How to grow and Harvest Oats on a Small Plot

[Music] hello everyone I'm recording today from Valley View Acres which is our small farm in beautiful Cache Valley Utah here at Valley View Acres we try to do something new or experiment with something every year this year we decided to try growing oats my wife and I both have celiac disease so we decided that oats would be a good thing to grow because you can buy Oats that are gluten free but most oats are processed in the same places where they process wheat and other grains that have gluten in them and so we decided to try for this year's experiment growing oats now first of all we went this spring out to one of the farm stores to try to buy some oat seed we found out that there is two different kinds of Oats that you can grow there's a polis oat that is best to grow for human consumption and we couldn't find any seeds for that and then there's the regular oats that has a really hard hole on it and it's hard to separate and they grow that for animals well since we couldn't find any of the holless oats oats we decided to go ahead and grow some of the oats for animal feed just to see how oats would grow here at our farm and so we used about 10 pounds of oat seed and we planted a patch about 15 feet by 55 feet I planted that just by broadcasting the oats on the ground and got them spread out evenly and then I raked them in so that they had about a oh just so they were covered a little bit with the soil and then I scattered some grass clippings on the top to help hold the moisture in and then of course watered it in good it took the oats uh probably two weeks before they came up but once they came up they were easy to grow and our patch grew really well during the summer now we're into fall it's the end of August and we started looking into how we were going to harvest our oats and we'll go down to the patch here in just a minute but I started looking to see what was available for harvesting and there really is not anything that I could find that was available uh for harvesting a small patch like that and so I'm going to try three different things we'll go down to the patch of oats and I'll show you what those are going to be so we'll see you down at the patch okay this is our little patch of oat as I mentioned this is about 15 feet by about 55 feet the oats grew about two feet tall and if I get down here close you can see that the heads are large it's ripe it's ready to harvest okay the first tool that we want to try in our Harvest is going to be a sickle but before we try this I want to just mention that we did go online and tried to see if there was any small Harvesters like a small thresher or a small combine that you could use on small patches like this for the home Gardener and we didn't find very much what we did find was very expensive and hard to get and not really practical for the home Gardener to use so we're going to try some hand tools and see what happens so we'll try the sickle here first foreign well I'm not very happy with that I'm knocking a lot of the heads off if I put this in the bucket and strip what heads are left off we can see what we're starting to get in there [Music] um a lot of stocks and the heads that are in there are pretty tight with the hole on them so we're going to try a different tool and see how that'll work I have an old side here I don't know if any of you have ever used one of these this belonged to my grandpa and then my dad and then I got it but we don't seem to have a lot of use for it nowadays but we'll give it a try foreign okay that is cutting it but again that is really knocking a lot of the heads off and we're losing probably over 50 percent of our crop to the ground using that because it just isn't uh very smooth in cutting it so I think I'm gonna try the lawnmower and see how that does with the catcher on it so in just a moment I'll set that up and we'll see how that works out for us okay I've got the old John Deere set up and ready to go we'll take a pass around here with the catcher and see what that does for us foreign well it seems to cut pretty good let's look in the bag and see what we've got all right of course we have a lot of straw in there with it um I think I'm going to just have to put a blower on it and see what we end up with after we're done so I'll go ahead and do that and we will get back to you okay I haven't blown this yet but this is all that I got out of an entire pass around the patch and that's not very much and looking at this it's mostly straw I see don't see very many heads of the oats in there so I'm going to go ahead and shake it all out and see what's left in the bottom and then we'll go from there okay I've cleaned most of the straw off of that um oats that we got with the lawnmower and I'm not real impressed with what I'm seeing here okay as I cleaned the straw out um there's just not very many heads in there [Music] um without the oat head is made up of two parts the center part that you eat is called the groat and then the outer part is the hole and I'm seeing a lot of holes in this but very few groats and so I'm thinking that the lawnmower is probably not the way to go as far as harvesting the