The Homestead - Part 2 of 3 - The Animals

If you missed Part 1, click here.

What's a farm without animals?  Sure, there are a lot of grain operations in southern Saskatchewan, but everyone has two or three chickens, a few head of cattle, or at least a horse or two.

My grandfather primarily grew grain, but everyone in the family knew about his chickens!  I can remember being quite young and going to the chicken coop to gather some eggs.  This memory is a bit of a mystery to me as I know that he mostly kept meat birds - birds which are slaughtered well before egg-laying age...

While Dad conducted business with Grandpa, I would tear around the farm-yard on an itty-bitty mini-bike.  Around and around and around I'd ride, by myself all day, left to my own devices. I'm not even sure what Dad was doing on those visits and rarely were there cousins with whom I could get into trouble - my cousins were all boys at that time, and either much older or much younger than myself.   

Now that I'm older and have listened to a few stories, I realize that my days were quite tame compared to the rest of my cousins.  I never went into dilapidated barn or the precarious old homestead house.  I never went up to the nuisance ground nor to the gravel pit, both of which were across the road from the farm.  Neither did I start fires nor beat up my siblings.  Listening to stories of my brother and cousins, it's a wonder that any of them survived childhood!

A day on the farm always ended with a big evening dinner - fried or roasted chicken, mashed potatoes with gravy to die for, creamed peas and carrots.  Everything from the farm. I know Grandpa took a tremendous amount of pride in providing food for his family.  As I place my chickens into the freezer, I get a small sense of this satisfaction, too.

Going back there with my Dad was such a good experience. There are so many reasons why I didn't have much of a relationship with Grandpa, but walking through the homestead and listening to my Dad tell stories about each building, each place, each item, each person, was a very special experience.

 This receipt was stapled to the wall of the chicken house.  It's not terribly old (heck I still remember 1981!), but those seem like pretty good prices. It's also interesting to note the address of the poultry supply - corner of Dewdney and Albert, Regina.  I know there is a car wash and battery place on the east side of Albert and some empty lots on the west - I think the business still exists, but that location is long gone.

This is actually a photo of a photo.  Although these are likely not the chickens from the receipt, it does shine a bit of understanding on Grandpa's chicken operation.  I see he has only a few nest boxes for this many chickens, so that tells me these aren't laying birds.  I count at least 60 birds in this photo.

The chicken coop now.  I see that he raised the five boxes from the previous photo and added more at some point.  I didn't get a snap of it, but the roosting dowels from the previous photo were mounted on hinges and had been raised to the roof in order to clean the coop.  The triangular box on the left (and partially cropped on the right) were feed trays - I bet he could fit a 40kg bag of chicken grower in each of those hoppers.  The brooder light still hangs from the ceiling and oddly enough the long-empty room still smelled of chickens.

Certainly at the time, but more poignantly as I look through these photos now, it occurs to me that each item on the farm, save for a few, has been placed in it's spot by a person who is no longer with us.  I suppose most of us have experienced loss, and it's true I was not close to Grandpa, but as I walked through the farmstead I couldn't help but think about all the remnants, collections and detritus of one person's life.  I took this photo of field coats because all of them have hung there for as long as I can remember.  The milk cans and milk bottle rack are the remains of Grandpa's side business of delivering milk to the town's folk.  I can remember a large barn on the property, which housed the draft horses and milk cows, as well as a large pig barn.  Both of these buildings are now gone, with only a small garden marking where the pig barn once stood.

Walking through the tall grass on the south end of the yard, one must be careful - the remains of implements, fencing and miscellaneous dips and holes will greet the unwary visitor.  My dad said he can remember the drafts pulling this manure spreader, he may have even driven it himself.   In the yard there was also some sort of horse-drawn processing equipment (possibly for potatoes) as well as the "flat deck".  Dad says he can remember Grandpa harnessing up the horses and taking all the kids in town for a ride.  Hidden in the grass is a seed drill and several types of harrows. It's remarkable that anyone was able to work that amount of land with this equipment.  Aside from the horse-drawn equipment like the spreader above, it is all in very good shape and very usable, on a small scale.  In fact, Grandpa still used the "one way" (a two bottom plow) and the disk harrow on his 1 acre garden.

Using horses meant feeding and watering horses.  With the chicken house in the background, these two enormous water troughs are the tires from an even older steam tractor.   It's too bad the story of their beginnings and arrival is long-gone, as I'm sure it was quite an event to see these big wheels arriving.  Can you imagine the machine from whence these came?  It's difficult to get an idea of their size, but they are at least 24" wide and probably 8' diameter!  Grandpa placed these next to one of the well houses and filled the bottom with concrete in order to provide water for the horses.  Dad says he can remember playing in the troughs, paddling around with his siblings on hot summer days!  Inside the closest trough is a spike/drag harrow and a roll of snow fencing.

