I threshed the second half of my mustard crop today. This mustard was planted at the same time as the stuff I threshed last week, I just left to mature about a week longer.
This harvest suffers from the same problem as the first one. The seeds are a mix of yellow, brown, and green. As noted in an earlier post, Virginia in the summer is not the proper time and place for harvesting mustard seed.
That said, this second harvest isn’t as bad as the first harvest. The second (later) harvest is less green than the first harvest. By eye, the later-crop seeds are markedly more yellow, on average, than those of the earlier crop. But the yield per square foot is markedly worse.
I still don’t know if it’s edible. I’m going move forward by cleaning up a bit of the second crop, then what it tastes like when ground into mustard, the condiment.
A threshing method is unacceptable if it can’t be done sitting down.
That’s not original with me. I’m pretty sure I read that somewhere.
A week ago or so, I threshed the first crop of mustard by combing through “sheaves” of mustard, while standing over a dropcloth. See Post G22-043 for excruciating detail.
For the second crop, I lined a five-gallon bucket with a trash bag, and threshed sheaves of mustard while sitting down, using thumb and fingers to “frisk” each sheaf, squeezing the pods to release the seeds, while holding that sheaf in/over the five-gallon bucket.
Either method works. They seem to process the plants at about the same speed.
Most of the seeds seem to fall where intended. But not all. So with any significant volume of plants, you end up with mustard seeds, straw, and plant parts everywhere in your vicinity.
I’m probably inadvertently wearing some mustard seed right now.
Either way — standing or sitting — mustard-threshing, as I do it, is not an indoor activity. Arguable acceptable for the back porch, as long as you sweep up afterward. Probably better done out in the yard.
Here’s a view of the floor, post-threshing. I believe I’ve already done some cleanup at that point. If you look hard, you’ll see a small amount of mustard seed pretty much everywhere.
Here how I threshed mustard today: seated, no tools.
Today I threshed the bundle of plants on the left, below. That’s a good solid armful of plants, if you pick up the cloth they are sitting on. Enough to fill a porch chair.
Below, this is how it looked when I was done. I sat in the green chair. Raw plants had been located to my left, in the white cloth. I separated out sheaves of mustard — ideally so that the stems, compressed, made maybe an inch-diameter rod. I neatened up the sheaves a bit, then threshed into the bucket in the middle, with bucket tilted onto my knees. Threshing in this case meant using thumb and forefinger to break open the seed pods. The spent sheaves of plants ended up in the bucket on the right.
After a while, I think I figured out that if a pod didn’t immediately open, you probably didn’t want the resulting seeds anyway.
Possibly, that’s just sour grapes. But the point is, you don’t take the time to get every possible pod and seed. The gross majority will do, and you can get those quite quickly.
I originally started by combing the sheaves, as I had done before, to break open the pods. But that turned out to be too violent, with a lot of the seed going flying.
On to winnow a couple of tablespoons of the most recent batch and make some mustard.
