Harvesting Wheat & Transforming It Into Flour: A Step-by-Step Guide! 🌾✂️👩‍🍳 #FromFieldToFlour

Hey guys how's it going? Today we are going to be working with some of the wheat we grew this past season which has turned out to be a very fun project. I want to recap the whole thing, kind of go through the whole process when we planted it, some of the things that I kind of learned through out the process. Now you can see right behind me where it was growing right here between the sweet peas and foxglove. You can see all the stubble we need to come through and clean it up and you'll notice like on the sides there are a few heads here that I could be really fussy and come through and pick every last one of them but we did pretty good. The shorter stubble here which goes a little bit more than halfway down the row we harvested to make wreaths. So my mom, sister and I did that we got a total of 11 wreaths out of that section and then the rest of it I think you just maybe saw when I came through the other day and I got the rest of the heads harvested that's what's in the back of the gator. So this little section here and then from the taller stuff this way I just harvested the tops off again you can see a few little wheat heads sticking up it's real hard to get every last one of them but I got most of them. So this wheat right here the variety is Ovation it's a soft white winter wheat that we planted mid-October last year and we'll go ahead and link that video down below because I did sit down I ran through all the details about this type of wheat and some of the pros and cons of you know different types but this as you can see is a bearded wheat which means it has these awns so these spiky things that stick out from it and you know because my intention with most of this wheat was to use it for decorative purposes I think that the bearded wheat is just so pretty and bulky and adds so much architecture to have those awns but there is beardless wheat as well which I think I might like to try some of that especially if what we're going to do with the rest of this wheat today goes well it might be kind of nice and easier to harvest to not have the awns on it it's also much softer and a little bit easier to work with without the awns but it's amazing to me that this pile right here came from that big old section out there you know what I did is I would harvest a little bit in this tarp right here and then I'd roll it up kind of like a sleeping bag and then I'd press my knees like I get on top of it and press my knees kind of start that thrashing process to break up these dried wheat heads what that does when you're breaking this apart is it helps release all the wheat berries which is what we want in order to grind it to mill it for flour so you can see that the initial breaking process is done so when I got on top of it with just my body weight there it did condense quite a bit of it it broke a lot of it down but what we want in the end is to get rid of all the chaff so all of the awns all the little holes and we want to end up with wheat berries that look like this so you guys that's actually what we're going to do today we're going to hand thrash this wheat because there's not a ton of it I'm hoping to I've got some buckets out here we're going to use a fan to help blow the chaff away it's going to be an interesting process and I don't know how long it's going to take exactly but I bought myself a flour mill and I did harvest a little bit of the wheat earlier on and I milled a little bit like I think I had a third of a cup of wheat berries and I ended up with a nice bowl of flour so I'm very excited and the soft white winter wheat the flour that you get from it is good for things like cakes and pastries pasta I'm going to make some biscuits with it today because I heard that it's really good in biscuits but there's also a type of hard red wheat which I'm going to grow that next year because that's a good one for bread making I don't know that this one is particularly good for bread making I might try it just depending on how much flour we get but the mill is really cool I'll show you that once we get inside it's got a stone in it and it's just a tabletop or a countertop one that you can plug in I looked at the big iron ones in fact my parents sell them the big grist mills that they have and I thought you know for my purposes at this point I don't need it to be hand-powered we're just going to get a plug-in countertop one it'll do the job we needed to do and I was very pleased with how quickly it worked and you can adjust the the grind it can be a coarser flour if you want or all the way down to like a real powdery flour this is the tool I don't even know what it's called you guys one of you sent this out to me and it's just been an amazing tool but this is what I use to harvest all this I'd grab a bunch of wheat and then just it's so sharp it would just cut right through it and then I am using gloves for this process because these are pokey these awns are a self-defense mechanism for the wheat so like if you have heavy deer pressure or you know whatever the case may be in the area where you're growing it it's a little bit harder for them to get at this type as opposed to the beardless but I think you can already yeah look at this you can already see down at the bottom here I there's a lot of chaff but there's a ton of wheat berries already just that have sunk to the bottom I think I need to paw around in here though because the tarp I use is a little bit old and there are holes which was a bad bad choice of tarp so I might have to kind of scoot stuff around and put some tape on some larger holes dang it okay so for this part all I'm going to be doing is basically just grabbing the wheat and rolling it between my hands to get the wheat berries out and then all of the stuff that I'm left with all the stems and other things I'm just going to pop down on a tarp here so that hopefully in the end we just have a gator full of chaff and wheat berries but no stems something like if I gather up a bunch I'm hoping I find a rhythm and