thrashing

noun, ‘threshing’: the action or practice of separating the grain of a cereal crop from the husks and straw by any of various methods, such as by shaking, trampling, beating with a flail, or (later) by means of a combine harvester or similar machine (OED, 2b); see also thrash

“Him and Uncle Len took over the farm and the thrashing.”

“The only time they need the horses, when they were thrashing, eh?”

“Well, when I started thrashing, was an old steam engine.”

“I was just old enough to see the tail end, the last two or three years, of thrashing, eh.”

“Thrashing took the grains out of the… different types of grain. Oats, barley, wheat, you know.”
“So it’d take the seeds out of the grain? No.”
“Off the stalks.”

“Summer thrashing and harvest, it was kind of a busy time. Always quite a gang of guys around and good food and good cooks.”

“I remember being down at the Foot place. They were thrashing down there for … I don’t know who had the farm, but there was a steam engine thrashing at Tom Smith’s. I don’t know whose it was, had a canopy over the top of it.”

“Father said about him … they’d be thrashing or at a bee of some kind, and somebody be’s telling a big story, and this Mr. Smith would say, ‘You know, I never called anybody a liar in my life, but you sound a lot like me when I’m lying’.”

“He was a bit of a young lad or early teenager, and they finished thrashing up there, and I don’t know if he was told to clean up around the strawstack or not. But anyways, he started cleaning up, and he thought it would be easier cleaned up if it was burnt. So it ended up burning the barn down.”

“There’d be pies to no end and all kinds of desserts and generally you had the thrashers for at least one day and maybe two, depends on the weather. If you got a day that you might just get set up and start the thrashing, or if you get a shower of rain, well, everything shut down.”

“They used to have a thrashing machine and a steam engine. They come to Wolfe Island to do quite a bit of thrashing around the Head of the island, too.”

“Actually, he had two thrashing machines. But he never came to Wolfe Island that I can remember. He just done the thrashing on Simcoe Island at that time.”

“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.”