Black Walnuts
We had a few black walnut trees on our property. I'm not sure if it started out as busy work for us kids, but we all eventually took to cleaning the husks off -- which is a very messy job. Oh wait, it was probably fun for us kids because of the mess. We used to pound the walnuts in husk through a round hole in a brick. Then the walnuts were laid to dry. Once dry we enjoyed a lot of black walnuts all winter long. The whole family would set around the table on cold winter evenings and eat walnuts. Each of us would get a pie tin with a half of a brick inside it. We placed the nut on the brick and cracked it open with a hammer; we used a nut pick to pick out all the nut meats. Sometimes my mom made black walnut cookies for us too.
We also had hickory nut trees and a beech nut tree on our property. Hickory nuts are one of my mom's favorite nuts. I remember once or twice a year us kids would sit and pick enough hickory nut meats so mom could make her favorite cookies.
Make the Bed
My Mom is really big on making beds. From the time we could toddle around she encouraged us to take a stab at making our beds. She was very understanding -- she never expected us to do it perfectly. She was training us to develop the habit. Neatness would come with time. I especially liked to help her make her bed, which we called "the big bed". I remember being very impressed that she could get the bedspread on over the pillows just so. I still haven't developed this talent, which is why bedspreads drive me nuts. My mother-in-law makes up the guest room with one of these and I fight with it every time we go up there.
Laundry
You can learn all about how we did laundry
here. I still love laundry to this day, especially hanging it up out doors. Sometimes when laundry feels a little overwhelming I stop for a moment and close my eyes to take a trip back to my childhood. I think about how much work laundry day used to be and remember that it took a
whole entire day. It takes all of 5 seconds for me to remember how very fortunate I am to have time saving appliances that allow me to do something else while the laundry is on auto-pilot.
Castration Day (wonder what kind of Google searches I'll get on this one)
This chore was mainly done by Daddy and my older brothers. As soon as I heard my dad talking about going out to "do it" I hung pretty close to the house until all the squealing was over. As much as I disliked this chore, I'm mentioning it because when you live on a farm, even the chores that are strongly disliked are very necessary and it's important to know how to do them.
Cutting And Stacking Wood
This was very tiring work, but I loved doing it. When I got to be about 9 or 10 I became my dad's "woodcutting helper". Each summer we headed out to the woods on our property and spent several weeks cutting enough wood for winter. My dad did the cutting with his chainsaw and I would help carry the pieces and throw them into the back of the pickup. I loved the whole experience of being out there in the woods and enjoying the beauty of it all including the smell of fresh sawdust. Once we were all done for the season, my dad took just me (not the whole family) to McDonald's. Going to McDonald's was such a rare treat in itself but it was even more special because it was just the two of us sitting there congratulating ourselves on a job well done.
One of my brothers and my dad usually split the wood over a course of a couple of months. Of all the kids, I did most of the stacking, primarily because I liked to do it so much. There is a real knack to stacking wood properly and I still get just as big a kick out of doing it well as I did when I was ten. When my husband and I first moved out here we had a giant old tree that had to come down. We spent a lot of time the whole first month after our wedding stacking wood. I remember smiling to myself as I worked. Working side by side on a project that benefited us both was such a good way to begin our life together. Looking forward to the cozy evenings in front of the woodstove helped make the work all worthwhile.
Sewing
My mother had a 1960 Singer Sewing machine. She received the sewing machine as a wedding gift, back in the day before cappuccino makers were considered a necessary staple to start out married life. Over the years she made so many beautiful things for us all. One of the most touching memories of my mother is her bending over that sewing machine late into the evening trying to finish up a new dress for me to wear to school. Sitting bent over for so long really hurt her back, but she new how excited I would be to wear a pretty new dress the next morning. It was so touching to know my mom would spend hours at the sewing machine after she had already worked so hard all day. Sadly, I don't ever remember properly thanking her -- I was usually so excited about the dress; a thank you wasn't the first thing on my mind.
