A Kid Grows Up on a Farm - Part Two: The Other Farmyard Buildings

 Previous: Part 1: The Barn

About 50 steps from the barn in the direction of the house is the Milkhouse. It is a two-room 8’x12’ structure with a square, roof-top ventilator and brick chimney projecting from the cedar-shingled roof. Outside the front door a small concrete pad with the date 1935 etched in one corner, indicates its year of construction. Dad tells us he had a carpenter get materials and help him built it in exchange for a cow. That was during the depth of the Depression when lumber and labour were cheap, and money was scarce. He also mentions that men from Edmonton were walking farm roads looking for work, not necessarily for money, but merely in exchange for food and shelter.

Activities in the milkhouse are simple. In the entrance room the pail of milk from each cow is placed on the hook of a ceiling-hung scale, and the weight recorded on a wall chart according to the date and cow’s name before it is strained into eight-gallon milk cans[1] At the end of milking, I lift the cans into the four-foot-long metal-lined tank of water to cool. The second room holds a large, galvanized sink in which we wash and rinse the pails and strainer. In winter wash water is heated on the wood and coal heater fed from the neighbouring woodpile and buckets of coal from the house. I don’t mind the washing up because it is easier and cleaner than milking and also brings me the satisfaction of a job completed.

The Pump House is a small (8’x10’) barn-red building that houses the well-head and pump. Four angle-iron supports that pierce the roof are the base of the thirty-foot high Aermotor windmill overhead. The west wall bisects a 6’ round wooden water trough, half inside and half out for access by thirsty cows and horses. A separate low trench-like trough for the sheep is filled by overflow from the bigger trough.

We fill the livestock troughs (and the house pressure tank) with a pump that has two sources of power. When a breeze is blowing it is hooked up to the reciprocating wooden rod connected to the windmill’s wind-driven power unit at the top. When there is little or no wind (usually the hottest days in summer and the coldest in winter!) it is connected to the pump handle to employ our muscle power instead. It only takes about two days for the cows, calves, and horses to empty the 300-gallon tank. I figure it takes about 10 pump strokes to produce a gallon of water, so that’s about 3000 strokes to fill it. If so, and we continuously pump 30 strokes per minute, it would take two hours to fill it. However, we usually don’t need to pump that much at one time.

Our reliance on the wind to reduce our workload heightens my sensitivity to any breeze. If there is enough wind, I lift the windmill brake lever and happily pass the job to nature. Sometimes at night after a very calm day I hear Dad go outside. When I hear the rustle of the poplar leaves through my basement bedroom window, I know why.

Wintertime ice on the tank has thirsty cows mooing with frustration. To melt the ice we use  barrel-sized wood and coal tank heater that floats in the tank inside the building. In very cold weather we fire it up to keep some water ice-free. If this is not enough, I swing the ice axe into action. The weather may be freezing, but this task, and the hand pumping keep me plenty warm.

Ours is the only deep-drilled well in the neighborhood and it yields an endless supply of very soft water. Other wells are shallower and produce hard water. Neighbor Jinora Matheson drags in her horse drawn barrel-bearing stone-boat for her laundry water when rainwater fails. Pete Yohemas comes to get theirs in his rickety old 1928 Chev truck.  Sadly, in 1950 a seismic crew testing for oil or gas on the road allowance nearby set off an underground exploratory explosion that not only shakes the foundation of the house but collapses the uncased walls of our deep well. This not only drastically reduces the flow but also makes the water much harder, as it is now partly fed from a shallower source.

The single car Garage is close to the pumphouse and connected to it by a steel wire-mesh gate that divides the house yard from the barnyard. It is clad in barn-red cedar-siding and has two large, hinged doors at the back, and an entrance door at the front. Inside is the ’37 Chev, a workbench with a vise, and an inverted milk-wagon rein-weight serving as an anvil. Tool-holding spikes line the wall over the bench. A large cabinet hangs on the opposite wall which, when opened reveals drawers of nuts, bolts, springs, among the many small items needed on a farm. White painted letters on the brown door indicate its contents: “Sundries”. There are axes, shovels, hoes, some mower blades, and a scythe just inside the door. One job I have is clamping dull cutting tools in the vise and sharpening them with an emery stone.

