I threshed and rough-cleaned my first batch of mustard today. Took about an hour. Yield was poor. Worse, the seeds look like last year — a mix of yellow mature seed and green/black immature seed.
Not clear what I’m going to do next, but I can endorse one method for threshing a stack of dried mustard plants reasonably efficiently: Comb them to break open the seed pods.
Above is the bundle of mustard I’m going to thresh today.
Folding it up in a cloth and stomping on it didn’t work. I think I have too much — too thick a layer of plants. In any case, when I opened up the cloth, most of the seed pods were still whole.
So I got out a brand new coarse comb and combed it, while standing over the open cloth holding the dry plants. Pick up a scant handful — the stems, scrunched in my hand, might have made a bundle an inch thick. All seed heads pointing in the same direction. Then comb the bundle of stems as if it were a lock of hair. Starting from the far end. And being none too gentle. Then toss the combed-out stalks in the discard pile, and repeat.
This seemed to go a lot faster than trying to “rub” the seeds out of the individual pods. Eyeing the results, I’d guess that I got more than 95% of pods to open by rough-combing the stalks.
I used a common kitchen colander to remove most of the the chaff.
There’s a bit of chaff left in the seeds, but there’s no point in removing it until I figure out what I can do what the resulting mix of seeds. From the get-go, I could see that I was going to get a mix of mature and immature seeds.
I’m not sure that I can separate those. And I’m not sure how edible (not to mention tasty) the immature seeds are.
Anyway, that’s where it stands.
The good news is that the entire threshing process so far took less than an hour. Rough-combing those stalks does a good job of releasing almost all the seeds, fast. Sifting out almost all the chaff, from the results of that, wasn’t hard at all.
The bad news is that there isn’t much of it — just 8 ounces of mustard seed. That’s for just under half of everything I grew. The resulting seed might fill a pint jar. And the seed is impure, in the sense that it contains both mature yellow mustard and immature brown/black seeds.
I’m not sure whether that’s due to anything I’ve done, or because Virginia is not a great place to grow a spring mustard crop. I definitely planted these too close together — as a cover crop, not as a seed crop. That said, my mustard did the exact same thing last year, and produced a mix of mature and immature seeds. Maybe my back yard is just not a great place to grow mustard.
