Hay

Hay was an important crop on our farm.  The crop started with a planter called a Lister, which was a row-crop planter.  In the Spring, the fields were prepared and planted.  We used a row-crop tractor called a FarmAll H.  I spent countless hours driving that machine in all kinds of  weather.

The crop we used was called Kafir Corn---it was a cane sorghum crop that some farmers chopped up and stored in silos.  They ran it through a chopper and blew it up to the top of the silo where some unfortunate worker tromped around to pack it down.  We harvested it in the field with a binder which tied it up in bundles with twine and left them on the ground for us to come along and arrange them in teepee-shaped piles called shocks.  They remained there until we had time to gather them and haul them to a stack near the feeding corral.

Each morning when we did chores, we had to pitch these bundles off the stack and into the feeding troughs.  We also used alfalfa hay, but we did not grow it because our upland soil didn't suit it.  We purchased it from neighbors who had bottom farmland, and pitched it into our hay mow.  It was from there that we fed the barn animals: calves, the milk cows, and the horses.  The real modern ones baled their alfalfa and used machinery to do most of the work.  I sometimes hired out to work with harvesting alfalfa.  Someone else always did the baling and  I worked with someone else to pick up the bales, toss them onto a hay rack, and lift them into the hay mow. Pitching hay or lifting bales was very hard work.

In the Fall when all the shocks had been collected from the field, we stretched an electric fence around it and turned the cows into it to graze on the stubble.  The cane stalks were full of juice and made excellent fodder.  In the Spring, we tilled the fields, cleaned out the corrals.  Feeding all that livestock over the winter produced a prodigious amount of manure, so each Spring we had to shovel out the stables and corrals and spread the manure on places that needed fertilizer, and the process started all over again.

Chores

Chores:  If it was winter, the day started with Grandpa stoking up the fire from embers banked from the night before.   Ashes had to be shaken  down and put in a coal bucket to be hauled out to the ash pit.  Although grandpa did the fire, the boys hauled ashes out and coal back from the coal pile.

We lit the kerosene lantern and went out to milk the cows while Mom prepared breakfast on the kerosene cook stove.  She had an ice box for a refrigerator.  When oil was discovered on our property and six well were  brought into production, we installed a propane gas tank, got a gas cooking stove and a gas refrigerator, and a gas heating stove.  We thought we were very well off.  Aunt Inda was still cooking on a wood-burning stove and using the well as a cooler.  Eventually, they got propane, too.

It was while we were out at the  barn that she emptied the chamber pot, since she was the only one who used it.  Us guys just went out back and peed on the limestone wall.  For some reason, there were rust stripes spreading down the wall from about waist high and the grass did not grow along that wall.

After milking the cows, we brought the milk to the wash house where we kept the  separator, and separated the cream from the milk. It got tiresome turning the crank, but in the winter time at least we were in the wash house where it wasn't too cold.

 We fed most of the milk to the calves and pigs.  We put the cream in 5-gallon crocks in the cellar where we kept it cool until we could take it to town and sell it at the local creamery.Selling the cream and the eggs she gathered gave Mom her household money.  It was the only cash flow we had between harvests or  stock sales.

After doing the milking and taking care of the milk, we went in for breakfast; then it was back out to feed the rest of the stock. The older calves had to be fed hay, and the cow herd had to be fed bundles of kafir cane whhich had been harvested and stacked in the Fall harvest season.

 

We fed the chickens by scattering wheat or milo in the out for them to scratch.  Even though they were free-ranging chickens, they almost always went to the hen house to lay their  eggs, so gathering them was no big chore and could be left until later if things got too busy.  After chores were done, we went to school.  When we got to high school, we liked to go to social activities.  Grandpa didn't care how late we got home the night before  if we were attending a school activity, and he would   do the night chores for us, but he always expected us to get up for morning chores.

Laundry Day back on the farm

Monday was laundry day. We started early in the morning by hauling water to the big boiler on a gas flame in the wash house.

We pumped it into buckets from the cistern and hauled it to the fire.  Mom's best friend lived on a farm that had the cistern under the house and there was a pump right  over the sink in the kitchen.  How lucky can you get?

 (My other grandma had to heat her water in a large black kettle over an open fire.)















We had a wringer washing machine that had a gasoline engine to run it.

 We filled the washing machine with hot water and two wash tubs for rinse water. After one load was washed, we ran everything through the wringer into the first rinse tub; then through the wringer into the second tub; and then through the wringer into the wash basket. We toted the finished laundry to the back yard where we hung it out to dry on the clothes line or hung things like rugs or overalls over the bushes of the yard fence.

You could learning some interesting things from looking at laundry on the line.

 After they dried all day, we brought it into the house to prepare for ironing. The shirts and fine linens were starched (another operation done in the wash house.) The ironing had to be sprinkled and set aside for ironing. We used flat irons heated on the gas stove in the kitchen. After the cleanup---including draining all the water out onto the outside lawn, we put everything away. Our ears were ringing from hearing a gas engine all day in the wash house, we were tired from hauling the water and wet laundry and hanging it on the line. How much easier it is today. It is still good to hang things out on a line because they smell better.

We still had to do chores morning and evening, and during the school year, we had to go to school.  When we went to Jay one-roomed school for three years while Chalk Mound School had no teacher, all three of us boys rode a horse to school.

 Thinking about all of this makes me realize how much we had to work in those days. I don't know if we are any better off today with all the labor saving devices. I thing if I could go back to farming like we used to, I would if I could make a living at it.