Andre Wiederkehr

The trick I found is to alter the shovel, not your feet! (Or at least, not alter your feet more than for normal barefooting.)

I made this little wooden step, carved so that the top edge of the blade sets into it (this custom fitting is the time-consuming part). The step is slightly wider than the shovel so you can't slide off the edge and hurt yourself on the corner, and is perhaps 2" to 2 1/2" front to back. A couple of screws and a clamp block coming in from below the sleeve hold it on.

I have found this fairly comfortable for doing a full morning or afternoon of sod shoveling, entirely barefoot. Even if you wear boots, you might find it more ergonomic for long tasks.

The downside is it adds weight, and prevents digging a flat surface deeper than the blade depth.

My bit of experience with oats has been that birds love the hulless ones. So I'd rather grow ones with hulls and find a way to remove the hulls.

Preferably a way that doesn't involve rubber (as in the Corona mill solution), since I can't grow/make that.

Does anyone know more about how oats were traditionally processed and eaten?

What options are there for footwear you can make locally, low-tech, from natural materials?

I'm barefoot above 5\degree \ C, which solves a large part of the year's footwear conundrum. But my feet don't seem able to adapt to a lot colder than that, certainly not below freezing for very long. So I want to figure out how to make winter shoes or boots.
I live in zone 4/5 where winter often involves times of significant mud, shallow slush, and knee-deep snow.

I don't love working with hides, and it seems leather is not very waterproof. When it's cold, I can imagine it working if you have enough socks or fur inside so that the leather stays cold enough to not be melting snow (I think that's what many Indigenous groups did), but this seems like it would be really poor in slush or mud (probably a more common occurrence now as weather becomes less stable).

My best brainstorm so far has been wooden clogs combined, when snow is deep, with some kind of leg wrappings to keep snow from getting scooped in. I haven't tried them, but people I've talked to who have tried a little tell me that snow can pile up on the bottom of the clog in a very annoying way. Ideas for how to deal with that?

Maybe the best option is clogs in slush/mud and leather boots in deep, cold snow.

Other ideas for winter footwear?

I am leaning toward bush beans over pole beans because of the labour/materials for trellising. If the limit is space rather than labour and materials, then pole beans are great.

Hay/straw mulching around the plants probably helps some with preventing mould on pods, and definitely helps keep them from being muddy.

There are bush varieties that are determinate enough to harvest the whole plant at once as others have described.
However, ones I've worked with are usually not so determinate that you want to leave them in the field until every pod is dry (unless your weather is really dry). If you leave them, the early pods will probably shatter or mould.
So, it works well to cut them just before they start doing that and dry the plants until the pods are all crackly.

For harvesting whole plants, a sharp sickle does a good job and I find it ergonomic enough. Cutting rather than pulling keeps dirt clods out of the final crop. Perhaps a scythe would work, allowing you to harvest standing. But the stems can get hefty. I haven't tried it.

If you do not have enough indoor drying space, outdoor drying racks are a possibility. Variations on this theme were widespread in northern Europe for a bunch of different crops. I have relatively little experience with this idea, but in some experiments it seemed to come through rains no problem - as long as there was sun soon, they just dried out again without molding.
The horizontal poles just sit loose on the pegs, so you start at the bottom, make a layer on the first pole, add the next pole and layer, etc. Some variations have a small roof.

For threshing, trampling on whole plants seems pretty efficient in my experience. It's a lot faster than picking off the pods. And very low tech!

An alternate I'd offer to the bike thresher design is this treadle thresher. It is more compact, lighter, lower-tech, easier for a single person to use, and maybe clogs a bit less if you are putting through stemmy crops. Probably less ergonomic, but I've found it okay.
It would be easiest to use this thresher with picked dry pods. I think it would be tricky to feed it whole bean plants, but with the right variety it'd probably do fine. It works well with soybeans, but they have stiffer stems.

One other thought, since it's come up a bit:
Most "dry beans" are Phaseolus vulgaris. Mostly self-pollinated.
Runner beans are a different species: Phaseolus coccineus. These have the option of being insect/bird pollinated, so if you're trying to maintain multiple varieties it's a lot trickier to keep them seperate.

I find this thresher transformative for being able to practically grow grain amaranth by human power as a significant part of the diet. A couple hundred cups were comfortably doable.

