Harvesting Wheat by Hand: the Thumbnail Test and Threshing

Milk, dough, hard: reading the grain with a thumbnail

There is one test for ripeness and it takes five seconds. Pull a kernel from the middle of an ear, put it between thumbnail and forefinger and press. If liquid comes out it is not ready. If it squashes flat into a soft paste it is close but still filling. If it dents and holds the dent, like firm cheese, the grain is at hard dough and this is the moment to cut. If your nail will not mark it at all and it splits under a tooth, the crop is fully ripe and needs cutting immediately before it starts shedding.

Color is a rough guide rather than a test. The straw yellows from the base upwards, the ears fade from green through pale gold, the flag leaf dies back and the ears bend over on their necks. But a crop can look convincingly golden while the grain inside is still soft, particularly after a wet spell, and it can be hard and shedding while the lower straw is still greenish. Always check the grain itself, and check ears from several places in the bed rather than one.

Cutting at hard dough rather than waiting for full ripeness is deliberate. The grain is already at its final weight by then and will finish drying on the cut straw, and you avoid both shattering and the sudden risk of a rain event on a standing ripe crop. In a garden, where the whole harvest is a few armfuls and can be moved under cover in one trip, cutting slightly early is nearly always the right call.

Test in the morning rather than the afternoon. Grain takes up a little moisture overnight and firms up again through a hot day, so an afternoon test on a warm bed reads a stage riper than the crop actually is.

Cutting and stooking

Cutting a garden bed of wheat is a job for a sickle, a bread knife or a pair of shears and takes far less time than the preparation for it. The aim is to keep the ears together, keep them off the ground, and get air through the straw so it finishes drying evenly.

1. Cut on a dry morning after the dew has lifted Damp straw will not dry down properly in a bundle and molds in the middle. Wait for a settled dry spell if you can; a cut crop rained on is a much bigger setback than a standing crop rained on.
2. Grip a handful, then cut low Take as much straw as your hand closes around, hold it firmly, and cut three to four inches (8 to 10 cm) above the soil with a sawing stroke. Grip first and cut second, so nothing falls and no ears end up in the stubble.
3. Tie into sheaves with the ears all at one end A sheaf about four inches (10 cm) through at the tie, bound with twine or with a twisted rope of the straw itself. Keep the cut ends level so the sheaf will stand. Loose ties dry better than tight ones.
4. Stand the sheaves in stooks or hang them under cover Lean six to eight sheaves against each other, ears up, so air passes through, or hang them head down in a shed. Ten to fourteen days like this and the straw rustles and the grain is hard and glassy.
5. Keep the ears off the ground and away from mice A sheaf lying on soil takes moisture back up and is found by rodents within days. Store on a rack, a pallet or hung from a beam, with a sheet underneath to catch anything that drops.

Threshing and winnowing at home

Threshing is separating the grain from the ear, and it is where most people discover that bread from your own garden is a serious undertaking. The simplest method that works is a clean tarpaulin, a large sack or a plastic tub, and blunt force: put a few sheaves head down in the sack, close the neck, and beat the sack against a wall or thrash it with a stick until the grain has come free. A short length of broom handle used as a flail on a tarpaulin works equally well and is easier on the back.

Once beaten, lift the straw off, shake each armful over the tarpaulin to release trapped grain, and set the straw aside for mulch. What remains is grain mixed with chaff and bits of stem. Rub handfuls between your palms to break up whole ears, then sieve out the coarse fragments with a colander over a bucket.

Winnowing removes the chaff by weight. Pour the grain slowly from one bucket to another in front of a fan or in a steady outdoor breeze. The grain, which is much heavier, falls straight down; the chaff blows sideways. Three or four passes gets a garden batch clean enough to mill. Do it outdoors or in a garage, because the chaff goes everywhere and it itches. Allow an hour or two for a bed of a few square yards, and expect it to take longer the first time.

Grain destined for storage must be genuinely dry: it should shatter rather than dent when bitten. Spread it in a shallow layer indoors for a few more days if in doubt, then store it in a sealed jar. Damp grain in a sealed container molds, and the whole batch is then finished.

A modern bread wheat threshes free of its hull, so what you get is clean grain ready to mill. Older hulled grains such as spelt, emmer and einkorn keep a tight husk that survives threshing and needs a separate dehulling step, which is why they are much slower to process at home.

What a garden bed actually yields

It is worth being blunt about this before you commit ground to it. A well grown garden bed produces roughly ten to twelve ounces of clean grain per square yard (300 to 400 g per square meter). A bed of a few square yards therefore gives a few pounds of wheat, and a pound of wheat mills to roughly a pound of wholemeal flour, which is one loaf. Five square yards of good wheat is two or three loaves, not a winter's baking.

Nobody grows wheat in a garden for the flour economics, and it is better to be honest about that from the start. It is grown because milling and baking something you sowed nine months earlier is genuinely satisfying, because a few square yards produces an armful of clean long straw that is useful all year, and because a patch of wheat is an excellent winter cover and green manure that can be cut and turned in at any point if you decide you would rather have the bed back.

Save some of what you thresh. Wheat is self-pollinating and comes true, so a handful of your own cleaned grain sows the same area again next season, provided it was fully dry and stored cool. Label the jar with the type, because unlabelled wheat is wheat of unknown habit and you are back to guessing whether it is winter or spring.

What to record at harvest

Write down the cutting date against the sowing date. That interval is the true length of the crop where you garden, and it is what tells you whether a spring sowing has room to finish before your late summer weather turns, or whether you should be sowing in autumn instead.

Weigh the cleaned grain and record it against the area of the bed in square yards or square meters. That single number is the only honest measure of whether the season went well, and it is the figure to compare when you change a feeding or sowing decision. Note the height of the straw and whether any of it lodged, note how much grain you found on the soil before cutting, and note how long the sheaves took to dry down. A crop that needed three weeks in the shed to harden was cut too early or the shed is too damp, and both are worth knowing before next summer.