Suzanne Ress
The name Lammas is an English corruption of the old Saxon Hlaf-mass, or Feast of the Loaf, the first harvest festival of the year.
Lammas is often used interchangeably with the name Lughnasa, an ancient Celtic harvest celebration centered on the twenty-four hours from sundown on July 31st to sundown on August 1st, and the two weeks preceding and anteceding that date. Lughnasa honored the sun god Lugh, with Olympic-like games and sports contests, and celebrated the first fruits of a successful harvest season.
When the medieval Christian church tried to suppress paganism and its traditional festivals, Lughnasa was renamed Lammas. Loaves of bread made from the newly harvested wheat were blessed by priests and either buried at the top of a hill or broken into four parts, which were placed in the four corners of the barn to protect the grain and ensure a bountiful autumn harvest. Bread, the staff of life, has symbolically represented the human body for a long time. Bread was regarded as sacred, essential to human life. Grain cultivation is responsible for the human transformation from living day-to-day as hunter-gatherers to being able to settle down into stable societies, where the arts, science, philosophy, and more could flourish. We owe a great deal of humanity’s development to cultivated grain, and to bread.
The Christian Church was not very successful in suppressing the Pagan origins of this agricultural festival, and Lammas was widely thought of as being one of the four major Witch Sabbats, which also included Halloween (Samhain), May Day (Beltane), and Ladies’ Day (Imbolc).
The beginning of the harvest is considered an auspicious time for hand fasting, the initiation of a new romantic relationship, and marriage. Lughnasa means, “An Assembly for Lugh”. This was when the sun god wed the earth mother, and the consummation of their relationship was celebrated.
Nowadays many of us have little or no awareness of the importance of a successful harvest to an agriculturally based society. We may try to buy local, buy organic, perhaps even grow our own herbs or veggies, but if heavy rains destroy a crop or drought prevents proper growth, or if pesticides from a cornfield kill all the pollinators, there is a supermarket always mysteriously full of fresh produce, flour, bread, and all the food anyone could dream of and beyond, just down the road.
In olden times, when the last year’s grain ran low or finished, the newly harvested grain was cause for riotous and happy celebration. Having successfully harvested the grain, survival through another winter was secure.
Last November I decided to plant two ¾-acre fields with wheat. These two fields, strangely situated in the middle of a woods, had caused me endless frustration ever since I’d bought them five or six years earlier. They’d been over run with black locust saplings and mugwort when I’d purchased them, hardly recognizable as the hay fields the deed said they were. We cleaned, cleared, and ploughed. The following year I planted both fields with borage and set up several beehives at the end of one. Unfortunately, the borage did not grow quickly enough to compete with the returning mugwort, and it was soon over run.
I resorted to applying the oft ill-spoken of Glyphosate to kill the mugwort, and attempted the borage planting again the following year, but once again the mugwort won out.
The next year, in the Spring, we ploughed the emerging mugwort underneath as a green manure, and I planted buckwheat, hoping my bees would make buckwheat honey. By late June the fields were beautiful, full of white buckwheat blossoms, but the bees, for reasons only they knew, wouldn’t go near them. Once the buckwheat died down the mugwort came back with a vengeance.
This past fall’s weather was unseasonably warm. In a stroke of what I believed was genius I decided to plant winter wheat, which, because of its long over wintering growing season, and head start in the Spring, would surely kill off the mugwort.
I placed my order with an organic seed company for 300 pounds of antique variety Verna wheat seed. A couple days later it was delivered in large burlap sacks on a pallet.
The fields had been ploughed and tilled, and my husband and I borrowed a seeding machine on November 14th to plant the wheat in long even rows.
“If the weather stays warm another ten days, you’ll see the seedlings emerge,” my farmer friend told us. “But it’s risky to plant this late in the season—most people do it in October—the weather could turn cold any day.”
We hoped for the best.
Ten days later, and no sign yet of frost, I rode my horse to the wheat fields, and, from a distance, saw the first rows of green emergence! I telephoned my farmer friend to tell him.
“Great!” he said. “You’ve been lucky. Now all should go well, unless—”
“Unless?” My heart sank a bit.
