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I had a grand harvest of quinoa despite the lanky plants that dropped limbs and sometimes fell over.

When wetter weather came I cut the seed-laden branches and hung them in a garage to dry. Then I stripped the seeds off by hand and put them in a washtub, which was soon full.

This is where challenges began. The point of threshing is to knock off the husk that surrounds the quinoa seed. I have no tools or techniques. I rubbed the husked seeds between gloved hands looking for the light-colored seeds. I found that this generates a lot of dust, so a face mask became part of my attire.

I also found that this takes lots of time and effort. I threshed maybe one-fourth of the washtub full.

I left threshing for leisure times during the winter to see if I could separate the tiny quinoa seeds from the chaff. At home there is never enough wind and a fan was ineffective. So I waited for a breezy day out at the farm, took a wide and long container and poured a thin stream of “stuff” toward it. I saw as many tan seeds miss the container as made it in. Even so I made a couple more passes, with similar results.

But I saved what I had winnowed, noting that there were still husk-ey looking maybe-seeds in the winnowed material.

I showed it to Maura suggesting that washing the winnowed stuff would improve the condition of the harvest, small though it was at this point.

We decided that the process hadn't been successful enough to justify continuing the laborious process. So the entire production of quinoa went into the compost bin. And from the looks of the composting process this appears to have been a good thing.

It will be a while before I grow quinoa again.