Threshing Wild Rice

It seems like a strange time to be writing about wild rice since we harvest it in August.Wild rice is versatile in that respect however and keeps just fine in the hulls as long as it is well dried.We had a lot of rice left over from the year before and were busy last fall so we stored our dry rice until now. This first pic is of Ann stirring the rice in our parching pan. Parching is the first of three steps in threshing the rice. There is a small fire below the pan and the rice is being  heated to desiccate the hull making it easier to remove. The second step is treading the rice, traditional done in a hole lined with leather. A small amount of rice was placed in the hole and then gently treadled on while wearing leather moccasins.The friction between the leather surfaces ripped the hulls loose. This process requires young men and women with stamina to tread for hours so I have resorted to the contraption in the pic at left.It works on the same basis as an old flour mill with rubber disc substituted for the stone burrs. The top 20 inch diameter rubber disc has a hole in the center allowing the grain to be fed in. As it rotates the rice is rolled between the moving top disc and the stationary bottom disc. It works fairly well but not as well as I would like. I'll have to do some tweaking on it. The third step is winnowing. This requires a good breeze or a fan. It being a calm day, you can see the rice being poured in front of the fan allowing the lighter hulls to be blown away.We save the rice hulls to use in the chickens nest boxes. The rice usually needs to be ran through my treader two or three times.