Gadenin日本語Get the appKnowing when it is ripe
Rice ripens from the top of each head downwards, and the whole plant tells you at once. The heads that stood upright and green through flowering bend over into a heavy arc, the green drains out of the head and then out of the upper leaves until the whole tub is the color of straw, and the grains go hard. Test with a thumbnail: a ripe grain resists and dents rather than squashing, and if you split a husk the kernel inside is firm and white with no milky liquid. When about four grains in five on a head have gone hard and golden, cut.
The gap between ripe and shattering is short. Overripe rice drops grains at a touch, and a windy week at that stage empties heads onto the mud where you will never recover them. Err early rather than late: grain cut slightly under-ripe finishes hardening on the drying rack, whereas grain lost on the ground is simply gone.
Drain the tub two to three weeks before you expect to cut. Dry mud ripens the crop more evenly, lets the straw stiffen, and means you are not standing over a bucket of slurry with a handful of wet heads.
Ripening heads are the single most attractive thing in the garden to birds. If the tub is not netted by the time the grain goes from green to gold, you can lose the entire crop in a few days. See the pests and problems guide.
Cutting and drying
Cut the stems near the base with scissors or a sickle, keeping each handful together, and tie them into small bundles about as thick as your wrist. Do not cut the heads off on their own. The stem is a useful handle for every step that follows, and grain still finishes maturing off the sugars left in the straw for a few days after cutting.
- Bundle and hang heads-down under cover Tie each bundle at the cut end and hang it upside down somewhere dry and airy: a shed, a porch, a garage with the door open. Rain on cut rice causes sprouting in the head and mold in the bundle, and both ruin it.
- Dry for two to three weeks The straw should go brittle and the grains rattle when you shake a bundle. In damp weather this takes longer, and airflow matters far more than heat. A fan pointed at the bundles in a still shed makes a real difference.
- Test a grain before threshing Bite one. A properly dried grain shatters crisply between your teeth. If it dents or feels leathery it is still too wet, and grain threshed wet will mold in storage within weeks.
Threshing: easy, and messier than you think
Threshing means knocking the dry grains off the head, and at home scale it takes minutes. Hold a bundle by the stems and beat the heads against the inside of a large bucket or a tarpaulin-lined box, or lay the bundles on a sheet and rub them briskly between gloved hands. The grain comes off readily once it is properly dry; if it clings, the bundle needs another week of drying rather than more force.
What you have now is a mixture of grain, broken bits of straw, chaff and dust. Separate it by winnowing: pour it slowly from one bowl into another in front of a fan or in a steady breeze, outdoors. The grain is heavy and falls straight down, and everything else blows sideways. Two or three passes gives you a clean bowl of grain. Do this outside and downwind of yourself, because rice dust is intensely irritating to the nose and eyes.
At this point you are holding paddy rice: whole grains, each still sealed in its hard husk. It looks like a finished crop. It is not edible.
Hulling, the step that catches everyone out
The husk on a rice grain is not a papery skin like the one on a wheat berry or a sunflower seed. It is two hard, interlocking, silica-stiffened halves fitted around the kernel like a case, and rubbing handfuls between your palms will do little more than take the skin off your hands. This is the moment most first-time rice growers discover that they have four months of work sitting in a bowl and no way to eat it. Plan for this step before you sow, not after you harvest.
There is no elegant home solution, only workable ones. The realistic options, in rough order of how well they work at tub scale, are set out below. Whichever you use, expect to lose some grain to breakage and to spend far longer than you expect on a small quantity: a cup of paddy is an hour of fiddly work by hand.
After hulling you have brown rice: the whole kernel with its bran layer intact. It cooks and eats perfectly well, takes longer than white rice, and keeps for a few months rather than years because the oil in the bran goes rancid. Going further to white rice means milling the bran off, which is a separate abrasive process and not worth attempting by hand at this scale. Store what you make in a sealed jar somewhere cool and dark, and cook it within a couple of months.
| Method | How it works | Verdict at tub scale |
|---|---|---|
| Small hand-crank grain huller | Rubber rollers running at slightly different speeds shear the husk off | By far the best result. The only method that is genuinely pleasant. Worth buying if you intend to grow rice more than once. |
| Mortar and pestle, gentle | Pound with a rocking, rubbing motion rather than a strike, then winnow | Works. Slow, and you will break perhaps a fifth of the grain. The traditional method everywhere, and it shows why hulling was a daily chore. |
| Rolling pin on a folded towel | Roll grain firmly between cloth to crack and shed the husks, then winnow | Passable for a small bowl. Very uneven. You will re-roll the same grain several times. |
| Blender or grinder on low | Short pulses with a rubber-lined jar to knock husks loose | Unreliable and breaks a lot of grain. A last resort only. |
| Rubbing between hands | What everyone tries first | Does not work. The husk stays on. |
What the tub actually gave you
Weigh the paddy before hulling and the finished grain after, and note both. Hulling takes roughly a fifth of the weight away as husk, and hand methods take a little more as breakage. A well-run 25 gallon (95 L) trough might give you five or six ounces (150 g) of paddy, which becomes something under a cup of brown rice. It cooks as one modest side dish for two people.
That figure disappoints people who did the maths in their heads in spring, and it is worth stating plainly: this is not a staple crop at home, it is an experience. The compensation is that you now know exactly what the inside of a rice plant looks like, why hulling machinery exists, and what a grain of rice costs in labor. That is a much better return than the bowl itself.
Save some of your best grain, unhulled, as next year's seed. Choose it from the clumps that headed earliest and stood up straight, keep it in a paper envelope somewhere cool and dry, and write the year on it. Also record the harvest weight against your planting notes. Two or three years of paired numbers, clumps planted against grams harvested, tell you far more about your own conditions than any general guidance can.