The amaranth threshes much better if it has gotten a solid frost and dried a bit after that. I haven't dealt with a really wet fall, so I don't know how that would go. Some people cut the heads and dry them indoors before threshing; while that would definitely work, it can make a lot of extra hauling, depending on the distance between garden and building.

Even so, a lot of flower head bits get knocked off without being fully threshed. Hand-rubbing these on a heavy metal screen yields an extra 5-10%.
I would estimate very roughly that it's at least four times faster than threshing by foot.

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It also works well for small grains like wheat or rye.

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Works well for soybeans because the plants are stiff enough to hold onto and stick in.
Dry beans and peas I haven't really tried. Pea vines especially would tend to wrap.
If you have picked pods of these (well-dried), you could pour them in the top and they would thresh well.

Here's a very small, very cheap threshing machine my brother and I built.

Three big design goals were making it:

relatively compact and not too heavy

leg powered (treadle), and

as wooden as possible both to make it very low embodied energy and easy to make with simple tools 

Unpowered tools, in our case. Hand saws, planes, brace and bits, pole lathe, shaving horse/drawknife.

The metal involved is a few bolts/washer/nuts and wood screws.

The shafts are wood and run in wooden "bearing blocks" that got an application of mineral oil (Got ideas for non-FF alternatives? I wonder if food oils/fats would get rats gnawing on it). These blocks could be easily replaced when they wear out.

The drivetrain is wooden gears, the big one a piece of MDF and the small one two layers of cross-laminated hardwood (MDF will just split at that size). They've lasted for a full gardening season, but I don't know how long they'll be good for.

We built this thresher after having tried Lu Yoder's bike thresher design (which, wonderfully, is available for free!). Skip this paragraph if you're not interested in what we didn't love about it. Probably most of the deficiencies we experienced were due to our execution of it (I tried to use a leather flat belt drive on wooden pulleys that kept slipping, and the bike was geared too low so you had to peddle real fast...). But we also found the whole thing was just really big and heavy - not very practical to take to the field - and straw would wrap on the small central shaft, clogging it up. Also, having the screen in the bottom is a nice idea, but just resulted in lots of junk piling up and needing to be cleaned out to often. Better to just have continuous flow-through and separate it later.

So we were imagining making something much more compact (hence the switch to treadle - it's also just so much simpler, more appropriate for a scratch-building rather than salvage paradigm), with a big drum instead of a small shaft to avoid wrapping, and open/no screen.

A lot of the inspiration was this Japanese rice thresher. Turning that into wood.

The business end of the thresher is a drum made of eight boards stuck full of stubby peggs. You hold sheaves of grain, soybeans plants, or heads of amaranth against the pegs as they spin away from you. You can also pour picked pods of dry legumes through a hole in the top while the front opening is covered. Either way, the pegs whack the seeds out, which then fall down to the slanted bottom and slide out the back onto a tarp or swept floor. They'll whack your fingers if you get too close, which could break them, but at least won't take off an arm like a tractor-powered machine. Don't get to close, and let go if it suddenly grabs what you're threshing.

The drum is affixed to the rear shaft. The gears are on the right side. The rear shaft has a small gear that meshes with a big gear that's on the front shaft. When the big gear spins, it makes the small one spin 3 1/2 times faster. It's important that you ONLY TREADLE WHEN THERE'S A SAFETY SHIELD THAT COVERS THE GEARS. You could crush a finger in a hurry.

The front shaft is attached with crank arms and connector rods to a treadle that sticks out the front of the thresher. The treadle is supported and drives the front shaft on both sides so that it doesn't need to be particularly rigid against torsion.

It does kind of spray grain everywhere out the front, but it can't be much more closed in or it gets in the way of your knee or your eyes. A tarp or a well-swept floor does the trick to catch what does get sprayed around.

That's it. After threshing, you need some way to separate the crop from all the chaff and bits of stem that got pulled through. A fanning mill is a great human-powered option that's well-matched in terms of scale. Wind winnowing also works.

A few construction details:

Pegs: 1" thick; 5 or 6 pegs per board over the middle foot or so.

Drum: each end is made of a stack of four boards, pinned together with a bolt to keep them evenly spaced, and screwed onto the rear shaft.

Shafts: 1 1/2" dowel (turned on a pole lathe).

