Gadenin日本語Get the appCut early, on purpose
An oat panicle is an open, spreading structure of fine drooping branches, each carrying a spikelet on a slender stalk, and when the grain is fully ripe those stalks become brittle. Brush past a ripe bed and grain rains onto the soil. Wait for the crop to look properly ripe in the way a wheat field looks ripe and you will lose a serious fraction of it before you get it out of the bed. This shattering habit is the single most important thing about harvesting oats and the reason oats have always been cut before they are dead ripe.
The target is the hard dough stage. The straw is still faintly green low down, the panicle and the upper stem have gone yellow, and a grain squeezed between thumbnails no longer produces milky liquid but dents rather than shatters. Bite one: it should be firm, like a hard cheese, not powdery and not soft. At that point the grain has finished filling and is drawing nothing further from the plant, but the stalks holding it are still tough enough to hold it on through cutting and carrying.
Check daily from the point the panicles begin to nod and pale. Oats move from soft dough to shattering ripe in about a week in warm weather, so the window is real but it is not wide. If you are away and come back to a bed that has already begun to drop grain, cut it immediately and in the cool of the morning while the plant is damp and slightly more forgiving, and lay a sheet under the cut as you carry it.
| Stage | Grain when squeezed | Straw color | Action |
|---|---|---|---|
| Milk | Squirts white liquid | Green throughout | Too early, three to four weeks to go |
| Soft dough | Squashes like soft putty | Green with yellow upper stem | Getting close, check daily |
| Hard dough | Dents under a nail, does not squash | Panicle and upper stem yellow, base still faintly green | Cut now, this is the target |
| Ripe | Hard, cracks under a nail | Straw yellow throughout | Cut immediately, expect losses to shattering |
| Over-ripe | Falls from the panicle when touched | Bleached straw, panicle thin | Salvage what stands, most of it is on the ground |
Cutting, sheaving and finishing off the drying
Cut a garden bed with a sickle, a serrated bread knife or shears, gathering a handful of stems at a time in one hand and cutting low, six inches (15 cm) or so above the ground, so you get straw as well as grain. Work with a bucket or a sheet at your feet to catch what does drop. Do not shake the bundles or drop them; carry them upright, panicles up, and set them down gently.
Because you cut before the grain was fully dry, the crop finishes ripening in the sheaf. Tie each handful into a bundle around the middle with twine, and stand five or six bundles together on their cut ends leaning into each other so they hold themselves upright with air moving through. Under cover is better in a wet climate: a shed, a porch, a greenhouse with the vents open. Left outside, stand the bundles butt down so rain runs off the panicles rather than into them, and expect to bring them in if the weather turns.
Ten to fourteen days of this and the grain is hard, the straw is brittle and pale, and you can thresh. Test by biting a grain; it should crack cleanly against a tooth with no give at all. Threshing damp oats is miserable work and stored damp oats go moldy, so do not rush this stage. If in doubt give it another few days.
- Cut at hard dough, in the morning Damp plants shed less grain than dry ones. Take handfuls, cut low, and lay them one way in a barrow or on a sheet so the panicles all point the same direction. Handling everything in one orientation makes tying and threshing much easier later.
- Tie into bundles and stand them to dry Bundles about as thick as your wrist, tied once around the middle. Stand groups of five or six leaning together, or lean them along a wall under cover. Air moving through the middle of the group is what dries them; a heap on the floor will heat and mold within days.
- Thresh onto a sheet Beat the panicles against the inside of a clean bin or barrel, or lay the bundles on a tarpaulin and flail them with a stick, or rub the panicles between gloved hands for small amounts. Oats thresh easily compared with wheat because the spikelets are already loose. Twenty minutes clears a bed's worth.
- Winnow the chaff off Pour the threshed material slowly from one container into another in a steady breeze or in front of a fan on low. The light chaff, hulls and hairs blow sideways and the heavy grain falls straight down. Three or four passes gets it genuinely clean. Do this outdoors; oat chaff is an irritant to skin and airways.
- Sort out any remaining hulled grains Even a naked oat leaves a few grains still in their hulls. They are visibly larger, paler and boat shaped among the bare kernels, and picking them out of a jar takes a few minutes. Hulled grains left in will not soften in cooking and will show up as splinters in the porridge.
- Dry hard, then store cool and sealed Spread the clean grain a single layer deep on a tray somewhere warm and airy for two or three days after winnowing, then store in a sealed jar or tin somewhere cool and dark. Properly dried oat groats keep well over a year. A few days in a freezer at the start kills any weevil eggs that came in with the crop.
Yield, stabilizing the groats, and the straw
A well grown garden bed of ten square yards (about eight square meters) gives somewhere between three and six pounds (1.5 to 3 kg) of clean naked oat groats, which is a fortnight of breakfasts and rather less than most people expect for the space and the effort. Grow oats because you want to have grown them, or because the cover crop value justifies the bed anyway, rather than because it is a sensible way to feed yourself.
Home grown oat groats are not shelf stable in the way that shop bought rolled oats are. Oats carry an enzyme that turns the grain's oil rancid within weeks of the kernel being exposed, which is why commercial oats are steamed or kiln dried before rolling. If you intend to roll or grind your oats, stabilize them first: spread the groats on a tray and hold them in a low oven at around 200F (93C) for twenty minutes, or steam them briefly and dry them again. Whole groats stored intact and unstabilised keep considerably longer than rolled ones, so leave them whole until the week you want to use them.
The straw is a genuine second crop and is worth keeping. Oat straw is softer and more palatable than wheat straw, it makes good animal bedding, good mulch and good compost brown, and it breaks down faster than wheat or rye straw. Store it dry and off the ground. Record the harvest date, the weight of clean grain and the stage you cut at, because the honest way to learn oat timing is to look back at a note saying that last year you cut too late and lost a third of it.