it goes pretty fast all right guys it is a new day I've been working on the thrashing or threshing you could use those words interchangeably but I've been working on that process for the last couple of days as I've had time just because it's a little bit tedious not hard to do just a little bit tedious and now we're to a point where I'm winnowing so this right here is an example of what the thrashed or threshed grain looks like you can see it still has a bunch of chaff in it that needs to be removed but it's largely like there's a lot of wheat berries in there and then this right here is an example of winnowed grain which is basically removing all the chaff and just being left with the wheat berries which honestly there's still a little bit of chaff in here because this is my first time doing it and I'm doing it by hand I'm learning through this process and I do think that having some screens would be very helpful so I'm going to run this pail when I'm done winnowing this grain right here I'm going to run the whole thing down to my parents garden center because you know they have a seed plant with seed cleaning equipment but they have screens and so I thought we would run this for the last time through screens just to pick up any of the extra because I'm at a point where the winnowing process that I'm using which is basically just using fans over here it's not picking up just that very last little bit and I'd have to hand pick it which would take forever so what I actually ended up with from all of that wheat that we cut was two five gallon buckets that look just like this and two two gallon buckets filled all the way to the top and this right here is the amount of clean grain from one five gallon bucket and the two two gallon buckets I hope that all makes sense before we take it down we need to get this winnowed so I'm going to take this larger bucket and you probably just saw a little bit of this process but I put this down on the ground right in front of a fan I'm going to turn the fan on I started with level one but I ended up going to level two because I found that that was a little well of course stronger so it would blow more of the chaff away but it wasn't such a strong wind that it would blow the wheat berries tarp was there just to catch most of the chaff you can see it kind of overshot a little bit so you basically just pour one bucket into the other leaving a little bit of space between the two so that fan has a chance to blow the chaff out the wheat berries are heavier than the chaff so it works out pretty well I mean you can see here I mean this right here you can see a little bit of chaff in there but not much compared to this right here I mean that's a pretty stark difference there this whole process right here that I've been doing my hand hand cutting hand threshing hand winnowing this is all done in a combine like if you have a big operation and you're growing wheat to sell it and that sort of thing having a combine would be so nice because it does all of these steps for you all inside the machine it gives me a great appreciation for people who lived a long time ago who did all of these things by hand and things were just like people lived slower and things came slower because it just that's the way it was it took a lot longer to do these sorts of things okay so let's get this last bucket all cleaned up and then we're gonna head down to the garden center okay so this is after one pour so remember this bucket was pretty full so we lost several inches just of chaff and all of that was blown out onto the tarp mostly onto the tarp onto the tarp and beyond but if you get in here there's no wheat berries it's all like even if you go down to the bottom you're not seeing any wheat berries it's all just lightweight chaff it's crazy and that's what it looks inside the bucket you can still see quite a bit of chaff so i found last night when i was winnowing it took about five or six pours to get it to the point where i've got it in the other bucket so let's get it finished up all right guys so we are down in the seed plant right now it's really loud because they're actually cleaning wheat right now i've got a very small screen that we just tried and cory is grabbing a larger screen for us to sift this through it's one of the screens that they actually put in the machine to clean the seed i'm going to run you over here and show you a bin of raw seed that just came out of a combine right in here which honestly looks a lot like mine because you can see the chaff here on the side see that little bit of chaff so this has yet to go through the cleaning process but it's beautiful isn't it so it goes through a network of screens over here so super loud but that's what it goes through all the clean stuff is then shot through it goes all the way up through that right there through that menagerie of pipes and tubes and then it comes down into bags where it's completely clean seed my little bucket looks so sad in comparison to that all right guys we are back home in the studio this is where we're going to mill the wheat here it is we ended up with about 33 pounds it was like 32.9 look at how beautiful that is oh my goodness so we ended up using a couple of different screens when i was down at the garden center we used a size 13 i don't know if that's like a standard and then we ended up going down to a size 12 and we got most everything out on occasion you'll run across like a tiny little like itty bitty i don't even know can you see that hmm it's like a tiny soft little piece of what covers the wheat but they're few and far between so i'm not really stressed about that but it was really fun to kind of do it the old-fashioned way and we were able to they were cleaning wheat at the moment we were down there and i did try to give you a little bit of a walk around but it was so loud i don't even know how that turned out but i was able to show you inside of a bin that had unclean wheat so wheat that had been dropped off but it hadn't yet to go through the process of being clean so it's kind of fun to see how it looked versus