There’s an old sifting contraption in the barn that I took a look at today. I didn’t pull it out, I’ll wait for warmer weather, but it seems to be three horizontal screens stacked with a few inches of space between, and an electric motor. I think the motor shakes the screens and grain is sifted down through progressively smaller mesh. Could be useful.

Grain will be fun!

My first year at the garden I have now, I planted a wide variety of plants to get an idea of what would do best, and amaranth was one of the plants I tried. It didn’t do well, and I never looked into why. I remember one plant did grow nicely, and had a great red flower, but I never got any seeds. I’ll be interested in hearing how you get on with it. Maybe it’ll be worth my trying it again.

As far as threshing goes, Dan Jason of Salt Spring Seeds, BC, Canada uses a ‘threshing box’. A simple wooden box with slats screwed into the bottom. He uses it for many different kinds of plants. He uses it with his foot to break up the seed pods, then an air compressor to blow away the chaff. I haven’t yet had enough of anything to make building something like this worthwhile, but this will probably be my first step.

One of the problems I have with the spelt is removing the seed hulls. I was recently reading about using a modified Corona Grain Mill for this (at a cost of about US$40 for a small hand operated unit). On the same page is a suggestion for modifying a leaf shreder/wood chipper for threshing. I don’t know if it is worth it for you to go to the trouble to do this, but if you already have a wood chipper anyway, maybe it’s worth looking into:

http://www.plantsciences.ucdavis.edu/LTRAS/itech/thresh.html

I’m looking forward to hearing how you decide to do your threshing!

I’m planning to grow grain amaranth this year, after trying it four years ago and ending up doing nothing with it (besides giving some for flower arrangements). Easy small-scale threshing was sticking point, although I didn’t really look into it, and I don’t know if amaranth is particularly difficult. Are you familiar with amaranth (grain version)? It has quite a little story, centuries ago it was kind of politically buried, something like that, besides, it’s a super-grain and tastes good, too.

It’ll be fun following your home grain experiment. I’ll pass on any threshing tips I find. There’s probably some interesting stuff from Fukuoka, his small scale, no-till system.