Growing and Harvesting Wheat 🌾 on a Small Scale & Making Bread! 🍞

We have been working towards food self-sufficiency for the last five years and one of the things that we had never grown before but has always been a goal of ours is to grow and harvest our own wheat for food, especially for bread. We made the decision that we were going to plant wheat this year for harvesting a little bit late in the year so usually in our area we found out that it's better to plant wheat in the fall and have it over winter and to do one of those types of wheat. But I did quite a bit of research and I was able to find a hard red spring wheat that we could plant in early spring for a summer harvest. My method for planting these was to lay down paper and then we layered on a lot of compost. The reason I did that is because I was very worried about weed seeds in this and it worked out super well. We had hardly any weeds at all. You can see the wheat on the left there. During the growing season I did fertilize it once with some blood meal that I just sprinkled over the top of the rows and that was it until we harvested. By the end of May the wheat was going to seed and then in June it finally started to dry out which is perfect because in our area we get wet weather up until about June-July and then it's dry. When we started to harvest the wheat we tried a couple of different methods. At first I was going to cut all the way at the base but after I got some feedback from others who had grown grain before they said on a small scale a lot of times it's just easier to clip off the grain heads so that is what we did. This is the time consuming part of the process but once we got to the threshing and winnowing step everything went a lot faster because there was a lot less material there to get rid of. Since this was our first year growing and harvesting wheat for food we really didn't want to put a ton of money into it so we looked online and were able to find an idea for how to thresh it without there being a huge mess and what it is is this bucket here with a drill and we're going to show you how we put that together in a little bit and then after that step was done we just took a fan and set it there and slowly poured the wheat into a bucket so the heavier wheat kernels fall down and all the chaff blows off to the side. After that step all that was really left to do was to do one final look through the wheat just to make sure there wasn't any other little pieces remaining and usually there were just a couple little things that got missed and still fell into the bucket so we just pulled those out and it was ready to store after that. We didn't harvest the wheat in a day it was something that we did slow and steady over the course of several weeks. We learned that the best way to get the heads off was not to use scissors or just break off them individually but to grab a big handful and then just pull up while with the other hand holding the stems down otherwise we would pull out all the roots and we didn't want to do that. We also were able to learn a couple of tips and tricks on how to get the threshing to go faster and easier and Cam is going to tell you all about that with how we made this little bucket and some of the things that we did differently than what we had seen online to make it go a little bit better. I'm going to show you how we built our wheat thresher tool thing. I cannot take any credit for this we saw this on another youtube video and decided to try it and it worked good. All you need is a I have a three-eighths inch threaded rod here and some chain that I've already cut it's like 10 inch two 10 inch strips no sorry two eight inch strips and then we have some washers and some nuts. Okay so I'm just threading these hex nuts on right now. The video that I watched only had one chain on the bottom that rotated. I'm going to do another one up here it kind of has more more biting power onto the wheat and I'm doing two nuts so that one will lock the other one in place because this is going to spin very very fast and we don't want it to fly out and do some damage. So I have nut, nut, washer, chain, washer, two more nuts and I'm going to repeat that for the bottom. This threaded rod is nice because you can adjust and basically put these as high or as low as you want. You could even put more on here if it yeah I just haven't tried it with three so that may work better. So we'll go quicker because we're closer to the end of the rod. So it's pretty much assembled now not not rocket science and I'm just going to come through with some pliers and tighten these nuts on here so that they do not break loose. So these chains when it's spinning fast they're going to be I mean they're going to just be tearing apart those wheat kernels well they'll leave the kernels but they'll get the chaff and everything else out of there. So here we are we have it on our drill and then the bucket that we use this is all this is all we need to thresh. So I actually did so that I didn't ruin the chuck of my drill I used a grinder to kind of make three like a triangle edge on the the threaded rod just mimicked like what a regular drill bit would have. We tried this with a cordless drill because I know everybody and their dog has one. It works but it just doesn't quite have the torque and the power that that a corded a good corded drill will have. This is the bucket that we use it's it's been patched and duct taped so this is prototype number one. So we basically drilled a hole in the top of the lid can you see