Please Tell Me You Are Not Harvesting Your Own Grain

We are harvesting our own amaranth grain. When a friend saw our card table grain harvesting operation in the dinning room she said , "Please tell me you are not harvesting your own grain." I guess that puts us over into the too far gone category. It is an operation born of necessity. We were planning on using our corn to make corn meal for carbs for our week experiment. But the pumpkins over took the corn and now our corn crop is stunted. I need a carb plan B. Enter Amaranth. We have an over-abundance of the stuff. It grows like a weed. I was reading an old timey book that stated back in old timey days- they just harvested the grain by beating it over a chair to get out the seeds and then threw the wheat and the chaff into a light breeze to sort it. Lets say the first experiment with a light fan breeze and throwing the grain into the air was... how shall I put this... completely unsuccessful.

So here's my new and improved method.

Cut the tops of the Amaranth off the plants. By the time they are light brown they have already dropped most of their seeds naturally- so try to catch them before that. Karate chop the tops and then shake out the seeds.

Find a large piece of cardboard. (Ours is from the back of my daughters jumbo coloring pad.) Place a thin layer of the grain and chaff and put it in front of the fan air.

The fan will blow off the chaff and keep the grain seeds in place.

Dump the chaff into the compost bin and repeat until all the seeds are seperated. Homegrown grain!

Cooking the amaranth successfully ... now that's still a work in progress.