Hulless Oats

 I foolishly said on a previous post that threshing the grain wasn't the issue - Well it turns out I was wrong there as well. 

My hulless oats have been causing me trouble as well. 

Dehulling Machine Needed!

 I've grown a small amount of Emmer wheat with the hope of planting more of it next year, or potentially as a crop to over winter.

Its proving difficult to hull though. This isn't threshing - this is the act of removing the grain from it's protect hull - something that is a lot more suborn on these "less developed" grains.

Does anyone know of any open source plants to build a dehuller? Or seen a method that works well by hand. I'd rather not use heat as want all the seed to still be viable.

Currently thinking I'll get an old hand grinder and create rubber plates for the seed to rub through, which should take the hulls off. Although I'm open to suggestions!

Messing About With Small Scale Grains - Again

I think if you take how well I did at this last year this should go into the "why do I bother" pile. But like it or not grains are a huge stumbling block to self-sufficiency, or mine at least.

They provide a large proportion of my calories each day. Either through the porridge I eat daily for breakfast (oats) or the bread I eat for lunch (wheat) or the feed I give to my animals to help provide our protein with meat or eggs.

Small Scale Grain

So my plans for growing some more calories on our smallholding has already hit some setbacks. I had planned to turn the front lawn over to growing some grains and started to grow some grains as plug plants in the green house but unfortunately the mice put pay to that idea. 

Sorting grain - hull less on the left and the ones with hulls on the right

They ate most of my wheat seed and all of the hull less oats that I had when I started them in cells in the greenhouse. I managed to get some hull less barley growing and enough wheat to make a triple row.