Farming for self sufficiency

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THRESHING

First we have got to thresh the grain. You can take the sheaves and bang the heads of corn over the edge of a barrel or the back of a chair (or a 'threshing horse' made for the purpose with several parallel horizontal bars). The grain will fly all over the place and so you must have an unencumbered floor. This method is still much practised on the west coast of Ireland. Or you can pile the straw higgledy-piggledy in a big heap on the floor and wallop it with a flail. Or you can lay the straw on a clean, hard floor and drive animals over it as the Sinhalese do with their rice and the Spaniards their wheat. Or you can get a threshing machine. The latter has the advantage that it will winnow it too. (To winnow is to blow the lighter chaff out of the grain.) There used to be plenty of little barn threshing machines—every farm had one, often driven by a water wheel, or a horse walking around in a circle pulling a bar. If you could get one of these you would be well away. But the bashing over a chair method is quite satisfactory for small quantities (say up to a ton) and is quite fun.

WINNOWING

If you spread a tarpaulin on the ground on a windy day, and pour your threshed grain and chaff on to it from a height, the wind will winnow your grain—that is the chaff will blow away and leave the clean wheat. There is nothing difficult about this at all. The chaff is good, mixed with oats, for your horse. You can sometimes pick up a winnowing machine from a farm sale: it is a good buy.

MILLING

This used to be done by rubbing two stones together. The quern was a refinement of this—two round stones, one on top of the other, the top one revolved by woman-power. Then came the big stone mill which is in use in many places today: once driven by slavepower (that is what Samson was doing when he was 'eyeless in Gaza among slaves'), then horses or other animals, then wind or water, then steam, now diesel. Stone milling is a highly skilled profession, and far out of the scope of this book. If you can get a stone mill, and know how to dress the stones when they need it, or can find somebody who does know, you are lucky,

Otherwise there is the steel plate mill which is to be found on every farm, which has two steel plates, one of which revolves against the other, and this is fine for grist (that is meal for animal feeding) but murders wheat rather than mills it. And there is the modern small electrically-driven mill or coffee grinder. This is what you will probably come down to in the end, and it is perfectly satisfactory. The large Kenwood with coffee-grinder attachment is OK.

Industrial milling today is a very complicated process. Before the eighteenth century wheat was stone ground and often passed through a sieve to get the coarsest of the husk out. This resulted in good whole meal bread. Just before 1700 an Austrian invented 'high milling' which consisted of grinding the flour very fine and passing it through fine cloths. This resulted in white flour, because only the endosperm, or starch of the grain, was fine enough to pass through the cloths. Most of the later windmills in England had things called bolters towards the end of the wind era. These did this job of passing the flour through a 'bolter cloth'.

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