Not much farm work happens in the garage, but I do enjoy using it for creative endeavors such as carving vise-held wood into little boats and aeroplanes using my jackknife and the drawknife (a two-handled blade we use to peel bark from rails). I also assemble arrow guns from grooved boards, rubber bands cut from old tire tubes, and a clothespin for a trigger. Arrows are made from a thin strip of cedar shingle with a fin left at the thin end.

For fun, we shoot arrows at each other from a safe distance to see how close we can come. But they are not always fun. One day I was testing my accuracy by shooting at a chipmunk running across the top rail of the sheep fence. To my surprise and sadness, I hit and killed it. That was the last time I ever saw a chipmuck in our yard.

About 50 steps northeast of the milkhouse are the two Sheep Sheds and surrounding rail corrals. The smaller sharp-peaked shingle roofed shed is set on a three-foot-high log wall. The other shed has four-foot-high log walls supporting a flat roof of spruce poles and willow branches covered with a thick layer of straw. The sheep use both sheds for shade in the summer and shelter from winter storms in the winter. Rain doesn’t seem to bother them with their lanolin-coated water-repellant wool.

Hampshires in the North Field

In front of the sheds and across the small sheep yard there is a log-rail holding pen and a rail-enclosed haystack enclosure. Every evening I herd our flock of twenty-five black faced Hampshires from the field into the shelter of their yard to protect them from coyotes or neighbour’s dogs, counting them as they pass through the entrance gate to be sure none are missing.

Most sheep work happens in the holding pen. Dick or I catch an animal and hold it while Dad trims the wool from the eyes of those with very woolly faces, and from the rear end if there are any adherences. Next the wool is parted at various points to apply pyrethrum powder to keep the ticks under control. Overgrown and misshapen hoofs are also trimmed.

The busiest times with the sheep are lambing and shearing. Lambing happens as the snow is melting in April. Most mature ewes produce twins while first time mothers are more likely to have single births. Occasionally older ewes will have triplets. If Dad notices a first-time mother having difficulty, we simply get a rope, tie it to the lamb’s emerging front legs, and pull, much the same as we do for heifers having trouble with their first calf. When the lambs are a few weeks old their tails are docked, and the ram lambs not being kept for breeding are castrated.[2]

It's now May. The sheep are panting on hot days so it’s time to remove their winter coats. The empty cowbarn is the shearing site as it is the only place Dad can plug in the electric shears. Dick and I bring the ewes into the barn one at a time for a procedure that at first fascinates me: Dad grabs the two-hundred-pound animal, pulls its head back with his left hand and pushes its rump down with his right, causing it to sit on its hind end. Now that the docile sheep is leaning back against his legs, I hand him the shears to clear the wool from its under-side from its head to its rear end. After successive long strokes shaving most of the right-hand side, he leans the passive ewe to the left to clear to the middle of its back. After trimming the wool from its right legs and head he turns to the other side to repeat the process and complete the job. 

Dad gathers the wool and ties it into a eight-pound bundle (about the size of two fat pillows), for me to lift into the seven-foot-high woolsack hanging from the barn rafters. When the sack is half full, it’s my task to climb the step ladder and lower myself into the sack to pack the wool with my feet. By the end of the day, we are all well oiled by lanolin.

When released from the barn, the ewe bleats for its lambs, but the formerly grey bulky beast has been turned into a cream-coloured skinny wool-less spectacle. The confused offspring are reluctant to approach this strange looking creature with their mother’s voice until eventually convinced of her identity.

Our flock of sheep fills the big wool sack, which is then stitched up and loaded on Pete Yohemas’s old Chev truck for delivery to the Canadian Co-operative Wool Growers collection depot in Edmonton.

Next to the sheep sheds sits the Henhouse, a south-facing 8’x10’ shed-roofed building with a smaller wire-fronted scratching shelter attached. The front has a creaky old wooden door and a small four-paned window. Three thin spruce poles span the back of the room serving as roosts for the two dozen New Hampshire Red hens, a dual-purpose breed that are reasonably good layers and are also good for meat. (Unlike the skinny White Leghorn egg-laying machines). There are six straw-lined foot-square waist-high laying boxes on the left and an opening to the scratching shed on the right.

