One Man’s Experience Harvesting Small Plot Wheat

One Man’s Experience Harvesting Small Plot Wheat CROPS New Techniques When Leroy Keim planted a 7 by 75-ft plot of old fashioned Red Fife wheat he decided to harvest it all by hand “I had a 5-lb bag of Red Fife seed in the freezer for a couple of years and I was anxious to see if they would still germinate ” says Keim who described his experience in detail in the Winter 2018 issue of Farming magazine www farmingmagazine net; ph 330 674-1892 Keim tilled the ground in the fall of 2017 and broadcast the seed by hand To his surprise most of it germinated and grew 6 in tall by the time the ground froze When spring came the wheat took off again At harvest it was 3 ft tall Keim recalls sharpening his Austrian sickle grabbing stalks by the handful and leaving them in piles to be tied into bundles When gathering them for bundles he tied them with twisted stalks For hand threshing Keim tried flails both long handled and short striking untied bundles laying on a tarp Not satisfied he tried a plastic water pipe which worked better It took him about 4 days to work through the grain “The method was far from perfect and I believe I lost 20 percent of the crop ” says Keim Keim then sifted the chaff and grain in front of a window fan set at high speed It took some time but did the job Keim tripled his plot size in the fall of 2018 He broadcast the wheat using a hand crank seeder harrowing with a spike-toothed harrow At harvest Keim used a horse-drawn mower to cut the wheat “I would mow one swath at a time and then gather the grain so the horse didn’t walk across it ” says the 70-year-old Keim Instead of tying off bundles with straw Keim built a tying box The 1 by 3-ft box has 3 slots in the sides for twine to be laid for different length straw “You make sure the straw ends are even at the bottom of the box and use the twine about 3/4 of the way up the length of the straw to make the bundle ” says Keim “It’s a simple way to do a small plot You can do a quarter acre fairly well ” Not eager to thresh the wheat by hand again Keim downloaded small thresher plans from the internet Essentially his mini thresher is a box with a central shaft and chains to flail the grain Bundles of grain stalks are put in the box and the top closed or the stalks are fed in through a hole in the side Keim runs it off his subcompact tractor “It ran too fast even at idle but it worked ” says Keim “I still had to winnow grain with the fan ” Keim is again upgrading for next year’s harvest He is going back to a small Keystone thresher similar to one he once owned The antique hand-feed thresher was originally made to replace flailing Eventually a separator with straw walker shakers and a fan were added “You could buy just the cylinder or the separator or both and put them together ” says Keim “Mine is both with a conveyer to move the straw into a pile ” Keim grinds the wheat as well as rye and Cox Prolific an old variety of corn on a small stone mill He shares his grain with his landlady who does a lot of baking He has a limited amount of Red Fife seed for sale “I’m selling it for $10 per pound ” says Keim who recommends small plot production “I like growing small plots of grain The journey from seed to harvest to table is a satisfying one ” Contact: FARM SHOW Followup Leroy Keim 162 Timmerman Rd Mansfield Ohio 44903 ph 330 718-2884; rellimup@gmail com

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