This Apron Strings post was sub­mit­ted By Mike Schreiner, Leader of the Green Party of Ontario. He’s also well known for his lead­er­ship in co-founding the award-winning orga­ni­za­tion Local Food Plus.

Also, please keep send­ing in your own sto­ries and recipes. This project will con­tinue long past Mother’s Day.

Wheat har­vest on my parent’s farm was a time of hot, hard work and cel­e­bra­tion.  Our extended fam­ily helped dur­ing those tense days of har­vest­ing, hop­ing to get the crop in before a storm wreaked havoc on our hard work and income.

Most of our wheat was loaded onto one of my dad’s eigh­teen wheel­ers and shipped directly to the local co-op to be trans­ported by train to dis­tant mar­kets.  Unlike his corn and soy­beans, which dad sold to local feed mills for cat­tle, our wheat trav­elled far from home.

The one excep­tion was the annual rit­ual of col­lect­ing bins of wheat berries for my Grandma Boyd, my mom’s mother.  Idabelle, my ten year old daugh­ter Isabelle’s name­sake, col­lected wheat each year from our har­vest, in order to grind it into fresh flour for her famous breads, buns, and cin­na­mon rolls.  Thanksgiving and Christmas, in par­tic­u­lar, would not be com­plete with­out a large assort­ment of her fresh baked goods cel­e­brat­ing the bounty of our har­vest. Continue »