“Unless there is too much hard rain in the spring. That can ruin wheat.”
Within a few days the weather turned cold and we had our first frost.
I wondered, because it seemed wonderful, how a plant could start to grow, then become dormant for the winter, and resume its growth in the spring when earth and air warm up. This process is called vernalization—the plant requires a one to two month period of air temperatures around freezing in order to flower in the spring, something like daffodil, crocus, or hyacinth bulbs, which must be planted in the fall for spring blooms.
Over the winter we had a couple of snows. The little wheat plants were covered completely.
By late February the snow had melted and the woods paths were muddy. I rode my horse to the wheat fields one morning, and saw, with much irritation, the deep tracks of a large off road vehicle that had entered and turned a wide circle over the tender plants.
My husband and I spent the weekend erecting a post and wire fence.
Within a few weeks the wheat began to grow again, slowly at first, and then, as the days grew longer and the sun warmed the earth, more quickly. All seemed to be going well, until, in early April, I noticed something else growing in the spaces between the rows of wheat—mugwort! It was shorter than the wheat, but I knew it would not stay that way for long.
Although I had wanted the wheat to remain organic, I wanted even more to eradicate the mugwort, knowing well that if I did not it might smother the wheat, and, at the very least, would make harvesting difficult.
Once again I succumbed to the tempting ease of a selective broad leaf herbicide, using it only on the affected field.
By Beltane I was pleased to see that the mugwort was turning yellow and had quit growing, while the wheat grew taller and more beautiful, like rows of spiky coarse grass.
The mugwort was dead by the end of May, but then the heavy rains began. The rains turned my horses’ paddocks into gigantic mud puddles and tore the black locust blossoms off the trees, smashing hope for a good first honey harvest.
When I could, I rode to the wheat fields, and saw, with dismay, that the rains had pushed large swaths of the tall green plants, which had just begun to flower, to prone position on the ground.
Wheat (Triticum) is a domesticated grass, probably created by humans, intentionally or not, more than 10,000 years ago by crossing three different grass species and selecting for big seeds. Around 8,000 years ago humans were grinding wheat grains with stones to make flour, and 3,000 years later the Egyptians were using yeast to make leavened bread baked in wood fired ovens. By the year 1180 there were windmills to grind wheat throughout Europe and England, and in the Middle Ages, every village had its water or wind powered mill close to the wheat fields.
Wheat and bread have been with us a very long time indeed. Combined with legumes, wheat forms a perfect protein source. It is also higher in fiber, B vitamins, iron, magnesium, and potassium than either corn or rice.
In recent years wheat has gotten a bad rap as more and more people seem to become sensitive to gluten. A 2013 study showed that this is likely due to the greatly increased number of gluten based additives in processed foods rather than any change in the amount of gluten in modern wheat varieties versus antique varieties, as some people hypothesized.
By mid June the weather stabilized and grew hot. The chestnut trees came into bloom for the second local honey flow. Every few days I passed by the wheat fields and plucked off a spike, picking out and chewing the berries to test for ripeness.
After a month the green plants had dried to beige under the hot sun, and the wheat berries were hard and dry. It was time to harvest!
There was only one problem: the woods paths leading to the fields were only 8 feet 10 inches wide, highly banked on both sides, and modern harvesting machines measure 9 feet 10 inches from wheel to wheel.
“Try asking Daniel,” said my farmer friend. “He has an older, smaller harvesting machine.”
Daniel, a tractor mechanic with an agriculture hobby, was the man I’d bought the buckwheat seeds from a couple years earlier.
“No, no,” said Daniel. “I can’t do that work for anyone but myself. No insurance on the machine, you see.”
My farmer friend had estimated we should harvest about three thousand pounds of wheat from those fields. I began to fear that my husband and I would have to harvest by hand, the way it was done for thousands of years. Reaping by hand, using a scythe, it takes about an hour to harvest 6 pounds of grain. I quickly did the math—my husband and I would be in the fields cutting grain for about three weeks if we worked twelve-hour days. The thought of this was dreadful.
