how the  colors changed from lush green, gradually to yellow, and finally to creamy brown. For a fruit and vegetable grower like me, a 1/4 acre of wheat,  is a lot of wheat! Unsure what to do with this new crop, my friend Jered, from Pie Ranch, suggested something they do every year -  invite the community to help with the harvest. 

You can all imagine how happy a farmer I was last Saturday, when I cranked up the tractor ready to pull a trailer full of helpers to tackle our first ever wheat harvest. 
Armed with hand-sickles we started cutting the stalks of wheat,  stacking them into small piles which then got tied into bundles. While harvesting the wheat, some of us not yet old enough to wield a knife, picked cherry tomatoes in the nearby tomato patch. It didn't take longer than 2 hours that the  trailer we rode over on, was stacked with wheat bundles. We slowly rode back with kids sitting on top of the wheat stack ready to take on the next, and most unfamiliar, part of the process - threshing, winnowing and milling. 

We took the bundles and opened them up  on a large tarp and started stomping and stepping on the heads of wheat to separate the kernels. Traditional hand threshing would be done with sticks resembling flails, or woodchucks like you see in martial arts.  Not something to be tried with 20 people having an enjoyable Community Farm Day. Once we grew tired of stomping around on the straw (about 20 minutes), the next step was to pick up the straw and move it off to the side. What we had left was a lot of straw mixed in with wheat at various stages of threshing. The easiest way  we found to get the straw out of the wheat was to put it through a very coarse sieve, for which we used our harvest crates, which worked great. We spent trying different ways of sifting and throwing wheat and chaff into the air, like people have been doing for thousands of years, but conditions weren't windy enough to separate the kernels from the chaff, so we had to resort to using a fan which also ended up not being strong enough. With enough air blowing, the wheat, which is a lot heavier, falls to the ground and the chaff, much lighter, is blown away.
We used buckets to collect the wheat kernels and after lots of winnowing sequences, we had a hat full of kernels clean enough to demonstrate how to mill the wheat into a couple of pounds of "precious" flour.   Time was limited to accomplish the complete circle from harvest to nourishing meal.  However, with flour bought the day before, Molly, farm intern and pizza maker extraordinaire, had made a fresh batch of pizza dough  so all of us wheat harvesters got to bake our own creative pizzas topped with goat cheese, cherry tomatoes, pesto, humus and herbs.  Thanks to all who came and made this, the farm's first ever wheat harvest, such a fun,creative, and "enlightening" experience.  - Tom



P.S. Since I didn't take a lot of pictures I have a small request to all who did take them. Please, if you don't mind, send your pictures to me (thomas@baymoon.com) in order to put together a visual sequence, from wheat harvest to pizza eating, in order to share the experience with other members in future newsletters. Thank You!!!!


 

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Not much to share from the field, except that everyone getting a share this week should be aware of the Padron Peppers, bagged with a red rubberband.  They where harvested a bit too large and therefore are Very HOT!!!!!!!

This year the one crop which seems very susceptible to mildew among all local growers are green and lemon cucumbers. We will continue to supply you with the Armenian Snake cucumbers, but the regular ones are for all intended purposes a crop failure :-(.

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We are very pleased to announce that our Live Earth Farm Discovery Program is now officially a 501c3 tax-exempt non-profit! We got our final letter from the IRS confirming our status just last week. This is excellent news: now every contribution to the Discovery Program (including our fundraising dinner coming up in September -- see Calendar, below) will be tax deductible to the full extent of the law!

This in turn has given us a new option for CSA members: in the event you make a change to your share that would result in a refund, you now have the option of donating that refund to the Discovery Program, and it will be tax-deductible to you. We will send you a thank-you letter with our Tax ID number, for your files, and the Discovery Program will get needed funds for supporting its educational programs -- a win-win situation!

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Courtesy of CAFF (Community Alliance with Family Farmers), from their July 31 bulletin:

"HR 2749 passed the House of Representatives yesterday on a majority vote. It had earlier failed to pass on Wednesday under rules that required a two-thirds vote.

"During the debate on Thursday, Rep. Sam Farr (D-Monterey) and Rep. Blumenauer (D-Oregon) both held "colloquies" with Rep. Dingell, the bill's manager, which allowed them to read into the record their understanding that the bill was not intended to conflict with conservation and biodiversity efforts on farms, negatively affect small farmers, or conflict with organic rules under the NOP, and to have Rep. Dingell agree. Since we were unable to get the actual language of the bill amended to reflect these concerns, this was the best we could do.

"Rep. Dingell had earlier circulated a memo from the consumer groups that were pushing the bill that speciously argued that all of our concerns had been dealt with. Read the rebuttal to this from the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition here."

"As the legislation moves to the Senate this fall, we will once again attempt to keep the FDA off of the farm. While CAFF believes that every farmer should pay attention to food safety issues, by making farmers subject to mandatory rules, testing, audits, and recalls, this legislation threatens to destroy the local food system we have been working to create.

"We thank those of you who contacted your Representatives and we particularly want to thank Rep. Farr and Rep. Lynn Woolsey, who were very supportive of our position. We will keep you advised of further developments."

Read more about this bill on CAFF's policy page.

If you have any questions regarding this bill, please contact CAFF's Policy Director, Dave Runsten, at 530-756-8518 ext. 25 or dave@caff.org.

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