James McDonald

This year was my first year with beans.  I tried the three sisters system using pole beans.  Early in the season the beans were attacked by Japanese beetles, once they got done decimating my small cherry trees.  I hand picked all I could find.  Eventually they left or all dies but something was still eating the bean leaves.  I never saw what it was but it had the same effect on the leaves as the Japanese beetles.  Very frustrating.

As I stated in the first post.  I am not a true back to basics.  I don't have enough ground to do more than just have a strong vegetable garden, but the idea of being able to process wheat if I could get my hands on it and the fact that wheat can be stored almost indefinitely I wanted to learn to make whole wheat bread by hand.  Then the oats came into the picture.  Every method I could come up with using my existing manual flour mill either didn't separate the groat and hull or the hull had the same density as the pulverized groat and willowing was meaningless.  I tried a screen sifter because the hulls were still substantial larger than the ground groat but the hulls were mostly in the shape of needles and instantly plugged the screen while still allowing some through???  A few other genius ideas but usually ended up with the separation being the killing process???  Thanks for your response.  

I doubt that the farmer would entertain the idea of using hull-less oat seed next time because his reason for planting oats was he missed the planting window for one of his other crops and this was a toss up as to if he would combine it or plow it under to improve the ground based on the price of oats at harvest.  It was a very close call but his wife ended up with a large reserve of chicken feed, because the market for oats was so low it couldn't pay for the fuel for the combine.

I have struck deal with a farmer friend and have gotten wheat in 5 gal buckets from the combine at avoided cost.  Hand grind it myself and make whole-wheat bread. Of course I share the bread with the farmer, which has definitely developed our friendship. A few years after this arrangement started he told me he had a few acres in oats and asked if I would be interested in some out of the combine oats.  Of course I said yes.  The hull on oats does not come off in the combine like for wheat.  This has been quite an odyssey. I deeply believe that back in the era of draft animals, pre gas engines, farmers grew more than half of their fields in oats to feed the draft animals.  I can't believe that they did not have a manual means to remove the hull for family consumption?  But all my queries have come up empty.  Anyone able to share a bit of history on how the resourceful farmer's wife would remove the hull off of fresh oats?  The current process uses a hypersonic impacting technique.  Doesn't should like a good process for someone that wants to process 5 to 20# of oats for oatmeal?

I appreciate any info you might share.

Jim Mc