How to Thresh Wheat by Hand

Once threshed, wheat can be rolled to make cereal.

Wheat grows on a stem, and a tough husk surrounds each seed kernel. This husk, sometimes known as a bract or a glume, is not digestible by the human digestive system. The process of removing the husk and stem from the wheat is called "threshing." Once the husk is removed, it's called "chaff." The stem, once it's removed, is "straw." To thresh wheat by hand, you can use any of three methods: flailing, beating or trampling.

Things You'll Need

• Old bed sheet
• Unthreshed stalks of wheat
• Wheat flail
• Container for threshed wheat
• Clean metal garbage can
• Sheep, oxen or hard-soled shoes

Instructions

Flailing

1. Spread the sheet on a hard surface. Lay the wheat out on the sheet in a layer no more than a foot thick.

2. Swing the flail so that the lower piece lands flat as it strikes the wheat. Use a large circular movement, swinging from back to front so the threshing end can build up some momentum before striking.

3. Flail for a few minutes. Check the wheat. As the wheat separates from the straw, remove the straw from the sheet.

4. Add more wheat to the sheet. Continue to flail. When you finish, remove all the straw from the sheet.

5. Use the sheet to pour the threshed wheat into a container for winnowing.

Beating

1. Grasp a handful of wheat by the stem end.

2. Bang the wheat against the inside walls of a clean metal garbage can. Use enough force to knock the wheat kernels off the stems. The force will also knock the chaff off the wheat.

3. Pour the wheat into a another container as it accumulates.

Trampling

1. Spread the unthreshed wheat on a clean sheet.

2. Trample the wheat. You can drive animals like sheep or oxen over the wheat, or you can walk or dance on it yourself.

3. As the wheat falls off the stems, remove the stems and add more unthreshed wheat.

Tips & Warnings

• A variation on the flail method is to put the wheat on a solid table and strike it with a wooden mallet. The mallet takes longer than the flail, but it requires less whole-body exertion and less skill.

• If you plan to thresh by hand, plant a variety of wheat that threshes easily. Some varieties are so hard to thresh that they must be threshed mechanically.

• Threshing is not the final process before grinding the wheat for flour. Before grinding, you must winnow. Winnowing is removing the chaff from the wheat kernels. Traditionally, winnow wheat by pouring it from container to container, letting the wind or a fan blow the chaff away.

References

• Mother Earth News; Grow it! Grain; November/December 1973
• bread Info: Harvesting Your Back Yard Wheat
• Grit; Farm School Week 28: The Grain Harvest; Alison Spaude-Filipczak; October 2010
• New Mexico's Digital Collections; Harvesting Wheat at Unidentified Pueblo
• Application of Physiology in Wheat Breeding; M. P. Reynolds; 2001

Resources

• Prairie Garden Seeds: Grain & Seed Crops