Farm Life

While most of my life growing up was spent living in small towns, I did live in farm houses on occasion. The first time I recall living in a farmhouse in rural Red Wing, Minnesota. This is the hills of Minnesota, not the lakes, so the only lake I remember seeing was Lake Pepin. This is a point on the Mississippi river which widens to two miles, and is twenty-two miles long. The year was about 1951-2.

Our farmhouse was on the top of a hill, which was shared, I believe, with one other family. I think my parents were renting, and the other family owned the house and land.

Actually, we probably only lived there for about a year, maybe two. My parents tell me that before I was five they moved very often - usually following whatever work my father could find.

It was here that my sister started school. There was no kindergarten, so she started directly into the first grade. In addition, since the only school in the area was at an orphanage, she started school in an orphanage.

This later point made for an interesting mistake when she graduated from high school. Being in a small town, the local paper ran biographies of all the graduates. When we read her biography, it said that she had been adopted. The reason, of course, was that one of the questions asked the graduates was were they had started school, and she had honestly answered that she started in an orphanage.

Back to Red Wing. One event that I became aware of because of my sisters entry into school was the Korean war. It really didn't look like things were going so well, but I don't think I understood it enough to realize that. That is, I remember her telling me that everyone was going south, as they did early in the war. For some reason, I thought she was talking about a land where the only way people could go was south. Since I was shown where Korea was on the map, the question I pondered is where the people were going to go. After all, if one heads south in Korea for long enough eventually you have to end up in the ocean.

I don't think I was aware of what was really going on, just the story that my sister told. What do you expect from a first grader that had never been to school before?

My father didn't do any real farming. That is, in reality he had a job in the city, and we lived in the country. My mother, however, always enjoyed having a large garden. In fact, at times the garden literally supplied all our vegetables. Even when we lived in small towns, my mother's garden was constantly there supplying us with fresh vegetables in season, and canned vegetables out of season.

Therefore, our life had a cycle. In the spring, dad would plow the garden, then my mother would plant it. After that, my brother and I would do the weeding and hoeing. Then in the fall, or actually throughout the year, my mother would harvest whatever was ready. Any excess was, in fact, canned, and sometimes that was a lot. It was not unusual for my mother to can more than a hundred quarts of green beans, for instance.

I really don't think it worked well because the garden was always being overrun with weeds. But it worked well enough for there to be a harvest every year.

Eventually, we moved to a farmhouse in Lamoni, Iowa, in the southern part of the State, about three miles from Missouri (or "Misery" as we liked to call it.) We lived there from 1961 until 1964 or so when we moved into town. Our house was about three miles north of town.

There we really learned to live off the land. My father's job as custodian at the local college was notoriously low paying, but he wanted to keep it because it was an opportunity to send his children to college, something we could not otherwise have expected. Also, he sent his wife through college so she could get a degree, and teach. (As coincidence would have it, my mother graduated from college the year before I did.)

My father would have liked to have gone, but he figured he couldn't graduate before he retired.

In addition to her garden, my mother would get permission to harvest all the "weeds" that were growing on the fences nearby. These were primarily wild grapes, but she also found a stand of choke cherries, and she canned all of them. Also, we had a mulberry tree growing beside the driveway, which my mother harvested. (Since us children also explored the fields around, I knew were there was a mulberry tree maybe a hundred yards from the house that we used as our own private patch.) There were also gooseberries, and dill growing wild in the yard.

The mulberries were harvested in bulk. That is, my mother would cover the ground around the tree with our sheets, then she would shake the tree. The ripe mulberries would then drop off the tree and land in on the sheet. She would pick up the corners of the sheets, and we would have a lot of mulberries.

Then there was the grass problem. The front yard was quite large, at least an acre. My father didn't like to mow it, and part of it he couldn't mow because it was swampy. He came from Minnesota, dairy country. Therefore, he decided to buy a cow.

He had been moonlighting on a farm near Lamoni at the time, and he managed to talk the farmer into selling him a pregnant cow. I remember him saying that if the calf was female, he would start a dairy farm, something he knew how to do.

The cow was housed in the front yard, so dad didn't need to cut it any more. The cow also liked the swamp grass, so it was kept down as well.

