Sonora wheat is lower in protein than most wheat, which makes it ideal for pastry flour & our pies! We usually sow the wheat in late fall or early winter and let the winter rains water it. By early summer the wheat is shoulder high, turns from green to golden & is ready for harvest.

On our July workday, our willing workers, with sickles in hand, cut the golden wheat and made big bunches or “shocks” tied with string, and set them upright in the field to further cure in the sun. Soon we will pass the wheat through the combine (for threshing and winnowing) and mill it as needed for baking pies with visiting students this fall. Pie Ranch pies are made from 100% Sonora flour, and because it’s a whole grain, pie = health!

Following the harvest, the crowd grew to 100 or more people who gathered in the roadside barn to share a meal & dance with the County Line Pickers & Andy Wilson’s amazing calling. The combination of satisfaction from the wheat harvest and some inspiring fashion made for an especially celebratory evening – our favorite outfits were a pair two 15-year-old cousins with matching petticoats, suspenders & converse sneakers. Their relative dressed in all-plaid shorts, shirt & hat was a hit too.

What most sticks with me after a barn dance is the joy & connection that comes from people doing meaningful work together and then celebrating that work together. This sentiment is best summed up by Winona LaDuke, which Jered shared with the crowd on the soap box at the dance:

“After the harvest, we have a big feast, and we dance and tell stories. The anthropologists watched us, and they didn’t like that. They said we would never become civilized because we enjoyed our harvest too much. We did too much dancing, too much singing.

When you no longer enjoy your relationship to your food, to your plant relatives, to the harvest, to the dancing and singing—when you end up with a harvest that has no relationships or joy, I think that must be the mark of civilization and industrialized agriculture.”

At Pie Ranch, we’re proud to creating a joyous and healthy relationship to food and farming. To share in our workdays and barn dances, come on down the Ranch on the third Saturday of each month any time after 2 pm. We’d love to see you.

-Nancy Vail