Bonus: Harvesting Wheat by Hand: Cradle, Shocker, Binder

We mentioned here that Allen Shanklin died shocking wheat.  What in the world?  Here are some terms to familiarize yourself with the art of harvesting wheat by hand.

Cradle: An attachment for a scythe for cutting wheat and catching it with all the heads aligned for easy bundling.  Comes in  grapevine or turkey wing varieties.  Every cradler carried a whet rock in his pocket to sharpen the blade as needed (after about a quarter mile).

Binder: The person who would pick up the piles of grain, tie them, and throw them in rows for the shocker.

Shocker:  The person who picked up the tied bundles to put into shocks.  A shock is a cluster of 6-8 bundles of wheat, standing upright, waitinging in the field for a few weeks to cure prior to threshing.  Sometimes instead of being shocked, they were hauled to be stored in huge stacks near the barn for easy feeding or later threshing.

See this link for a beautifully written description about an old-timer, recorded in 1974.

Swing, grab the grain, drop it, step, swing, over and over in rhythm without pausing for the length of a field. Elvie says, "I'd go a quarter of a mile, then stop and rest, whet the cradle, it wouldn't take but a few strops, then turn around then and be ready to go again."

Another great description, from here.  You've got to read their account of harvesting, raking, and tying.  They didn't even get to threshing or gleaning yet!  That user said:

 "It takes about ten minutes to become an expert with a scythe. It doesn't leave you breathless and panting. It's not physically hard -- it can't be, otherwise farmers from an earlier age couldn't keep it up all day as they did -- and once a rhythm is developed, it goes rather rapidly.  ... It's rather soothing and satisfying. The scythe does the work -- that's the important thing to remember -- and as long as you allow your body to go with the flow, you can keep it up for a long time."