THRESHING

For delivery of threshing sheaves (and not only flax), were built two-wheeled wagons with high suspension and wide-extended sides in the front. Usually, two people are required to move the sheaves. They would take them by the scruff out of the piles by three or four in each hand and throw them into the carriage. One was piling sheaves while another threw them in.
 To place flax bundles, like rye bundles, it had to be done skillfully, although they are not spreading out, like oats bundles.
   While stuffing the box to the brim, workers piled up sheaves in rows along the sides, the heads inside. Then sheaves were brought to the threshing floor, left in the barn, and in the evening, grandfather took kindling and started an oven in the barn. Overnight the sheaves were dried.
    In the morning, they were dropped down to the wooden floor of the barn, and then people sat and beat the sheaves with special mallets. Young people and adolescents were especially fond of threshing or beating of flax. So many competed who will do more, to thresh in the morning 40-50 units was considered quite normal. After that, threshed bundles were neatly folded on the pass in the threshing floor and even directly on the carriage to take them back on the field for lying down.
    Flax seeds and an unsifted mass of seed pods are raked into a pile, carefully brushed with a broom and aired. For the draft in the threshing floor were built small side gates were. Sometimes, when there was no wind, it was summoned with soft whistling; some people believed in such a method.
   Thousands of pagan, poetic details and large and small rituals accompanied each stage of labour. Sifted flax seeds were heavy, dark brown; it was said that they "flow." And indeed, they flowed. Like water, it finds even the smallest hole in the shelf or in the bag (again, the hostess should be able to weave sturdy canvas, and the owner must be a good carpenter).
   In the postwar period, flax threshing and breaking were done by machines and combing. To expedite matters, it is not even always thrashed and left on the strip. At one time, flax was threshed in a very original, albeit controversial, way: spread out on the paved road and rolled flax heads with the truck or tractor wheels.