GROWING GRAINS By: John Vivian

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On the farm, small grains are harvested by huge self-propelled combines that snow and thresh in a single pass. But for millennia before the machine age, and in low-tech societies still, grain was and is harvested entirely by hand. The crop is left standing in the fields until kernels are almost-but not quite-dry enough to separate from the husk and follow their natural inclination to self-seed, by popping loose when jostled by the wind.

To assure that grain is mature enough to harvest, if not entirely cured to storage quality, be sure the stalk has ceased nourishing the seed head and that it's begun to die back. It will have lost its fresh green color and will be less supple than when growing. To test the kernels, bite one: It should be soft enough to dent but not so soft that you can bite through easily.

Cut while still semigreen; the kernels will stay on the seed head. Small grains will cure rapidly if cut, sheaved, shocked and left in the field during dry fall weather. Shocks must be put under cover if prolonged rain threatens. Moldy grain is worthless. If infected with ergot mold, rye becomes toxic.

Corn can be left to dry on the stalk and in the water-repelling husk, or can be pulled, husked and dried on vented shelves or in a crib.

Small amounts of grain can be "topped" the ends of stalks sheared off and dropped into a harvest sack. It can be threshed in the sack by rubbing stalks between the palms of horsehide gloves. Or well dried, mature and loose kernels can be removed from standing stalks by shaking into a sack or by using a harvest rake similar to a blueberry rake a wooden scoop with a coarse-toothed comb fastened at the lip. Johnny's Selected Seeds sells a metal rake designed for harvesting chamomile blooms; it works on seedpods as well. If the teeth were narrowed, say by addition of a steel currycomb at the toothed edge of the lip, it would harvest small grain.

lost commonly, grain is hand harvested stalk and all-by harvest knives that pass through the stalks close to and parallel to the ground. Cut stalks are collected by the large handful, called a sheaf. Sheaves are bound near the top with supple barren tillers-secondary stems that grow from most grain plants' bases (you've seen them on sweet corn) but that fail to make seed. Two or three sheaves are stacked against one another-tops intertwined and bottoms lodged in the stubble. Then, other sheaves are "tepeed" onto them to form a shock large enough to put both arms around and are bound near the top.

The most sophisticated harvest knife is the long-handled, two-hand scythe, which permitted the 18th-century harvester to stand (or, more properly, to stoop) while mowing and stacking an acre an hour. Wooden fingers or frame cradles were attached on the off side of some grain harvest scythes to catch the stalks for easy one-handed pickup.

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