Previous: Part One: The Barn and Part Two: The Other Farmyard Buildings
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| The Farm Fields |
There are also weed and pest control tasks. Canada thistle is an invasive pasture weed.
So, after honing the scythe with the whetstone, I swing it over my shoulder and
head for thistle patches. We like to mow them down before they form flowers and
go to seed.
Gophers also
need to be kept in check. A group of them can consume a surprising amount of
grass. We use three control methods: shoot them with the .22 rifle when they
pop their heads up; place strychnine-laced oats down their entrance holes; and
catch them in leg-hold traps, dispatching them with a club. Dad poisons them,
and I prefer to shoot them.
In late
June, about a month after seeding, the first crop of alfalfa hay is ready to
harvest on The Nine Acres. The ride-on hay mower cuts a five-foot swath with a reciprocating
saw-toothed blade which is driven by the rotation of the wheels. If the horses
go too slow, the blade does not move fast enough to make a clean cut, so our
old Percheron pair must be continuously urged to keep moving at a brisk pace.
This is hard for the old girls who are nearing retirement at more than twenty
years old. Also, Dolly is slightly lame in a hind leg and lags a bit,
increasing the load on her partner. I feel a mix of guilt and sorrow as they
valiantly struggle to keep up the pace in response to my demands.
After a
couple of days in the sun the hay has wilted enough to rake. Once again, I
harness the horses and hitch them to the 10-foot-wide dump rake with its long,
curved teeth. I find this a much more relaxing job than mowing because speed
doesn’t matter. When the rake teeth are full of hay, I press a foot lever that
activates a cog in one wheel to raise the teeth to leave the newly raked hay as
an extension of the row of that was previously raked.
One day, our
neighbor George Daly is helping us with
raking. He has a pair of newly broken horses that he wants to give some work. I
am in the same field coiling[1]
hay that had been raked when I see Mr. Daly’s team speed up to a to canter. I
think they were spooked by the noise and jerk of the rake when the teeth are
lifted. Whatever the reason, they were now tearing across the field, out of
control.
I yell to Dick “I think it’s a runaway”. I had heard tales of runaways but never thought I would see one. Breathless, I watch the spectacle unfold as the team breaks into a full gallop. George, seated high on the rake, is leaning backwards as he pulls on the reins in a vain attempt to restrain his mustangs. He has nothing to hold onto but the reins. We watch him bounce off the seat and then reappear in the cloud of dust behind the rake. He is not ready to concede defeat. He holds onto the reins for a few long seconds, skipping along on his ample belly in the dusty aftermath of the speeding rake before letting go. We run to see if he is okay and find him black-faced and shaken but not hurt. The errant steeds had come to an abrupt halt at the fence at the east end of the field. George untangles them from the wire and leads them quietly back to his place across the road.
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| A rake like the one Mr. Daly was on. |
The hay is
left in coils for a few days to finish curing. Hay coils can shed a light rain
and still dry, but if a heavy rain soaks them through, we have the extra job of
turning them over to dry out. When the hay is dry, we hitch the team to the
hayrack and head for the field. We pull
alongside a row of coils and start loading. Dick and I jump off the hayrack and
start pitching the coils onto the rack, starting at the enclosed ends of the hayrack. It usually takes two forkfuls to pick up a coil, but I like to
test myself by trying to do it in one.
Molly and
Dolly proceed along the row of coils starting and stopping by our verbal commands. When
the center unenclosed part of the rack has a couple of feet of hay, Dick climbs up to
build the load, distributing, organizing, and packing the hay. By the time I am
hoisting forkfuls 10 feet high I know we have a full load of over a ton of hay
ready to haul and stack in the yard beside the barn.
We pull into the yard leaving enough room for the haystack between our hayrack and the barn. After we fork off half the load Dick jumps down and arranges the hay in a about a 7’x 15’ rectangle to form the base of the stack. I unload the rest while Dick packs and arranges it. He keeps the walls of the stack vertical while keeping it high in the middle to create a thatching effect on the sides to repel the rain. On the fifth and final load of the day Dick tapers the stack to create a rounded top and the stack is almost finished. The final touch is going around the stack stroking its sides with our pitchforks to leave vertical surface straws to better shed the rain.
The nine-acre field of Alfalfa yields ten loads of hay, and five more loads the next day complete a second stack. In a few days, the twenty-acre “Big Field” of Brome grass and Alsike clover mix will be ready to cut, and the haying process is repeated taking up most of July. The feeling of having three more haystacks in the hay yard and one by the sheep corral is very satisfying. Dick and I get a break in mid-August as we enjoy a week at the United Church boys summer camp in Elk Island Park. When we return, we start in mowing the second crop of Alfalfa for the final hay harvest of the year.