mine which is very similar and then we were able to show you some of the machines that it goes through and it's basically a big machine that the the wheat seed is siphoned up and down into and then it goes through a series of different screens and it shoots out we had a bin of wheat that was like irregular shaped or cracked or like some of the wheat berries still had holes attached to them and that's what they call chicken wheat so they bag that up and that's what i grow for my chickens for chicken fodder we can sell it for super cheap per bag and a lot a lot of times like if you planted it it would come up but it's like the imperfect seeds and then all the the perfect seeds are then bagged in other in another area so that that's shot out into different great big tote bags while the irregular seed is put in bins and then bagged up into 50 pound bags anyway i'm super happy with this yield i don't know what the average rate or average rate or average harvest is per square foot we were harvesting approximately 100 square feet out there and i think there's a lot of different factors that can play into it i mean climate for one uh consistency of irrigation a couple of things that i learned one don't plant it too heavy it was my first time growing wheat so i went in heavy with the seed and i should not have done that because i noticed that the edge plants were much more healthy and robust had fuller heads as opposed to the ones in the center which were a lot more congested they didn't get the light or airflow and they fought for it thus creating smaller heads um so i did learn that and then i also learned that i need to fertilize i did put land and sea and biotone starter fertilizer in at planting which i think benefited me greatly i'm glad i did that um but this spring my dad said hey the farmers are out fertilizing their wheat you should probably think about doing that with yours and i just didn't get around to doing it so that's another thing that can help boost your crop but you'll really hear no complaints from me the process of hand harvesting threshing and winnowing is definitely tedious but it's so satisfying to know like from seed to eventual table we did it ourselves this is our mill this is a neutral mill i bought it on amazon 450 watt i've used it once right here i tested out some flour and you can you can go with this mill like really fine like pastry flour or you can make um it as coarse as you want in fact this is the hopper right here it holds three cups and then there's a dial right here you can go coarse or finer whatever you should choose and then i think this is going to take two hands but i want to show you the stone hopper comes off you can see down in here where there's a few little wheat berries from the other night but right down in here are the stones and i guess it's like a near diamond strength stone so it's really good for really tough grains as well you can use this for all kinds of different things the only thing it did say to do was to make sure to turn it on oh i don't have it plugged in that was that was not very satisfying here we go okay turn it on the little wheat berries i had left yeah it said to turn it on before you put your wheat berries in so we'll turn it on and we're going to just start pouring in wheat berries and it will shoot it out into this little bowl and then we're going to put it in our i've got a food grade plastic storage container here with a gamma lid which these are like airtight leak proof they've got like the o-ring here they get a really tight seal i've been storing flour in these and rice and sugar in these types of buckets for years now i think the goal with this sort of thing is to keep the wheat berries intact for the most part so that you can have flour at its peak freshness you know just grind the amount that you need as you need it and that's kind of the beauty of this particular mill it's really pretty so you could keep it right on your counter and use it as you need it but i'm kind of curious i'm curious to see how much flour this will uh create so i think we'll get into the project we may or may not end up grinding all of it up but we'll probably fill up our tub bucket you know what i went and grabbed one of these cups because it's got measurements on it so that i can show you what like a half cup of wheat berries we'll see how much flour that turns into about a half cup right there turn it on that looks like about a cup let me see if i can get it in here just under one cup of flour it's really fine too oh that's so exciting okay i'm going to spend the next little bit just turning out this flour so exciting and there you have it there is our finished product i can't even believe we're looking at this right now i mean we grew this from seed that is just the most amazing feeling so one full three and a half gallon bucket and one bucket that's just about half full right there oh my gosh and it's a nice consistency like it's nice and powdery flowery i know it kind of has this lumpy appearance to it but it's definitely got a really nice feel to it and this little mill did a great job just a little ways into the project i noticed that it was turning out flour that had a little bit more texture than i wanted so i did end up cranking it down so that it was turning out a more fine flour i did notice that one it did take it longer to to mill that sort of flour and the machine overheated once so it overheated and shut off and i left it alone for a good while in fact it was perfect samantha needed to go down for a nap so i went inside and hung out with her we went on golf cart ride first had snacks and then we went down for a nap so um in that time frame the machine cooled down i came back out here and i was able to finish the project and i did some googling to figure out how much flour this is approximately and uh i'm figuring about 97 cups which is amazing so we started again with about 33 pounds just just right under 33 pounds ended up with 97 cups now bread recipes vary greatly but if you want a two pound loaf of bread it's typically four cups of flour so i