that? We drill a hole in the top of the lid you take this and put it just kind of shimmy it in there and then you're ready to go and this keeps most of the dust and stray pieces from flying out and just adds for add some protection. We're happy with we're happy with this solution right now. We're now at the last step this is a hard red wheat which I don't normally use. I am not making a whole whole wheat loaf of bread because I never really do that anyways we always do like half whole wheat and then half bread flour. We have about 90 percent of the wheat harvested. I am going to go ahead and just weigh what we have so we can see how much we got from what I planted. I remember I planted about a pound and a half of wheat in the ground. We planted two 90 foot rows they're two and a half feet wide so it's about 450 square feet of space for the wheat. So from that amount we're going to see how many pounds we got. There were a lot of birds that came and ate a lot of this wheat too so it's going to be a little bit lower than expected. However from what I can see we at least got more than what we planted so let's go ahead and weigh. The next step is grinding the wheat. We are using a wonder mill. We have had this for 18 years. Cam's parents got it for us as a wedding gift so it's a very long lasting trusty machine and we use it all the time because we don't buy very much bread at the store. Actually even from the time that we were married until now I can probably count on my hands the number of times that we've bought bread at the store. It's just something that's always been a priority for us because it saves a lot of money and it's a lot healthier it tastes better. This second part of the machine here it used to have a little foam part on the top. I lost that at some point during one of our moves and I never replaced it. I just go ahead and put a little dishcloth over the top so that the flour doesn't fly everywhere. So let's go ahead and grind up some of this wheat. My first batch of bread was a failure. It literally flopped and I'm saying that because I had way too much water in the bread. The hydration was too high and when I put it into the dough balls and put it into the baskets then I put it into the refrigerator overnight. I brought it out in the morning and this dough was just like flopping over the sides. It was a big mess. So we're trying again this time with less water. Every wheat acts a little bit differently so I now know that I need to use a lower hydration with this particular wheat that we have and hopefully we get better results this time. I wanted to show like a beautiful finished product but it's just not my week for making bread. So last night I started to make this dough and I went to bed in the middle of making the bread. I completely forgot I was in the middle of just like stretching and folding this dough and I left it on the counter. Luckily Cam saw that I left it on the counter after I had gotten to bed and he put it in the refrigerator for me so that saved the the bread so at least I could make it in the morning. So here's the bread. I still feel like this could be quite a bit better if I put my full attention onto it but we're gonna go ahead and cut into this and see how it is. How is it compared to the normal bread? It's actually a different kind of wheat. Normally I use hard white. This is a hard red variety. It looks darker. Yes, darker. Tastes the same. Tastes the same? Yeah. Is it stronger? Because usually like it is stronger. A red wheat is a little stronger. Same taste but stronger. It's a teeny bit chewier or is that just Is that a good thing or a bad thing? It's a good thing. Good? Yeah. We went into growing and harvesting wheat knowing that it wasn't going to be something that was going to save us money or be more efficient or anything like that. It was just something that we wanted to learn how to do on a small scale. We wanted to learn how to grow it, harvest it when it was ready, how to thresh it and winnow it and we were able to learn all of those things so that check that box and we accomplished what we wanted to accomplish. The real question is will we grow it again? Yes, I think we'll grow it again. I don't know if we're going to grow it in the next couple of years just because we are trying to get to more food self-sufficiency and we already have accomplished growing 100% of the vegetables that we eat and like 99% of the meat that we eat but we're just missing the fruit. I had to grab a baby because he was crying. So we are really low on our supply of fruit. So fruit is something that does take a really long time to establish and get going so obviously that makes sense but it's something that I feel like if I had to choose between putting my time into growing grains and putting my time into growing fruit I would prefer to put my time into growing fruit right now and then add on the grains later on maybe once we figure out some faster way to harvest it on a small scale. You'll notice this is we have this attached to a cordless you can run it all night long and it's going to be fine or all day long. Why am I saying that? That's stupid. The corded drill has so much more torque and power that you can apply to it. Why am I trying to sound smart? It's not cool. The corded drill has so much more torque and power it works way better for threshing wheat. Is that okay? You're so much better on camera. Do I need to redo that part? I don't know. Okay, I'll have to look at that. Maybe I should edit this part. Are you still going? Oh gosh, okay.