Quinoa harvesting

Self Sufficient Life in East Palo Alto hosted a quinoa harvesting workshop, to provide education but also get some help with this time-consuming task. I sometimes use quinoa instead of (brown) rice for variety. I'd been pondering the feasibility of growing it myself to continue my own path toward self sufficiency.

Harvesting the seeds is easy but time and water intensive.

This is a quinoa plant that is almost ready to harvest - the plants ended up not being as dry as they should have been when the workshop rolled around.

You lay the plants out to dry further after cutting, then chop them into smaller pieces.

Grab a small handful of the pieces and roll your hands back and forth. The seeds and small plant matter will break away from the stems and leaves. A sieve will allow the seeds and small matter through. Toss the large pieces into the compost - no more use for them. This step is particularly time consuming and is better done with a group of friends.

This is what comes through the sieve.

 Place the seeds and plant matter into a bowl and fill with water. Mix with your hand. Most of the seeds will sink to the bottom and the plant matter stays at the top, to be skimmed off.

 Repeat a couple of times and you have what LOOKS like ready-to-eat quinoa. However the seeds are still covered by a coating of saponin, which makes them bitter.

The host said that he was taught to remove the saponin with repeated rinses, but it's inefficient. He found the best way to do it was by swirling the seeds with water at low speed in a blender.

 Very quickly the blender fills with the bitter foam!

 Rinse and repeat until you are not seeing foam come off the seeds.

After a final thorough rinse, we finally had beautiful, golden seeds!

I would like to try growing my own quinoa, but I will definitely have friends come over to help me harvest. Also during the demo the host let the rinse water soak into the ground but he said that it doesn't seem to harm plants, so I would catch and reuse the water.