Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Baling, Combing and Sileage Making

When we lived on the farm “putting up” was a common term. My mother used it when she canned vegetables, and my father used it when he baled hay, made hay stacks, made shocks of oat straw, and made huge silage storage hills.
Our farm was relatively small. It was one hundred sixty acres. Forty acres of it was timber, but the majority of it was pasture and crop land. My father raised alfalfa, oats, corn, and soy beans. He depended on these crops to sell and to feed his cattle.
In the fall he would tell my mom that it was time to harvest one of these crops. There were many different phases to “putting up”. The ground had to be cultivated, fertilized with manure, then planted, then cultivated again. When the hay was dry, he put on his mower on the tractor. It was a cycle mower. Two different blades that moved at different times to cut all the stalks of either alfalfa or oats. After the hay was mowed, it had to be win rowed. This process turned the hay over so the sun could dry the bottom of the win rows. If it didn’t rain, it would be ready to either bale or shock depending on the crop. Oats needed to be shocked. This process was back breaking. I even helped my dad when he did this. Several bunches of stalks were stood on end and then tied together. They looked like little Indian teepees. The farmers did this to shed the water. The shocks were fed to cattle at the point they needed fattening for market.
Combining oats was a neighborhood project. The neighbor men and my father would take turns helping each other. The big combine would be pulled behind the tractor. It would extract the tiny oats from the straw and fed it into a wagon pulled by another tractor.
When the combining was done, then the straw needed to be baled. A big enormous machine came to bale the straw. It always seemed to break down. It would feed the straw up a big conveyor, then compress it and take twine rope and tie the bales together. Neighbor men would throw the bales which weighed about eighty pounds onto hay wagons. These hay wagons would then come back to the barn and feed the bales onto an elevator which was powered from a gasoline engine. A man put the bales onto the elevator and a man way up high grabbed the bales and stacked them in the hay mow. The barn had a big hole in the floor which my dad used to throw bales to the first floor of the barn. He used the straw for the milk cows.
If the corn crop was not good or if he needed feed for his cattle, my dad would cut the corn when it was green and chop it up into silage. Wagon loads of silage were dumped in one place and packed with the heavy tractor. Over and over he went until he was satisfied that the silage was packed really tight. When that was done then he would cover it with enormous tarps to keep the rain and snow from ruining it. In the winter he would feed this good silage to the cattle for as long as he could. This mound of feed was called a silage silo.
My dad fed the pigs what he called “slop”. It was sour milk, leftovers from the house and anything else he could think of to feed them. My mother fed them vegetable left overs from her “putting Up”. We always had fat pigs.
One thing I hated about the Harvest time, was the etiquette my mother had about feeding the neighbor men. Kids ate last! “ What?” I thought. I never have to eat last any other time. She always made mountains of mashed potatoes, fried chicken for an army, two or three vegetables, and so many desserts it made my head swim. Often, there was little food left after they had eaten. I found out though after I had my little fit, that my mother had put food away for me and her that we ate after they went back to the fields. It was on one of those days, that my mother was so busy, she forgot to give my brother his bottle. She said he didn't cry for it so she didn't think of it. When she realized he didn't cry she did not give him a bottle again.
She explained to me, that it was important that the men have all they needed to eat because they worked so hard.
She must have really believed that, because every morning and every afternoon she would take thermos’s of coffee, ice tea, sandwiches and cookies to the field via my little wagon to hold all the food.
One of the most interesting things I got to watch was the men washing up before meals. Mother had a wash stand on the porch, with a porcelain basin, lava soap, towels and a pitcher of water that had been warmed by the sun. The men took turns washing up to their rolled up shirt sleeves before mother called them to come in to eat.
As years went by and I become older, most wives worked in town, the farm work was hired out and the men went into town to eat. Where are the memories for the children when that happens?

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