Threshing dry beans and peas

  A major food in our diet is dry beans and peas.  We try to grow a variety of both beans and peas to keep things interesting.  During the summer, as these crops dry down on the vine, we collect the dried pods into paper bags.  We then hang these bags in an outbuilding from wires to finish drying and to deal with them when we have time later.
  Now is that time.  Winter is when we catch up on threshing all of the beans/peas and seed crops.
 

  If we need to keep a variety pure, like for seed, we'll thresh the bean/pea in a pillow case hitting it with a baseball bat to insure there is no contamination of another variety.  But for eating beans/peas, our electric sheller makes quick work of the job.  From the picture you can see there is a drum within a box.  In the drum are flails that rotate.  The peas are knocked out of the pods and fall into the drawer below.

The first step is to pour about a quarter bushel of pea pods into the sheller.  Much more and the drum is too crowded to thresh well.

Then the lid of the drum is put on.  As you can see, the drum is covered in hardware cloth.  Off set from this about a half inc is sheet metal.  This allows the peas to roll out without the pods coming out too.  Then there are three gaps in the sheet metal from which the peas can fall out into the drawer below as it rotates.

Finally, the box lid is put on.  We made the lid out of some scrap lumber lying around (thus the Turkish writing) after we realized some of the peas were flying out.  It usually only takes a couple minutes of running the sheller to get the peas good and threshed out.

Once it is finished running, we pull the drawer out.  There are some hulls, but it is mostly peas.  We dump this into a bin for later winnowing.

The next step is to take the box lid off and then the drum lid.  Then just the box lid is put back on and we run it a minute.  With that large gap in the drum, all the hulls are dumped into the drawer, leaving the drum empty and ready for the next peas to thresh.

The hulls get thrown to the chickens to find any remaining peas.  The bin of peas is then ready to winnow.  We simply set up a large fan and dump the peas back and forth in front of it. 

They are quite clean of hulls and chaff at this point, but will need one final going over to pick out any bad peas before they are ready for the pot.

Finally, it is time to cook them up.  These here are Big Boy Brown Eyes.