....it's harvest time again

Something about working outside means that the next season always has something to look forward to. Before you know it......It's harvest time again (a Neil Young song this time). Modern agriculture with its combines, silos and dryers has made harvest time almost invisible to our society and it seems the only way we can measure it is by the effect upon the price of a white sliced loaf of bread (if you buy white sliced loaves).



You'd expect it to be a little different at the Weald & Downland museum and it is. At the same time as we were finishing the threshing flail in the woodyard, down in the museum fields the wheat harvest was being gathered. A brief gap between rainy days on Thursday allowed just enough time for the wheat stooks to be gathered from the fields and built into a traditional thatched rick to be stored before it is threshed later in the year.

Threshing will separate the grain from the straw. The grain can be ground in the museum's working watermill. but in this case the straw will be the most important part of the crop as the variety being grown is thatching wheat, needed for the repair and rebuilding of thatched roofs through Sussex, Hampshire and Dorset. The local master thatcher and his team were on hand to take part and to help ensure the harvest was successful.



In a microcosm of the way communities used to work many of the museum staff, volunteers and of course the horses join in to help with the work on the basis that 'many hands make light work'.




The sheafs of corn are pitched from the wagon to the elevator and then stacked by those working on the rick to create a steep conical shape with a thatched roof so that rain will fall off the rick and not penetrate inside.



Chatting to Ben who was pitching the sheafs onto the elevator I noticed that I could see water boiling on the small stationary engine running it's belt drive. 'This Lister engine doesn't have a closed cooling system, it cools by allowing the water to boil off from the open top of the reservoir.



The museum's little Ferguson TE20 tractor was also helping out with the work which seemed quite appropriate to me. This tractor, perhaps more than any other, brought machinery into smaller mixed farms with it's revolutionary 3 point hitch for controlling mowers and ploughs whilst being small, reliable and cheap to run. Many of these little mechanical 'work horses' are still working today on farms and smallholdings and it's the forerunner of my own little red MF135.



The next harvest I am waiting for is from the hop garden. Surely a few of these fuggles hops wouldn't be missed? Now we just need a couple of weeks of warm weather to ripen them.