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The crop leaves the bed with roughly a quarter of its seed still green, and that seed finishes ripening on the cut plant using the moisture and reserves left in the stem. This is why the stand is cut rather than stripped in the field, and it is why the bundles are hung rather than piled. Green seed on a cut plant kept airy will darken and harden over one to three weeks. Green seed in a heap will simply mold.
Hang the bundles seed-heads down from a beam, a wire or a line of hooks in a shed, garage, porch or greenhouse, with a sheet spread underneath. Air movement matters more than warmth. A cool airy building dries the crop better than a hot stuffy one, and a fan on low in a still garage is worth more than any amount of heat. If hanging is awkward, lay the plants in a single loose layer on a rack or a sheet and turn them every few days.
The crop is ready to thresh when the stems snap rather than bend, the remaining leaves crumble to the touch, and a seed cannot be dented with a thumbnail. That thumbnail test is the one that decides it. Seed that still gives slightly under a nail is too moist to store and will heat and mold in a sealed jar within a fortnight.
| Test | Not ready | Ready to thresh |
|---|---|---|
| Thumbnail pressed on a seed | Dents or leaves a mark | Will not mark, feels glassy hard |
| Stem bent double | Bends and springs back | Snaps cleanly with an audible crack |
| Color of the seed | Green or pale brown patches remain | Uniformly dark brown to almost black |
| Leaves on the stem | Leathery, still flexible | Crumble to dust between the fingers |
| Shaking a bundle | Dull and muffled | Dry rattle, and seed falls onto the sheet |
Do not dry the crop in full sun on a hot day to speed things up. Fast surface drying cracks the hulls and splits the groat inside, and cracked seed both stores badly and germinates poorly if you were keeping it to sow.
Threshing without equipment
Buckwheat threshes more easily than most seed crops because the achene is only loosely attached once it is fully ripe. A large part of the crop will already have shaken itself off onto the sheet under the bundles before you start, which is a good sign rather than a loss.
For the rest, the sack method works perfectly at garden scale. Put a few bundles into a clean pillowcase, a sturdy sack or a large lidded tub, close it, and beat it against a step or a wall, or lay it flat and walk along it, for a few minutes. Open it, lift out the bare stems, shake each one lightly over the container, and repeat with the next batch. A small block is done in a quarter of an hour.
An alternative for a very small quantity is to rub the heads between gloved hands over a bucket, or to strip the heads by drawing a stem through a closed fist. Both work but both are slow, and the sack is less effort for anything larger than a few plants. Whichever method you use, do the untying and the handling over a tarpaulin, because brittle dry stems shed seed at every movement.
- Confirm the crop is bone dry Thumbnail test on several seeds taken from different bundles, including the middle of the thickest one. If any dent, give the whole lot another few days of airflow.
- Gather what has already fallen Sweep the sheet under the hanging bundles into a bucket first. This is often a third of the crop and it is the ripest, best filled seed of the lot.
- Load a sack or lidded tub half full A few bundles at a time, cut free of their string. Half full is deliberate. The plants need room to move inside, because movement is what shakes the seed off.
- Beat or tread for a few minutes Swing the closed sack against a step or a wall, or lay it flat and walk along it. Keep going until what is inside feels like loose chaff and stem rather than whole plants.
- Lift out the straw and repeat Open over a tarpaulin, pull out the bare stems and shake each one. Feel through the straw before discarding it. Heads still holding seed mean the crop was slightly damp or the beating too gentle.
Winnowing, and the hull problem
What comes out of the sack is seed mixed with light chaff and broken leaf. The seed is much heavier, so a breeze does the separation for free. Pour the mixture slowly from one bucket into another in front of a fan on its lowest setting, or outdoors on a steadily breezy day. The chaff carries sideways and the seed falls straight down. Two or three passes leave it almost clean, and a final sieve or a hand sort on a tray removes grit and any remaining stem.
Start with the fan low and pour from a low height until you can see how far the chaff is traveling. A fan set too high blows the crop away with the chaff, which is a demoralising way to lose something you have spent three months on.
Then comes the part nobody mentions. What you have is unhulled seed, and the hull is a hard, tough, three-sided shell that does not rub off the way a bean skin does. Removing it at home is genuinely awkward: the usual approaches are a hand grain mill set wide so that it cracks the hulls without grinding the groat, followed by winnowing again, or a short soak and roast which loosens the hull but changes the flavor and ends any use as sowing seed. Neither is quick and neither is clean. If your goal is groats to cook, expect to work for them; if your goal is flour, unhulled seed can be milled whole and sieved, which gives a darker, stronger-tasting flour.
Storing the seed and keeping some to sow
Clean, fully dry, unhulled seed goes into airtight glass jars kept cool, dark and dry, and it holds well for a couple of years for eating and for sowing. Label the jar with the year, because two seasons of buckwheat look identical and you want to use the oldest first. Watch the jar for the first fortnight and if you see any condensation on the glass, tip it straight back onto a tray, dry it another week and re-jar it. Condensation is the reliable early warning of mold.
Hulled groats and any home-milled flour behave completely differently. Buckwheat is high in oil and the flour goes rancid noticeably faster than wheat flour, so mill only what you will use within a few weeks and keep groats and flour in the freezer rather than the cupboard. Unhulled seed in its shell is by far the most stable form, which is another reason to hull in small batches as you need it.
Set aside your sowing seed before you start cooking. Take clean, plump, fully dark seed from the best part of the block, store it in its own labeled jar in the coolest dark place you have, and note the germination you get from it next spring. Buckwheat seed loses viability faster than many crops, so seed more than two years old is worth testing on a damp paper towel before you commit a bed to it.