GROWING GRAINS By: John Vivian

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Short-handled harvest knives vary in size and shape. The machete and other heavy, long knives are used to cut the large stalks of sugar cane, sorghum and corn. The traditional harvest tool for small grains is the grain hook or sickle-a curved knife fastened at a shallow right angle to a wooden handle.

For small lot grain or cane harvesting, I remain loyal to the Collins made U.S. M-1 machete I was issued by the Marine Corps. Using it or a hooked harvest knife is stoop, duck-waddle, or scoot-along-on your-butt labor. Pick your torture.

Power - moving
For plantings measured in acres or significant fractions thereof, hand mowing is for masochists only, in my sciatic view. MOTHER's Gravely has a front-mounted sickle bar mower attachment hat cuts with a row of sharpened teeth, which move back and forth over a ground-hugging floating bar of fixed it. But its 700 pounds, not to mention he operator's own clodhoppers, can't help but crush the grain, losing more ham a few kernels in the stubble.

You can get smaller dedicated power sickle bar mowers, as well as still-operating antique horse-drawn sickle bar mowers that sport a seat so you can ride on the job. These go well with still-common, still - functioning horse-drawn hayracks that collect grain stalks in a huge set of curving spring teeth and dump the load by being raised up with a handle. Keeping a matched pair of these 18th-century horse-powered harvesting machines in operation into the 21st century just might be enough of a reason o take on a draft animal.

But my nominee for the best small plot small-grain harvester ever is the DR Trimmer-Mower from Country Home Products. This machine is a wheeled, amply powered string trimmer. It lacks power to the wheels, so you do have to push it. But it is nicely balanced and the revolving string head cuts a wide swath through any small grain. You could power mow grain with a little handheld string trimmer, I suppose, but the stalks and seed heads will fall and get chopped and snarled as you go. The DR lays the stalks to one side in a neat windrow so they can be raked or picked up and sheathed easily.

Neither string cutters nor sickle bars will cut standing corn, sorghum or other canes. I pull green ears and feed fresh stalks to the livestock. Flour corn is left to dry on the stalk. After the harvest, the stalks are hand-pulled and shredded or piled in long windrows and burned. If left standing over winter, they are the very devil to till in come spring and, unless a good dicing is scheduled, the tangled mess they make of tiller tines volunteers the plot to rest fallow for an entire year.

Threshing

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