Mom taught us girls to sew when we were all quite young. We started by "helping" her with scraps and sewing on buttons. Over time we gained experience and became very good helpers. We've all helped with the family mending (on a farm there seems to be a lot of mending to be done) and sewing clothing. While none of us are a 5 star seamstress, we are all pretty handy with a needle and thread and have made several articles of clothing and home items.
Gardening
We grew a large portion of the fruits and vegetables our family consumed each year. Each of us kids was expected to help with the garden. If you were little enough to squat down and put a seed in a hole, you were big enough to help. Each day we had a certain number of rows to hoe. Rather than foster a dislike for gardening, our early gardening chores caused most of us to develop a life long love of gardening. You can read more about our garden
here.
Canning
We canned a large portion of our produce each summer and fall. Let's put it this way: the whole process was lengthy, messy and hot -- we didn't have any air conditioning and somehow it always worked out that canning day was the hottest day of the week. Later in the fall, the cooler canning days were liked by all. We called canning "putting up". We put up dill pickles, bread and butter pickles, stewed tomatoes, green beans, peppers. We made jam and jelly from every kind of fruit available to us and then put up peaches, pears and plums. All of us like peaches the most. Every day after school we opened a quart of peaches; everyone got a few slices and some of the rich sugary syrup. It was a sad day in our house when we ran out of peaches and had to move on to the pears for our after school snack.
Gleaning
In years past, combines didn't leave the fields as clean as they do today. Lots of corn and grain was left behind in the field. My dad couldn't see any sense in letting this food go to waste. He would drive the pickup truck out into the fields and the whole family would fan out and pick up as much was we could carry and toss it in the back of the truck. We stored the gleaned corn in the barn and used it to supplement the pigs' feed during winter.
Farm Chores
Farm chores included several things that I helped with. Usually one or two kids with help Daddy with these chores: cleaning out the pig pens, cleaning out the chicken coup, feeding and watering the animals, squirting pigs with the hose and making a nice mud pit for them in hot weather (this was my all time favorite chore; actually it probably was just something my dad let me do for fun). I remember anytime we cleaned the pig pens and the chicken coop feeling sorry for myself because we didn't have horses. Those of you that grew up in an agricultural setting know that horse manure is the one you would rather shovel most because it stinks the least.
Two of my
self made playtime farm chores were making mud "poultices" to smear on every fly or mosquito bite on our sows. I fancied myself a young veterinarian and wanted to make sure my pigs didn't have untended to bites. I also made it my job to "help" all the little runts make sure they got just as much chance to nurse as the bigger piglets. Sometimes a sow has too many babies and not enough spigots. It was very distressing to me to think the little piglets might not be getting enough to eat. There was many a time I pulled a bigger piglet off the mama and held a little one up to latch on. This was probably considered playtime, but I took it very seriously!
Another fun chore was taking care of the "runts". We kept all of our runts -- no matter whether it was a sheep, goat or pig in a box behind the wood stove. Oh how I used to hope and pray for a runt in every litter so I would have a little baby something to tend to in the house. Most often it was a piglet. We kept them in a sturdy cardboard box with lots of shredded papers and rags to soak up their droppings. The little runts probably spent more time out of the box being held by one of us kids more than in the box.
Minding the Baby
In a larger family, it seems like there is always a baby or a little one that needs looking after. We called this "minding the baby". While none of us older children were the primary caregiver for a younger one, we all took our turn at minding the younger ones. This included feeding, burping, changing diapers, helping them go potty, grooming and just watching out for their welfare.
This wraps up the chores edition of my
Old Fashioned Life. As always, please
email me or leave a comment with your questions.
I'm currently working simultaneously on three new posts for this series.
Mama Hen recently asked about what our home was like, so that's the subject of one post, another one is Bath Day; (we only took baths once a week so that should be very interesting.)
Louise,
Rebecca, and
Roxanne got me started on another post; How to Raise Your Children To Become Adults. It's a little presumptuous of me to write a post on how to raise children when I don't have any, but I'm going to write it from the child's perspective. I will share a lot of what my parents did day in and day out to train up children that were able to turn around and become a blessing to them instead of a headache. This post will take a while to put together because I don't want to come across as too preachy. Obviously that will be tough to do because I share my parents very strong feelings on this subject.
