Part 4 of Native: Life in a vanishing landscape

Native: Oat couture/ Harvesting by hand

Are the old ways really the best? In his extract from his award-winning book, Patrick Laurie tries doing without machines to cut and thresh his crop

By Patrick Laurie

The oats passed beyond the colour of rich and lovely gold, and it was time to begin the harvest. I borrowed a sickle and cut bristles of straw until I got a feel for that stuff. It was glossy and thick, and soon there was stubble crackling under my feet. Oats fell and dropped a blizzard of chaff; white flakes like fish scales blew in eddies under the high clouds. Swallows skimmed by and stirred them in a bow wave.

I found bare soil, and light plunged down into the roots to reveal sprigs of nettles and thistles, fat hen and chickweed. Then I stacked the stems in a heap and tied them tightly around the middle with string like a corset. I’d seen it done it books, but I had no idea if this was right. Even my elderly neighbour Sanny had a machine to do this binding job; he was not sure what to make of my ancient method. He said it looked alright, and I noticed that he was calling my bundle a ‘sheaf’. It made a pleasing sight, buxom and waspwaisted. Soon there were five

sheaves, and Sanny explained how to lean them up against each other like a teepee to form a waterproof stook. Barring a monsoon, the crop can stand like this for a fortnight until the wind has blown through the heads and dried the crop for storage.

It took me three hours to make thirty sheaves. It’s a tiny harvest, but there was something compulsive about the work. I could hardly take my eyes off the golden stems, and it was exciting to see the soil laid bare after months beneath a rustling canopy. My mind was elsewhere, and I swung the sickle into my index finger. The blade stuck for a moment and the impact stunned my entire skeleton like a tuning fork. There was a bright flash of bone, then deep gouts of blood. The skin hung open like an unzipped pencil case.

‘That was bloody careless, son!’ shouted Sanny as he sipped at his tea. I pinched the edges of the gash together like stifled lips; blood hung in drips from my fingertips and blots of it fell onto the straw. I felt sick and shaky, but I was working again within the hour. Dirt gathered on the sticky edges of a beige plaster.

I’ve picked up dark calluses, black nails and cracked fingers in the last few years. I smart with sunburn and ache with strains. A hot bath should relax my tendons, but the water seeps into a network of fresh cuts and scrapes and makes me squeal like a boiling kettle. I’m on my way towards canvas palms and pumice fingers; it’s not a painless process. I’m being shaped for purpose, and my brain’s changing too.

The scythe is a beautiful tool. It’s a snaking bend of wood and steel, held in a bitter pitch of lucid sharpness. Wullie Carson [the previous owner of the farm] left three scythes hanging from the rafters in his tool shed when he died. I noticed them when we were shown around and I couldn’t wait to swing them again. But Wullie’s family made a bonfire of his old tools when our offer was accepted and the scythes were burnt along with a host of other paraphernalia. They were just tidying up and couldn’t imagine that anyone would ever want wooden tools again.

Those oats were almost a hobby in the early days. I was dipping my toes in the water, being careful not to rely on them until I knew more about the ways of mixed farming. But then the summer was dry, and the grass failed. I took a poor cut of hay and didn’t have the chance of cutting again. Neighbours complained that they would run short that winter, and I found myself with nowhere to run. I’d have to produce my own feed or go without. Going without would mean a reduction in stocking, and I couldn’t bear to face the loss of a single animal. The oats would have to pull their weight.

I returned with the reaper to speed things up. Chattering teeth skimmed through the oats and they fell in a drift like a rustling wave. Cereals are tougher than grass, and they’re not so fussed about rain. If wet weather’s coming, you leave the crop standing or you cut it and bind the stems so they’re upright. It’s not an option to leave them on the ground because the seeds will sprout in no time at all and the crop will be ruined. The weather seemed hard to fathom. I worked cautiously and only cut what I could tie and stack. I cut the crop in narrow sweeps and each one gave me forty sheaves. It took an hour of patient stacking and binding to tidy up in silence, and then I had eight stooks like golden chapels on the stubble.

Drying the crop is one thing; threshing it is something else. Nowadays the whole job is done by a combine harvester. The lumbering machines cut the crop, thresh the grain and do all the work in one go. A tractor just drives along beside and carts the grain away by the ton. Before combines there were enormous mills like buses which used to travel around and clean the cereal crops for a whole parish. You dried the crop in sheaves, then you fed them into the mill

Five sheaves stacked together into a stook can stand for a fortnight until the wind has blown through the heads and dried the crop for storage.

through a hole in the roof. And if a person fell into that hole, it was curtains. There’s no clear idea what came before the big mills, but it’s fair to reckon that separating the grains from the strain was a job for oldfashioned elbow grease.

So I would have to clean my oats by hand. I tried a few gadgets and techniques, but nothing was straightforward. The best method was a hand flail which I copied from an old book illustration. Hand flails have been around since the days of Ancient Egypt, and mine took the shape of a five-foot broom handle with a joint towards one end. You throw down a tarpaulin, chuck a sheaf on it and then batter it with the flail until the seeds have fallen off and you can start on another sheaf. The joint helps to amplify the power of every swing, and the end slaps the heads rather than jabs them like a spear. It’s as simple and back-breaking as that.

I beat black hell out of those sheaves. Seeds came tumbling out onto the tarpaulin sheet, along with a carnival of beetles and harvestmen, moths and ladybirds. Soon it was pooling in the dips, and I could run my hands through it and start to weigh my progress.

Threshing was a slow and steady slog. I took the best from every sheaf, but it was hard to resist wasting mugfuls of the seed. I needed dry weather for this work because rain clogged the seeds and made the job sticky. I picked my moments and threshed when it was dry, and a good breeze blew the chaff away in a blizzard of beige teardrops until the field was papery and crinkled and the seeds lay clean and crisp like beans.

If you were to measure my progress against the value of my gains, the comparison would be depressing. I can manage about sixty pounds of bagged, clean seed in an hour. The figure rises to a hundred when I have help. I could work at my desk and earn enough to buy twice as much, but I’ve always been happier to spend time in lieu of money.

My main consolation is that now I’ve got stiff calluses and my hands no longer bleed.

The sky was thick with swallows. I counted 170 on the telegraph wires below the house. The yellowhammers have produced a hearty brood of youngsters, and there are greenfinches and goldfinches swarming like ants over the fallen crop.

Native: Life in a Vanishing Landscape by Patrick Laurie is published by Birlinn (£9.99, pbk) www.birlinn.co.uk