I’ve always found amaranth quiet easy to harvest. I just cut the stalk and beat it on the inside of a bag. I noticed that what I’ve planted is up. I’m excited.
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Hmmm… I wonder if I just needed to hang the heads for a long time to dry. We get 40+ inches of rain a year and have a lot of humidity, so maybe they just had too much moisture to release the seeds.
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Last time i did it we did the same thing except mine wasnt the grain type i harvested red die seed it was very easy. We used my normal old pillow case method. Fill up the pillow case half full with the seed heads and then crumple it , beat it , stomp on it and poor out the seeds in a bucket. Took 2 minutes only.
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Flaxseeds are known as an excellent whole grain option for those following low-carb diets (as nearly all of the carbs in the seeds are fiber, a non-digestible form of carbohydrates that aren’t counted in the overall carb content). This means that two cups of flaxseed meal contain just 5 grams of carbs .
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The harvest/threshing itself wasn’t the part that took so long for me. It was winnowing/cleaning the grain. I cut the heads when they started releasing seed and left them to dry in brown paper bags in a greenhouse for a few weeks. I then threshed by crumpling them into a large metal bowl, a bag at a time. I shook the bowl to cause the seeds to settle. I removed the largest chaff by hand and then, shaking repeatedly to cause the seed to settle and chaff to rise, removed a lot of the finer stuff by blowing it away with my breath. I finished winnowing by repeatedly decanting from bowl to bowl and allowing the wind to blow away any fine chaff, then running several times through a sieve. (My clothes and pockets were full of amaranth flower bits by the time I was done!)
Doing more at a time by threshing in a sack—and using a larger screen and bowls—probably would’ve saved time. I always do things the hard the way for some reason! 
If I do a larger planting next year, I’ll probably make some changes along these lines. Also, I’ll probably not process it all at once. The nice thing about leaving the heads somewhere to dry before threshing is that you can do a little at time, whenever you feel like it.
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I would like to grow oats and black beans
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Great goals. I’d start with the black beans if were you. They are easy to harvest.
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And their full of antioxidants 
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Did the Benjamin grow on the same plant? If you could breed for that trait you’d be set! D
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Update: we totally didn’t harvest the buckwheat. The sheep got into that field, and apparently sheep really love buckwheat.
My small plot of Rouge de Beaudeux is growing beautifully so far!
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I want to get hull less oats to grow this coming year. spring is damp and cool then hot dry summer- they go in ground after last frost correct?
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I typically plant my oats in mid-March and our last expected frost is in mid-May.
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Depends on where you are at. Here in central/south Texas we plant oats in September or October. Try to time it just before the first cool front so they get rain. The oats overwinter. Usually we don’t get winter temperatures below 20 F, though the teens have been known to happen. Got to near zero in February 2021, which was very unusual.
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we get way below zero. and last Friday around mother’s day week. I’ll put them out in March I think
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In cold climates, oats are not considered frost hardy. Fine if they are just a cover crop then the frost can terminate them, but if you want to harvest grain…
Typically I plant oats in the spring, at or just before the last frost.
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I planted spelt and Kernza about 4 weeks ago and both look pretty good at this point. It’s just a small plot, no more than 1/8 of an acre, but I"m still excited about it. The harvest and processing probably won’t be fun, but I’m still excited about the project.
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That link says that it is perennial. Didn’t mention for how long, but if you can get several years out of it I’m thinking about trying a small sample patch. Seems like the second year would have grass and weeds competing with it though.
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I was told that weeds are not an issue by a farmer who grows a couple hundred acres of it each year. Although, I don’t think he’s growing it as a perennial.
I grow corn, garbanzo beans, barley, green peas at a community garden. Corn is the easiest of all because once it grows to a certain height the weeds do not get sunlight and stop growing so you only have to weed or work the soil once.
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