“What can I help you with?” Mike, the sales clerk at my local ACE hardware, asked as I rolled my folding bike inside.
“I’m looking for about six inches of heavy metal chain and two nuts to go on this,” I replied, holding up a drill bit.
He looked at my drill bit for about two seconds and definitively proclaimed, “Well, that’s not gonna work.”
I thought to myself, It actually IS going to work. It’s going to either work as I suggested, OR it’s going to lead me to the next idea. I’m gonna need to ditch this guy if he keeps squelching ideas. I’m happy to wander the store and find the answer by myself.
He cocked his head to the side a minute and then asked, “What are you trying to do with it?”
“Thresh wheat,” I replied matter-of-factly.
He looked at me a moment, wondering just how delusional I was and then quickly realized I was dead serious.
“I’m in,” he said, perhaps sensing this would be more fun than helping the next customer unclog a toilet.
I grow winter wheat as part of a cover crop mix, which includes grains, legumes, leafy greens and tap roots that all serve different purposes to continually regenerate my organic urban farm (okay, fine, suburban garden). The wheat progresses from green to golden and hangs heavy, as you might see depicted on a cereal box, waiting for its transformation to flour and food products. But how?
I had often searched for what to do with wheat and always got stuck at the threshing stage (just as I get stuck at how to make sorghum syrup — “first, get a mule”). Today, I was going to meet that challenge, and Mike at ACE hardware was not gonna stand in my way.
He did, indeed, help me. The solution we came up with required additional MacGyvering when I got home, but I did succeed in building a simple threshing machine. I threshed, winnowed (this involves a fan) and ground (with an old coffee grinder) that wheat that I had grown from seed right there in the Sharing Garden at the curb of my property in an HOA-ruled subdivision in Metro Atlanta.
And I made brownies (which included homemade lavender salt, which is why you see lavender at the end of this video):
And they were delicious.
And yes, I’m going back to give Mike an update, as I promised I would (the brownies are long gone). Because, moral of the story: “That’s not gonna work” is not a conclusion. It’s a beginning. Not just in the garden, but with everything. The pop-up protected bike lanes. The five-month journey across the USA without a car and on a $20-a-day budget. All of it.
If you are the type of person or organization that continually says, “That’s not gonna work,” please, please, please get out of the way of those of us who are doing it. Or, better yet, join us. It’s fun.
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