I've harvested 25lbs of wheat berries from a boulevard in my city. I then threshed, winnowed it myself. I still have some of the flour and berries left and use it to make bread.
I did my threshing using a lawn mower on a big tarp. This actually worked fairly well. Were I to do it again I would probably want a more repeatable setup. Ive seen some good strategies on youtube.
The winnowing I did with a leaf blower, and worked pretty well, I think I would use this strategy again, but I suspect if you were going to do it more often it would be very easy to build something that would help mechanically.
I have a friend with a little home flour mill which took a while but was perfect for turning it into flour. If you were to do it fresh when you wanted to make bread these little mills are fantastic.
There's a book I highly recommend reading called Small Scale Grain Raising [1] that has a lot of good tips, and ways to do this kinda stuff.
In this book they recommend using a leaf shredder or wood chipper which would be incredibly effective.
I'd be interested to hear about the bucket thresher. Most of the DIY options I found when I was looking where larger with custom flail mechanisms and bike-chain drives etc. Honestly, building the thresher itself seemed like kind of a cool project on it's own, but it was just more effort than I was willing to put in. But a 5 gallon bucket option that runs of a drill sounds much more my speed.
How much did you process? What is the maximum amount you think you would have been willing to process with that method?
I did about 3 pounds at once, but could have done more. Maybe 5 pounds. It goes fast, so you can do multiple smaller batches more quickly than the bigger batch.
I made a round out of plywood to put in the bottom of the bucket, drilled a hole in the center, and put a steel pipe end cap in it. I put a ball bearing in the end cap. Then a threaded rod up through the top resting on the bearing. I cut a round of plywood for the top of the bucket, chamfered to fit snugly. I drilled a hole in the center of that and put a pillow block on it to fit the threaded rod. On the bottom of the rod I put two pieces of flat stock about 1/2 from the bottom and about one inch above that one, just held on with nuts. That's pretty much it. There are lots of YouTube of variations on that design. Runs with a corded drill. Cordless might work for very small batches.
There are open design plans for homestead scale hand fed threshing and winnowing/seed cleaning machines. Put them in series. Sheeves of wheat in one end, clean grain on the other. Well worth the time to build if you are cleaning that quantity of grain.
I would suggest that the edge of a typical busy boulevard features 10-30 thousand vehicles per day, whose brake and tire particles in particular end up in the soil around the road. Typical farm fields might see 30,000 trips over the span of what, 100 or 1000 years? It's not in any way comparable to an urban roadway.
It was erosion control after some new road work. I sorta suspect they did bring in new dirt for it as well. I do only use it in small amounts.
Not really gonna make a difference over time in terms of pollution/heavy metals. But it was still a worthwhile project.
I've harvested 25lbs of wheat berries from a boulevard in my city. I then threshed, winnowed it myself. I still have some of the flour and berries left and use it to make bread.
I did my threshing using a lawn mower on a big tarp. This actually worked fairly well. Were I to do it again I would probably want a more repeatable setup. Ive seen some good strategies on youtube.
The winnowing I did with a leaf blower, and worked pretty well, I think I would use this strategy again, but I suspect if you were going to do it more often it would be very easy to build something that would help mechanically.
I have a friend with a little home flour mill which took a while but was perfect for turning it into flour. If you were to do it fresh when you wanted to make bread these little mills are fantastic.
There's a book I highly recommend reading called Small Scale Grain Raising [1] that has a lot of good tips, and ways to do this kinda stuff.
In this book they recommend using a leaf shredder or wood chipper which would be incredibly effective.
[1] https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/small-scale-grain-raisi...