threshing beans (November 1)

It's time to plant garlic, but we're killing time while waiting for the snow to melt off of the fields (even though you can't see snow in this picture). In the meantime, we're threshing beans.



When we harvested the dry beans, we pulled up the whole plants by their roots, and packed them into bags. Now, Eliza pulls out fist-fulls of bean plants and passes them to Mark to feed into the thresher:





The thresher is a fascinating piece of equipment that chomps up the bean plants and spits beans out of a spout on the side:



It spits mixtures of bean pods, stalks, and stray beans out of three other orifices:





After being threshed, the beans will go through a winnower, which blows the dust off of them, and the picker, which is a foot-powered conveyor belt allowing a person to sort through a steady stream of beans, pulling out the rocks and bad ones.