Continued from above...,
"Wheat and rye were cut with the sickle, made of steel with fine saw-teeth edge, and bound into sheaves by hand with straw bands, and oats and buckwheat cut with scythe, until the advent of the hand cradle then making its appearance. All grains were thrashed with the wooden flail, and cleaned with a sheet, two men so swinging the sheet as to blow the chaff from the grain, as it was slowly poured out of the half bushel by another hand, then the hand riddle used to clean the wheat for use. It was about a winter's job for a lone farmer to thresh out and clean the crop of a ten acre field. Men made it a specialty to so thresh during the winter for an agreed price per bushel, going around the neighborhood.
The wind mill, or fanning mill, made its appearance soon after the hand cradle, wheat then would some times be tramped out with horses on the barn floor. Buckwheat was threshed with a flail on a ground floor in the field, and cleaned with a sheet until the wind mill came.
Grass was cut with the hand-scythe, and cured with the fork and hand rake, hauled to the stack in co*ck, by horse and rope or chain, or by wagon, and generally stacked in the meadow where cut, and there fed to cattle, horses and sheep from the stack, on the ground in the winter time. The manure was left where dropped in the field. But little attention was paid to fertilizing the land, because it was not needed. Farming in fact was a sort of skimming process, as compared with the fine cultivation of the present time (1892 is when the author wrote this book about 1840s farming).
The harvest time was then, as it always has been, and still is, a great event as well as a busy time on the farm. Usually quite a number of hands would be employed to reap in the wheat or rye field, who with sickle and regular step, each one upon his allotted land, would literally march through the golden grain, with a leader in front, enlivened by song or joke, until the end of the round was reached, where water, and whisky and shade, would rest the jolly reapers. With sickle on shoulder, the reaper would bind back his sheaves. And woe to the reaper who did not stand the day's work and had to "give out" and lay in the fence corner, and in the parlance of the day, whose "hide was hung on the fence."
The mowing in large meadows was done about the same way and order, by numbers working together.
The old men and boys, and often girls, carried water to the harvest or hay fielf in the coffee pot or jug, and generally the bottle of whisky was to be found in the shade of a tree or fence corner.
The favorite amusement was to see who could get the most blackberries out of the bottle in one drink. The one able to stand the most whisky usually got the most berries. To the workers on the farm, the blast of the dinner horn was a welcome sound, and particularly so to the hungry boys.
One of the special duties of the farm boy, at noon, during hay harvest, while the mowers were resting, was to turn the grind stone to grind the scythes. This duty, often performed by the writer, has made him hate grind stones ever since."
END OF CHAPTER.
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