The hay
harvest is finished but the grain harvest is yet to come. By late September the
oat field has turned from olive green to ecru as the panicle heads of the
plants ripen. It’s time to drag the old McCormick binder out of the shed and
grease the bearings, check the canvasses, and load the binder twine. It is a
complicated implement. Like the mower, it has a six-foot reciprocating serrated
cutting blade but here the similarity ends.
Instead of
the cut crop falling on the ground, it is pushed back into a conveyer canvas by
a rotating reel above. This first canvas carries the cut oat stalks to a second
which elevates them a few feet until they slide down the other side to the
knotter. Here the stalks are bunched and tied into a bundle (sheaf) about eight
inches in diameter, after which they are dropped onto a carrier near the ground
level. When ten bundles have accumulated, a pedal is pushed to drop the carrier
leaving the bundles on the ground and eventually making rows of bundles piles
across the field.
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| A Binder like ours |
The binder, because of its weight and many moving parts, is too much for old Molly and Dolly so Dad borrows neighbor Dick Hulbert’s three-horse team of bay Belgians. The three of them pull the binder around the field with ease. This is an example of the sharing of resources among our neighbors. Equipment, labour, and horses might be shared and accounted for through work exchange, simple neighborly support, and sometimes even cash.
Dad operates
the binder while Dick and I do the stooking. When the crop is first cut, the oats
are of a chewy consistency and must be left for at least a week for them to
become hard and dry for threshing. For this final ripening, we stand the
ten-bundle piles on end to create stooks. I start by picking up a bundle in
each hand and plunking their butt ends down on the stubbled ground about two
feet apart, pushing their tops together to create an inverted “V”. I add two more pairs of bundles on either
side producing an A-frame stook. Dad says it’s best to align them east-west so
the prevailing west winds can pass through them to assist the drying. We are
wearing gloves because the bundles can contain prickly Hemp Nettle and Canada
Thistle in these days before herbicides.
When the
oats are ready, the neighboring Hulbert brothers arrive to do the threshing. I
am excited when I hear their cleated steel-wheeled Minneapolis tractor coming up our driveway.
Bob is on the tractor towing their 22-inch-feed Case threshing machine and his
brother Dick follows with a team and rack. Bob pulls the machine in beside the
granary, unhooks the tractor and levels the machine. He then positions the
tractor facing the machine so that he can connect the tractor power-take-off
pulley to the threshing machine pulley with a thirty-foot-long six-inch-wide
belt.
In the
meantime, as Dick Hulbert is helping set up the machine, brother Dick and I are heading for the oat field on our Percheron-drawn hayrack to load up. Dad has hired a man though the Edmonton
employment office to help as a field pitcher who is already in field waiting t.o help us load.
He is big strapping Black man who later tells us at dinner that his regular job is
running the plucking machine at South Edmonton Poultry Plant. He and I pitch
the bundles onto the wagon while Dick arranges them like sardines in a can with
their butt ends facing out on the open sides of the hayrack. When we are loaded, we
make the quarter-mile trip to the thresher with Dick and atop the load.
Meanwhile, our hired field-pitcher waits among the stooks to help load Dick
Hulbert`s rack.
As we pull
up alongside the bundle intake feeder on the threshing machine, the noise from the tractor and
the whirring machine makes it hard to hear each other. Dick goes into the
granary to level the oats coming into the bin from the pipe through the wall
while I unload the bundles. I am careful not to feed them into the machine too
fast or it will plug up the works inside. They must also be tossed in
grain-end-first to achieve the best thresh. I don’t know how it works inside
because all I can see in this loud and dusty environment are knives clawing at
the sheaves to cut the twine as they go in, and oat straw being blown out of a
ten-inch pipe, fifteen feet in the air creating a straw pile.
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| Typical threshing scene, We had grain going into the granary instead of a wagon |
By the five o’clock shutdown, after breaks for lunch and afternoon tea, about half the field is cleared. If the weather stays dry, we will finish the field tomorrow.
But our threshing job is not over yet. The arrangement is for the Hulberts to do our threshing, and for Dad to partially compensate them by providing a team and wagon for their harvest. And they have more to thresh than us. So, on a crisp October morning a few days later we harness up our team, hitch them to the rack and head down the half mile dirt road to their threshing site. Molly and Dolly are sufficiently reluctant to go to work that they plod along very slowly. They even try to turn off into every one of the five intersections along the road, two of which are overgrown with grass and haven’t been used in years.
Coming home after their hard day’s work is a different story. They need no guidance or encouragement to head straight home at the briskest pace they have displayed all day. When home and unharnessed they go to the trough for a long drink and then restorative roll in the dust of the barnyard.
Part Four - Help From Machines, is the last piece of this blog, and describes how our farm work changes after Molly and Dolly are gone, plus a few related vignettes.[1] Coiling takes a bit of pitchfork skill because the
2-foot-high igloo-shaped mound of hay should resemble thatching to shed the
rain.
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