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Subject: Quinoa--threshing and winnowing
From: "peter gauss" <pgauss@uswest.net>
Organization:
Date: Mon, 09 Oct 00 03:44:04
Message-ID: <MOD$001009.3940@rec.gardens.ecosystems>



Hi, never posted to this group before. This season I decided to experiment
with Quinoa. I have cooked it for years, but never really knew much about
how it was grown until a friend showed me pictures of flowering quinoa from
her trip to Peru. I immediately fell in love with the image and decided to
grow some. I ordered some seeds from Abundant Life out of Washington (a
variety called Dave 407 if you are at all familiar) and planted a small
patch in my garden. I live at an elevation of about 8500 feet in sunny
Colorado, and considering it has been traditionally grown high in the South
American Andes, I thought I would have pretty good luck with it. An
interesting note is that the quinoa looked almost exactly like Lambs Quarter
as it grew and I could honestly only tell the young plants apart because of
where I grew it. The plants grew to about five feet tall and the flowers
ranged from green to yellow to orange to a deep red. Beautiful. I let them
mature and begin to dry on the stalk before harvesting. I then let them dry
further in paper bags before hand threshing them and running through a
coarse strainer. Now I have a bunch of quinoa and chaff waiting to be
separated. I was thinking of maybe pouring it all out of a bucket in front
of a fan and hoping the heavier grain would fall through the breeze into
another bucket below. I haven't tried it yet because the grain is so small
that I think it will just blow away too. I have no idea how this was done by
traditional people, but there has to be a way of separating the grain. If
anybody on this ng knows about quinoa or knows where I might find more info,
I would greatly appreciate it.
Thanks

Peter Gauss