There was one strand of wire around the front yard, probably about three feet high, and hooked to an electric fencer. This kept the cow in the front yard, or at least it showed her were the boundaries were. In actual fact, the fencer only worked for a few months, then the cow knew where the boundary was, so it was never needed.

The day came when the calf was born. The cow ran off, so it took dad a few minutes to find her with the calf. Then, in the style that is common in Minnesota, he tells me, the calf was immediately staked out, and the cow prepared for milking. My father tells me this it the difference between the cattle grown in southern Iowa, and the dairy cows in Minnesota. Cattle would be allowed to nurse from the mother directly.

For the first couple of weeks, my father, my brother, and I, would milk the cow, and give all the milk to the calf. To get the calf to drink required us to stick a finger in the calf's mouth, then push his head into the bucket of milk. Feeding all the milk to the calf early on was good for the calf we were told. After a few weeks we would feed some to the calf, and we would drink the rest.

Then a problem came up. My father had been told the cow would give maybe half a bucket per day. In actual fact, we were getting anywhere from one to two buckets per milking, and the cow had to be milked twice a day. He, therefore, concluded that the farmer that sold him the cow must not have known how to treat a dairy cow.

The bucket was a five gallon bucket, so two buckets a day was about ten gallons. There were were eight people drinking it, so that meant we were expected to drink slightly more than a gallon of milk per day.

We had milk with every meal. In fact, my mother would make pudding for breakfast just to get rid of the milk. Actually, not all the milk was drunk, because my mother would carefully skim off the cream (we really drank skim milk) which was sold for money. I would not be surprised if some of the milk was simply poured on the ground due to excess supply. I know that my father tried to make some cheese, but I don't think he succeeded.

Meanwhile, the calf grew larger. The day came when the calf was too big to handle. By then I suspect he weighted a couple of hundred pounds. Then my father hired a team from the local locker (public freezer, for those too young to remember) to butcher the calf, and we filled our freezer with meat.

I'm not really sure how long my father kept the cow. I do remember having to get up at 5:30 to milk the cow, and be ready for the school bus which came at about 6:30.

At one point when we were living in the farmhouse, my mother decided to grow chickens for the eggs. This didn't really last long, as chickens are smelly creatures, and she decided she didn't want to put up with the smell. They ran around outside, keeping the yard outside the cow pasture smelly all the time. My parents quickly got tired of it.

Therefore, my father decided to kill all the chickens so we could have chicken. I remember him cutting the chicken's heads off one at a time. Then he would allow the chicken to run around "like a chicken with its head cut off" until it ran down. Then mom would pull off the feathers, and we would have chicken for the freezer. (My parents always had a freezer.)

Later, after we moved into town, my father thought about raising rabbits - for the fur, I think, but I'm not sure. He was always trying some new money making scheme. They met the same fate as the chickens. My mother made hasenpfeffer, a German rabbit dish, which I remember. I think she may have gotten the idea because the older sister she grew up with had a German husband. (My mother was an orphan when she was married.)

In fact, my parents grew so much of their own food that when food stamps came out, they couldn't get any. My understanding is that the food stamp program was designed to supplement the food people were eating, not to cut their food expenses, so the people were required to pay the money normally spent on food to the government, and replace it with more food stamps. The amount spent was determined by the government. Since my parents had six children and themselves they were required to pay $125 per month for food stamps, the amount the government concluded they spent on food. They would get $150 or more worth of food stamps as a result. But my mother calculated that she was actually spending about $25 per month on food, so to get the food stamps they would have to come up with about $100 per month more for food. My parents had to forgo the food stamps; my father couldn't afford them.

One advantage of living in a rural environment is that I had ample opportunity to explore. That is, there was a field near our house that belonged to the same farmer that rented us the house. As children we would explore down the fence row - maybe as far as half a mile. This is where we found our mulberry tree, so exploring in this direction when mulberries were in season was especially good.

Mostly what we did was climb the trees.

Since the farms around Lamoni grow cattle, there were large fields for the cattle to graze in. These were allowed to remain what they had been initially: forested land, with grass land on the tops of the hills. We would often go roaming around these fields with groups of teenagers (hey, we were teenagers at the time).

I have many pleasant memories of hiking in the hills. The only problem, of course, is you had to be careful where you stepped.