oats I have one more idea that I'm going to try and we'll go down and try that now okay we're not doing so well on our Harvest of our oats but I do have one more thing I want to try and this is with the old weed whacker and see if we can take him down without knocking too many of the heads off so we'll give that a try right now foreign foreign well that doesn't seem to be doing very good either um it's chewing it up too much we're not getting very many heads on it so as we mentioned at the stop top of our program everything we do here at Valley View acres is an experiment and I think this year's experiment has proved that we can grow out but we have also proved that we're having a hard time harvesting them hello this is brant I'm talking to you once again from Valley View Acres I've taken a few days and pondered my problem with trying to harvest this small patch of oats and I thought of a couple more ways that I would like to try first of all I'm gonna just try some hand printers and see how that goes as far as as uh harvesting the oats foreign that seemed to go pretty good using the hand pruners I'm getting all of the heads are staying on the on the stalks on the straw but it's a pretty slow process to do that the other way that I would like to try is using some hedge clippers just some regular hedge clippers so let's try those I liked that idea I was able to cut fairly quickly I didn't knock any of the heads off um it's still a fairly slow process because it's a hand process but the oats look good and so I think I'll try a little bit more of that so I'll report back on how the Harvest goes well into the harvesting of our little patch of all excited to go with the hedge trimmers I'm about two-thirds of the way through the patch now and I've only been cutting for about 45 minutes so I'm estimating maybe an hour and 15 minutes to cut this little patch using the hedge trimmers we finally completed the Harvest of our little patch of Oats I ended up harvesting it with the hedge trimmers I just got down on my hands and knees and clipped away and would move it into a little piles and gathered it up and it went pretty easy it took me about an hour and a half to do the 15 by 55 foot patch this is the yield that we ended up getting off I've put it in the greenhouse here on a greenhouse bench so that it can dry for a few days before we thrash it it'll be interesting to see how much we get this is this is the total amount off the field except for the part that we wasted in our experimenting trying to figure the best way to cut it so the next step will be thrashing I've had the oats in the greenhouse for a few days now and they're nice and dry so now it's time to thresh them I came up with the idea for threshing I took a board and stapled a short nap piece of carpet on the board and then I also stapled a little piece of the carpet on a block so that I could use it like a sander this seems to have worked pretty good foreign it cleans the grain off pretty good I've finished the threshing so now the last step is the winnowing winnowing is the process of separating the grain from the holes and I tried to use the leaf blower to do the winnowing but it was too powerful it blew the kernels away as well as the holes so I've gone to my shop vac vacuum and we're going to try using that uh in two different ways first I'll try dropping the Grain in front of the vacuum as it's blowing and see if that'll blow them away and if that doesn't work then I'll blow directly onto it thank you foreign well it looks like blowing directly onto it works a lot better than dropping it in front of the vacuum if the vacuum was just a little bit more powerful than maybe dropping it in front would work but I'll go ahead and finish this process and then we'll wrap this video up the process is now complete I finished winnowing the grain by using the vacuum as I showed you a minute ago and that worked really well to clean it up as you can see the grain is quite clean and nice looking now after processing I weighed it and I have about 30 pounds but I think I lost about a fourth of the crop in the experimenting with how to cut it but anyway we've got about 30 pounds here we started with about 10 to 12 pounds of seed so I guess in summary I would say that I'm a little disappointed in how much grain we got off our little patch but I am pleased with the success of the way it went and as this was our experiment for this year I think it was a successful experiment and I will probably do it again next year the one thing that I would say though is make sure that you know what kind of oat you're planting if you want it for human consumption make sure you get homeless oats if you're just using it for animals or chicken feed then the ones with the hole on is okay so I'm just just make sure that you understand that and it has been quite a time consuming process but I've felt good about it and I've enjoyed growing this patch of Oats this year thank you for watching [Music]

Channel: Valley View Acres

Views: 84,580

Keywords: Growing Oats, Harvesting Oats, Small Plot farming, Oats

Id: wjNTSlqjuA0

Length: 19min 9sec (1149 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 25 2022