stook

noun, Cdn. & Brit., a small stack of bales of hay or straw or sheaves of grain collected in a field, esp to hasten drying (COD); see also stook, v.

“The blackbirds would come and sit on the stooks and eat all the grain.”

“Would they be stooks back then? The grain be in stooks back then?”

“They used to have grain and they’d stook grain … He taught me how to stook grain. He says ‘You take this fork and put it down, and I put my fork down, and we make a big stook of grain’. And then, they could go along and the thrashing machine would come around and would go from one farm to another. I remember getting involved in a thrashing machine supper.”

“Could you describe what thrashing is? I still don’t know.”
“In the fall, like when you had grain and that, you had like what they call a binder, and you had to go around and cut the field. And your grain and that would all come out in stooks like, eh. So like it’s all tied up. So after the field was cut away, you’d have to take all these stooks and put them up in a thing like this, so the water and that would run off them like, you know, they’d dry. So then later on you’d pick them up and put them on a wagon or whatever, and a lot of the time they were left that way ’til thrashing time, and then you’d have probably a couple wagons go to the field all the time to pick up these stooks.”