In summer, the hens are little work. We make sure they have water and some chopped oats in their feeder. They forage the whole yard for grass shoots, insects, and seeds, supplemented by the fruit and vegetable waste that Mom has us spread in the yard. Eggs are collected every day and brought to the house basement for storage until used or sold. One day during the usually boring job of gathering the eggs, I reach under a hen in a laying box. There is nothing there, and she settles back down again when I remove my hand. Guessing that she was about to lay an egg, I put my hand back and wait. In less than five minutes a very fresh egg drops into my hand.

Like all farm animals, in winter chickens are more work: fresh water every day because it freezes at night, and plenty on chopped oats and oyster shell to ensure hard eggshells. The only heat in the henhouse is their minimal body heat and the sun through the window. Frostbite can abbreviate the combs of some during very cold weather.

Dad can tell which hens have ceased to regularly produce eggs, so they eventually become the source of a chicken dinner. Every two or three years he orders a box of a dozen pullet chicks from the South Edmonton Hatchery to raise for flock replacements. I ask Dad why the day-old chicks we get are all female. His answer intrigues me, “The hatchery hires especially skilled “sexers” to sort them, but I don’t understand how they do it.”[3]  

Across the hay yard from the Barn is the Implement Shed housing the seed drill, binder, mower, sulky plow (a one-bottom horse-drawn riding plow), single disc, hay rake, walking plow, diamond-tooth harrows, harrow-cart, and 50-bushel grain wagon. In one corner is a toilet enclosure for use when we are not in or near the house (and which was the only facility ever available to the hired man). 

The final farm building is the Granary, about forty steps beyond the Implement shed. A 12’x16’ wood frame building, it has a large central door opening to an alleyway with two grain storage bins on either side. Two of the bins hold the oat crop from the fall harvest, one is empty, and the other contains oat chop ground for Dad by neighbor Arnold Daly, as we do not yet have the machinery to do it ourselves. 

The first job in the spring is preparing oats to use as seed for the coming season. This is accomplished by putting oats through the hand-powered fanning mill in the granary alleyway. The machine is about four feet high and three feet square. It has a hand crank on one side and a hopper on top into which we shovel the grain. Its purpose is to remove weed seeds from the oats before planting using two methods. As it feeds from the hopper the oats pass sequentially over two slightly sloping screens that are shaken by a link to the crank, thereby allowing seeds smaller than oats to pass through and be diverted, while the partially cleaned oats to drop to the next step. Here the partly cleaned seed drops through a blast of air from a large fan separating lighter seed such as wild oats from the oats to be seeded. As clean seed comes out at a lower level, I shovel it into the empty bin while Dick turns the crank, reversing our roles occasionally until the dusty job is done. We are now ready for the first fieldwork of the year: spring seeding.

Fieldwork is the focus of Part Three of the blog. Here is an aerial photo of the Farm and Salisbury Corner.

The farm amidst our neighbours at Salisbury Corner

[1] Dad’s interest in herd improvement led him to enrol in the Alberta Herd Improvement Program and later the Holstein Record of Production Program. Both require a record of production for each cow. One of our best producers was Linda with 18,000 lbs. (over 8000 litres) of milk in 10 months.

[2] (Warning! Graphic details) Lamb tail-docking is not a fun job. I hold a lamb while Dad squeezes a very heavy  hand-held clamp on its tailhead. This crushes the bone and allows the tail to be cut off with a very sharp knife while clamped. Before Dad unclamps, I tie twine around the stump to minimize bleeding. In spite of it’s cruelty I prefer this method to the one used when I was younger. In that case the tail was pulled through a hole in a metal plate while it was burned off with a red-hot iron producing a very noxious burnt-flesh odour.

By contrast castration is bloodless. The heavy clamp is applied to the scrotum, crushing the blood vessels to the testicles so they do not develop. 

[3] I later learn in my Aggie poultry class that the chick is held upside down so it’s vent can be opened and examined for subtle differences in rudimentary sex organs.