figured it out that's 24 loaves of bread which my family goes through about two loaves of bread a week every family is a little bit different but that gets us about three months of our bread so if i grew twice what i grew this year because you know i only harvested less than half the row that we grew to get what we got today the other half or greater than half we used for wheat wreaths so if i did one big long row so it was a 60 by 5 foot roughly row if i did that twice then i would have enough flour to do a year's worth of bread if it's at two loaves per week and you know that varies so now the real test is going to be baking with this again this soft white wheat is best for like pastas pastries and i've heard it's really good for biscuits that's what we're going to take it inside right now and make um my sister's going to try a few cups of this for some pasta and then a friend of mine is going to be making some of her croissants with some of this i asked her if she would try out the flour to see how it does so i can be able to report back to you guys um which application it worked best for and this is just awesome just unprocessed not stripped not bleached uh really high fiber wheat so great so we are just gonna close these up and take them inside p.s i did sweep my mess up into a pile just to show you how much of a mess this mill made now you probably noticed that the tabletop was pretty flowery right around the machine i did wipe that up but that's it for what ended up on the floor and that was mostly my fault not the machine's fault so pretty clean process i actually did it out here because i thought oh it's going to be a big massive mess but it really isn't okay guys i got the biscuits done they turned out really great you can see i've already torn this one apart i was getting ready to eat my second one and i realized that i hadn't filmed any of the pulling them out of the oven or any of that i was so excited about how things were going they rose really nicely i do think i over mixed the batter just a tiny bit but it was a little bit different using this flour over regular all-purpose flour that i normally use the dough did feel heavier so i don't know if it was because i over mixed them or if it's just a heavier dough and i need to kind of finesse the process using a different type of flour but the flavor is really good a little bit of honey so so good and i cannot believe that the flour to make these came from our garden how fun and i'm going to have fun experimenting with recipes in there and kind of finessing the process using this um in you know i might try to make some bread i know that this flour isn't necessarily suited for it but i might try it just to see what happens and while we were busy working on getting the flour milled and baking these biscuits paul and bethany were out there cleaning up all of that wheat stubble they got the whole row cleaned up and they got it remulched and it's ready to go so i can plant some things for fall which is just so amazing so i think we'll probably leave you with some of that footage i think they filmed when they did that cleanup it's always satisfying to watch that happen so anyway thank you guys so much for watching this video and if you guys have any questions about the wheat growing process please leave those comments down below and we'll try to answer them in the recap it's just been such a fun learning experience and it's just one more of those like life skills that feels good to learn um you know you never know if you'll you will at some point need to grow wheat now we know how to do it anyway thank you guys so much for watching we'll see you in the next one bye quick ps you guys i've had a chance to experiment a little bit more with this flour so i wanted to share a couple of details and i did mention that soft white winter wheat is not a bread type of flour it's not really suited for recipes that you use yeast in i did try it in my bread machine just out of curiosity and this loaf is on its way out to the chickens but you can see like it just didn't rise usually my bread in the bread machine with regular flour rises about double and like the crumb is pretty pretty dense i mean it's got a really good smell good flavor and all of that but definitely not the type of flour for yeast recipes it was interesting to try that out though the thing is is that the protein content in your wheat in soft white winter wheat it's usually about 8.5 to 10.5 percent and in other flours it's much higher like i have a friend that took some of the flour and she's going to try to make croissants but you typically need a flour with at least 13 protein so we're going to just see how they turn out and then i also learned that the flour from freshly milled wheat berries typically measures a little bit differently especially if it's soft white winter wheat so for every recipe or for every cup of flour that a recipe calls for you need to add an extra quarter cup of the freshly milled flour so that's why when i made the biscuits the other day they were a little bit heavy the batter was more moist than i'm used to in fact i tossed the first uh the first mix because i was thinking oh i did something wrong i'm going to try this again so i tried it again and it was still pretty much the same so now i'm going to try that again the biscuits and i'm going to do some banana bread with it and just measure up a little bit more flour than i was using prior so anyway i thought those details were interesting definitely going forward i think planting a hard red wheat that's suitable for bread making is going to be a much more versatile flour for us so that's probably what i will try this next year i might grow a little bit of this too depending on how we end up liking it in some of these other quick bread sort of recipes might be fun to have a little bit of each on hand anyway just wanted to share those little details because that kind of completed kind of completed my experimentation at this point and then i'll just be utilizing it here and there as i need it in the kitchen so anyway see you guys