Then I remembered an acquaintance mentioning a couple from the mountains who had a small, hand-pushed motorized wheat harvesting machine. I inquired, and was relieved when they said they would come July 18th and, for a fee, do the work.
July 18th was sunny and blistery hot. The mountain couple arrived about 10:30 am, and we started harvesting by 11. Claude pushed the machine, which cut and separated all the plants it could reach, leaving the stems on the ground and spewing the grain into a fifty-pound sack attached to its chute. The rest of us used scythes or sickles to hand cut all the spikes at the edges of the fields, and the ones that lay prone, putting them into the machine when it passed. Whenever the sack was full it had to be removed, and a new one attached.
At one point, cutting through the border wheat with my scythe, I visualized myself as the Grim Reaper. This representation of Death, which has been with us since about the year 1400, carries a scythe because he comes to harvest human beings’ souls at the end of their season on earth.
During the course of the afternoon, several neighbors stopped by and joined in to help as their time allowed.
We emptied the full sacks into the trailer attached to our tractor and took turns sifting out the bigger pieces of grass and stems that were left in it. The trailer filled slowly. I began to doubt my farmer friend’s estimate of 3,000 pounds. As the afternoon wore on it became apparent that our harvest would be much smaller than expected. The machine left much of the grain behind. Antique variety wheat’s yield is naturally lower than modern varieties.
After seven hours without a break, all of us hot, sweaty, hungry, and thirsty, the harvest was concluded. I paid the mountain couple and gave them a few sacks of grain, then bid them goodbye. My husband drove the tractor with its trailer of grain through the woods and home, where we refreshed ourselves and then collapsed.
At seven the next morning I spread two old white cotton bedspreads on the south-facing uncovered patio, and we dumped and spread the grain there to thoroughly dry for 12 hours. During the day I turned it several times with a shovel, noticing lizards scampering across the warm grain. Later I realized that the lizards had provided a valuable service by eating the stinkbugs and shield bugs that had followed the grain home from the fields.
As the sun set my husband and I shoveled the perfectly dried grain into fifty pound sacks, a little dismayed to discover there was even less than we’d thought—only 900 pounds, including the two hundred we’d given to the mountain couple. We left the open sacks on the covered front porch to cool overnight, and the next morning tied them up tight and carried them to the dehumidified cellar for storage.
In the meantime I had called around to several nearby mills to find out about grinding the grain into flour. Two of these ground only corn. The third would grind wheat but only quantities over 2,000 pounds. I looked for alternatives.
I found an old man with a portable mill. He said he’d sell it to me, as he no longer used it. But when we tried it the motor quit. I took the motor to be repaired, but when I brought it back in working order two days later the old man had decided not to sell the mill.
“I’ll grind your wheat here for you,” he said. “You can pay me with honey.”
In a couple of hours we ground enough grain to make 7 pounds of flour and 4 pounds bran, but I knew I would not return, as economically the exchange made no sense for me. I’d find another way. At any rate I had a big paper bag full of lovely whole-wheat flour. I also had a paper bag full of bran, which is the outer shell of the wheat grain. This made a nutritious treat for our hens and horses.
The next day, July 31st, I baked bread, carefully following the “Basic Whole Wheat Bread” recipe from The Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book2. While it was rising I telephoned our helpful neighbors, inviting them for dinner.
From start to finish, it took 6 hours to make 2 one pound loaves of bread.
July 31st at sundown, Armando, Herman, and Alice arrived. It was the start of Lammas, and we sat down altogether to a dinner of homegrown vegetables, omelets made of freshly laid eggs from our hens, and, to my immense joy and satisfaction, the most delicious bread any of us had ever tasted! Home baked bread made from freshly ground grain really is something to celebrate!
Notes
1. Kasarda, D.D. “Can an Increase In Celiac Disease Be Attributed to an Increase in Gluten Content of Wheat as a Consequence of Wheat Breeding?” Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. Vol. 61, No. 6 (2013): 1155–1159.
2. Robertson, Laurel. The Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book: A Guide to Wholegrain Bread Baking. New York. Random House 1984.