On Our homestead

Hello, After work, I was able to enjoy a walk through the newly melted gardens and enjoy the sun. Year to date, our weather station shows 1.7 inches of rain and seems like more snow than normal. I heard a Red Wing Blackbird as well.  According to our seasonal logbook, he's 2 days later than last year; next should be the sandhill cranes... Ukrainka winter wheat: Tiompheevii winter wheat: Ukrainka and Tiompheevii are two of my new varieties, so, I'm glad to see them doing so well.   Frost heaved out a few of my labels, which always reminds me why...

'Hulless oats' or streaker-type (nude) do have a loose 'hull', just to make the naming convention confusing.   However, they are so much easier to thresh free than regular oats, so I understand the history of the name "hulless".   This is a Model No 99 from Grainmaker of Montana. For grain grinding, it comes with a pair of steel milling plates.  Some of our experiments are being doing with the dehulling kit which are plates with a rubber layer that are used in place of the grinding plates.  Sometimes I use one grinding and one rubber plate (just don't let them...

General pictures of the dehulling plates and kit from when I dehulled barley are shown here.  The seed photographs were taken with this level of magnification using a soft white incandescent light bulb for illumination.  The diameter of a quarter is 24.26 mm (0.955 in).  This photo demonstrates the sense of scale for any 'grain' pictures.   This is Duborskian upland rice gifted to us by a fellow backyard grain grower over on Michigan's west side. We planted and harvested some Duborskian rice this past season, but we want to have one more season of increasing our inventory before offering seed. For those...

I set about testing the dehulling plates for our Grainmaker No 99 flour mill using some barley from my 2017 grain trials. This is a Model No 99 from Grainmaker of Montana. For grain grinding, it comes with a pair of steel milling plates.  Some of our experiments are being doing with the dehulling kit which are plates with a rubber layer that are used in place of the grinding plates.  Sometimes I use one grinding and one rubber plate (just don't let them touch). The mill looks like this: Pictured below are the Grainmaker steel plates (on the left) used to grind grains for...