glean

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• intransitive verb To gather grain left behind by reapers.
• intransitive verb To gather (grain) left behind by reapers.
• intransitive verb To collect bit by bit: synonym: reap.

from The Century Dictionary.

• To gather after a reaper, or on a reaped field; bring together from a scattered condition, as grain left after the removal of the main crop.
• Hence To collect in scattered or fragmentary parcels or portions; pick up here and there; gather slowly and assiduously.
• To gather stalks or ears of grain left by reapers; also, to collect or gather anything in a similar way.
• noun A handful of corntied together by a gleaner.
• noun Anything gathered or gleaned.
• noun A somewhat indefinite unit; a bunch: as, a glean of teazels. [Essex and Gloucestershire, Eng.] A glean of herrings, by a statute of Edward I., is 25.
• noun The afterbirth, as of a cow or other domestic animal; the cleaning.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• noun A collection made by gleaning.
• intransitive verb To gather stalks or ears of grain left by reapers.
• intransitive verb To pick up or gather anything by degrees.
• transitive verb To gather after a reaper; to collect in scattered or fragmentary parcels, as the grain left by a reaper, or grapes left after the gathering.
• transitive verb To gather from (a field or vineyard) what is left.
• transitive verb To collect with patient and minute labor; to pick out; to obtain.
• noun obsolete Cleaning; afterbirth.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun obsolete cleaning; afterbirth
• verb To harvest grain left behind after the crop has been reaped.
• verb To gather information in small amounts, with implied difficulty, bit by bit.
• verb To frugally accumulate resources from low-yield contexts.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• verb gather, as of natural products