Gears: Size determined by size of drum in order for pegs to clear front shaft. I used Matthias Wandel's online gear template generator (https://woodgears.ca/gear_cutting/template.html) with settings of: 42mm tooth spacing, 16 degree contact angle, and 10 teeth for the small, 36 teeth for the large. I actually did them one at a time (not "gear 1" and "gear 2") so that I could just make 4 copies of the large gear printout and stick them together, each sheet covering 9 of the teeth. You could instead buy the full program (https://woodgears.ca/gear/) that lets you print multi-sheet layouts and use a number of teeth that's not a multiple of 4 if you like. I reinforced the MDF gear teeth with a coat of wood glue on the faces. The gears are affixed using a wooden block screwed to the face of the gear and a flat on the side of the shaft. A #8 screw will break with use; maybe a #10 will do it? I think just screwing through the gear on an angle would split out of the gear eventually.

Tie rods/cranks: use some washers and leave the nuts a bit loose to keep faces from rubbing. Use locknuts or doubled nuts to keep them from loosening/tightening over time. This could all be swapped for wood pivots.

To get the gears running with minimum play and without pressure, the right-side bearing block for the front shaft slides in a pocket that's longer than it, with tension adjusted by a bolt that presses on it through a block from the front.

If anyone wants more dimensions or construction details, let me know. Most of it was pretty improvised around the critical dimensions, and if you're handy enough to build it, you can likely improvise just fine too! If not, though, just ask.

If you're trying for a fairly dense stand of maize and end up with gaps (due to inconsistent germination or critters taking the seeds) you can fill in with grain amaranth transplants. Seed a transplant bed of amaranth (high density, by broadcasting) a few weeks before maize planting, then pop them into the gaps once the maize emerges. If you keep the roots wet the whole time they're out of the ground, they transplant okay. I like that this still produces grain in those gaps, even if not the main grain (maize) that you were planning for.

Just a quick safety note on the video from Timothy: when working on a bigger log, I would never put my hands into the split while still under tension like this bodger does at 1:13. If the froe slipped back into line, the log would really pinch. On smaller pieces, it won't really be a problem.

Once the split is complete enough that there's no more tension, I often reach into the split to pull the halves apart to snap any fibres that are still sticking them together.

In my experience, controlling the split is tricky. Probably a matter of practice.
Unless it's a really short piece, you'd almost always do it in halves.
The idea is to make the thick side bend away from the split more. The way I picture it is that this will stress the fibres on that inside surface of the split and make them peal off, staying with the thin side. Don't know how accurate that is.

Here's a video describing that:

I think with a thick piece where sticking your hands into the split isn't such a good idea, the same kind of differential pressure is applied by which side you put up and which side down in the brake, since the two trunks of the fork touch at different points along the piece you're splitting, and you can lean on the bottom half with the froe in addition to twisting in.
See this article, too. Give me a brake - Peter Follansbee

I was recently taught a bit of spruce root basketry, and that really clarified the concept on an intuitive level. Dig up some spruce roots, scrape the bark off with a knife or a tough thumbnail, and try splitting them. The roots are much more flexible and easy to bend around than wood, so perhaps easier to grasp the theory with. (Then go sew something with them.)

I appreciate this topic being discussed.

In the context of harvesting firewood for heating, I've heard various people talk about selectively cutting out dead (but still fairly sound) trees either
-because they're partly dry already or
-because of the notion that it somehow hurts the forest less than killing and removing live trees
Assuming you work ahead enough, the issue of moisture doesn't matter that much. But I've wondered about the latter concern. I know that dead trees (both standing and downed) are important habitat and food sources, so it's important to have some around from a biodiversity perspective. For me that is reason enough to not take them out, but I am curious: does it also end up making the forest more productive from a human perspective?

Any foresters out there who can comment on best practices for harvesting trees? Is it always better for forest health to take exclusively live trees, or is a mix of live and dead sometimes okay or even preferable? What about the idea of preferentially removing "diseased" trees? After all, these are going to be snags soon enough....

Just starting. So far it's been good.

I'm looking for more places to visit, though.

One focus is learning more about how a functioning food forest fits into a person's diet and annual work rhythms. I've heard lots of talk about food forests, but never seen one up and running as a major contributor to someone's diet. If anyone out there has such a system going and is kind of near my route, please get in touch!