US History: Colonial Times, Reading and Eating

We've been having a sporadically great time with our Colonial unit. Not that we haven't been having fun the whole time, it's more that we keep getting interrupted and sidetracked by fine weather and outside activities.

Here's what we've done so far:

We have been reading!

We really enjoyed If You lived in Colonial Times. It's written as a question and answer book with a special focus on how kids lived in Colonial times.

We are moving through Great Colonial America Projects You Can Build Yourself. The name explains it all! Actually, it has some nice explanatory essays which put each project into context as well as give more information about how the colonists did such things.

In The Story of America, we are up to page 40: Colonies in the Wilderness.

I am using A History of the United States only sporadically just now since it is focusing on events more than how the colonists lived. We are around Chapter 3.

We are also doing some on the pilgrims, particularly a book from the perspective of children making the crossing (although I"m too lazy to go upstairs and look up the title). Since the kids are actually Mayflower descendants (through the Emperor, obviously) doing the Plymouth colony is sort of mandatory.

Aside from the books, we've been eating!

Johnnycakes (also called hoe cakes, although I could think of no way to actually cook them on a hoe since mine is a stirrup hoe).

We have also been enjoying a colonial breakfast: popcorn with milk and sugar. No, they didn't have sugar, but it's just so good! It's similar in texture to puffed wheat, but the taste is much more intensely "corny" than corn pops. Yummy! We are doing it with pan popped corn since the microwave type is pre-salted. It's actually a cheap source of cold cereal, even today - and whole grain to boot!

Related to food, we are getting ready to cook down more squash and pumpkins for more pilgrim food, and we have planted out wheat.

If you haven't grown wheat, it's worth a try and now is the time to plant it! Wheat is a grass, so it will grow wherever grass will grow in your yard. You can get wheat seed at any natural food store, or possibly your supermarket. You are looking for "wheat berries." Ideally, you will get to choose "Hard Winter Wheat," but I'd try the generic "wheat berries" if that's what you can find.

You can find our posts with the how to details here.

Incredibly, when I went looking for wheat berries at MOM's, not only did I find "Hard Winter Wheat," they also had oat groats, spelt, flax, and buckwheat. A quick look on the internet told me that I needed to plant the spelt and oats now, and the flax and buckwheat in the spring. I'll keep you posted on how everything turns out!

Growing Bread Part 4 of 4: Threshing and Winnowing

Here's where I ran into trouble. The very modern strain of wheat I grew has many virtues: high yield, disease protection, and the ability to be harvested by combine harvester. A combine reaps and threshes at the same time. If you have a few hundred acres, this is great! You drive the combine and you end up with bales of straw and lots of wheat. Alas, to make sure the machine gets the maximum amount of wheat, the ears are bred to be shatterproof.

In practice, this meant that none of the hand threshing techniques used on old fashioned wheat would get the grain from the ear. What worked was rubbing the ears by hand... actually, not a bad way to while away an afternoon chatting with friends under a shady tree, but not a quick and easy way to get all the grain. I never found a satisfactory solution to this, if you do, please leave it in the comments!

On the plus side, I gave sheaves of wheat to all my homeschooling friends to try and, after the hand threshing, winnowing was a breeze. We used a fan and poured from one bowl to another: presto! Grain! I have a grinder attachment on my Kitchen Aid, and I did get enough grain to make a few loaves of bread- bread we grew ourselves!

Growing Bread Part 3 of 4: Harvesting

Back to the wheat field... I planted in mid October and the wheat grass came up quickly. Among the many surprises from this project, the grass was lovely: soft green that rippled like the sea when touched by the wind. It stayed a little less than knee high all that winter and began growing again in the spring. At long last, I enjoyed being out standing in my field...

By summer the wheat was in the ear, first green, then gold. How do you know when to harvest? When the ears begin to droop, I was told, harvest soon or the ears will shatter and all the grain fall into the field. For me this was mid July.

How to harvest? If you sensibly only planted a few square feet, you could harvest with kitchen shears. I knew I wasn't up to trying a scythe (you can accidentally cut off a body part!), so I decided to try a sickle. I had a very hard time finding a sickle!! I eventually found one some ways away in an ag supply place.

What a surprise! I thought the sickle was a curved knife and you used the whole thing to cut... Nope. The knife is at the very end. You grab a handful of wheat, hold it taut and draw the sickle across, cutting it with the sharp end. You kind of figure it out as you go. I reaped and the kids tied together the sheaves and then we went rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves. Since I didn't have a barn, we used the porch.

When I had finished reaping my tiny hundredth of an acre, I stood up and thought: that was fun. If the field had been just a little larger, that would not have been fun!

Growing Bread Part 2 of 4: Planting

The soil was ready, but what to plant? I live in cold hardiness zone 7 in Maryland and I wanted to make bread from my wheat. Bread wheat needs to be high in protein (gluten is the protein in the wheat that acts like rubber to make pockets to catch the gas from the yeast so the bread can rise) so I talked to my agricultural extension agent about what kind of wheat to grow. Hard winter wheat was the answer. Some very nice people from the wheat commission in Kansas gave me a pound of this wheat for free! I should probably mention that the ag agent and the Kansas people may have injured themselves rolling on the floor laughing at my 1/100th of an acre....

If you don't care too much about how high your bread rises, you go for the random wheat seeds sold as "Wheat Berries" in the health food section.

Still, I would encourage you to contact your ag agent (Google him based on your county) because he or she probably needs a laugh and because they can tell you things like: don't plant winter wheat (in my county) until after October 15th or it will all be eaten by a particular kind of fly!

Anyway, we scattered the wheat and let some of it fall on the path (sidewalk) where birds really did eat it very quickly, some on stony (untilled) ground and so forth. And we waited.

Growing Bread from Scratch Part 1 of 4: Soil Prep

We've been making our own bread since my oldest was a few months old, but there was that time we decided to grow our own bread from scratch. It takes some time a piece of your lawn, but it was terrific! I'd been thinking about because I was curious and then, my oldest daughter showed signs of getting ready for her First Communion. I thought it would be great to go through all those parables about sowers and reapers and tares and so on. I actually had hoped to have a home Mass and make the hosts out of this wheat. Well, that didn't happen, but it was a really great experience.

We have a side yard on a bit of a hill that I hated to mow so... that became our field. You can use anything with sun. Wheat is grass, so if you have a lawn, you can grow wheat. Since you won't starve if you don't get the maximum possible yield, it's OK if your soil is bad or you don't have full sun. If all you have is deep shade, try a smaller version in a sunny window! Dig up as much of a field as you like (or have energy for!). Just get the grass off and loosen the soil. If you are doing more than a few square feet, renting a tiller is a wise investment! We tilled ("we" being my dear dedicated home schooling hero of a husband!) 1/100th of an acre (about 15' by 30'). That gave us enough for a theoretical 60 loaves of bread. I think 3' by 3' will give you enough for at least 2 loaves if it's full sun.