It's hard not to feel a sense of sadness, walking about the property.  The old tractor sitting out in front of the shed. The shop, contents placed with care and attention to function, sits slowly sagging.  The chicken coop, once full of noise and business of chickens, is emptily tidy.  Implements left in the field according to a lost rhyme and reason. The big barn is gone. The big pig shed is gone.  All of the life and lives which once filled this farm slowly dwindled away...

I'm not sure that the family would have consented had I asked, but knowing what I do now, I can't help but wonder if we couldn't have made a go of it on Grandpa's old farm.

 

To be continued...

The Homestead - Part 1 of 3

As many of you know, I recently returned to Regina in order to attend my sister's wedding. While there, my Dad and I spent an afternoon together at the family's homestead. This site was the landing spot for the clan - Great Grandfather owned a couple of sections of land and even donated what is now the town site to the United Church.   At the peak of the farm's productivity, Grandpa owned and farmed almost 2000 acres of land.  This may seem quite average by today's standards (in 2011 the average Saskatchewan farm was  1,668 acres), but 50 years ago this was an enormous amount of land.

As the story goes, after growing up on the family homestead in Saskatchewan, my grandfather struck out to find his fortune.  His searching would lead to a manufacturing job in Toronto, where by all accounts he did quite well and was rapidly rising through the management ranks.  One day he received a missive, instructing him to return to Saskatchewan and take over the family farming business. Not wishing to disobey his father, Grandpa packed up his wife and newborn daughter and abandoned his career in The Big Smoke for the family farm in Big Sky country.

During the War, Grandpa volunteered to go overseas, but was rejected due to his eyesight.  As the story goes, the recruiter assuaged my Grandfather's disappointment by telling him that his work on the farm was just as important as those in the trenches.  I cannot say for certain if this was any consolation, but back to the farm he went.

It was here that three more sons were born into the family, including my Dad - the youngest and the apple of his mother's eye.  Grandma and Grandpa lived in town for many decades, spending winters in Florida, until Grandma's passing.

Grandpa then moved to the farm and continued to snowbird down in Florida for many more years.  Later in life, he moved back into town and "commuted" to the farmstead with his red pickup truck.  He'd then either jump on the tractor or the quad and head out to his enormous garden.  I will always remember digging carrots and potatoes in that garden, and enduring his admonishments and scorn as I accidentally forked a root vegetable.

The dinner table was always furnished with the fruit of his labour - a home-raised chicken, potatoes from the garden, creamed peas of which he was very proud, and inevitably a strawberry-rhubarb pie for dessert.

Since my grandfather passed away last year, the farmstead has been completely abandoned. As you can see from the photos, some of the outbuildings have long since been unused and fallen into disrepair.   As we walked about the yard, my Dad told me stories about these old buildings - stories of his childhood, growing up in a small town, his schoolmates, siblings, pets and animals.

 The Land of Living Skies

I guess this is where every prairie story begins - with the wide open spaces, above and under foot.  This is the sight that greeted me as we wended our way from city, through valley, over flat lands and through coulees to the family's cradle.  I felt like a young child again, in my dad's car, head out the window drinking in the dry summer air.  Upside down, watching the clouds roll by, as one correction line corner fell into another. 

The Field

The staple of southern Saskatchewan, once prolific and ubiquitous - wheat.  Although many contemporary farmers have diversified into other grains and pulses, wheat, oats and barley were the traditional backbone of the Canadian prairies. This field, slowly ripening, is part of the homestead, now leased, but still producing beautiful grain.

The Swather

If you can imagine, this swather has done more work in its lifetime than I have done in mine. Compare this to the monstrosities of a contemporary farm and your mind will reel at the amount of work this machine performed in order to prepare 2000 acres of grain for the combine.  This machine cuts the ripened grain and lays it neatly in a row for the wind to dry before the combine gathers it up. I have memories of my Dad on this machine, helping Grandpa and working well into the night - under a shade umbrella with a jar of water by day, working carefully by tiny headlights in the dust by night.

The Combine

One of the greatest and most complex machines on the modern farm.   Once the grain has had a few days to dry in swathes, the combine moves down the row, picks up the cut plant, removes the head from the stalk (straw), and winnow the grain from the chaff.  The grain is then held in the large hopper behind the driver and emptied with the auger, hanging out on the right, into a truck or tractor wagon.  This machine is miniature by modern commercial farm standards, yet performed just as much, if not more, work than a modern machine.

The Elevator

In so many ways, Grandpa was ahead of his time.  He was one of the first to move from teams of draft horses to a tractor, the first in southern Saskatchewan to own a four-wheel drive truck (the International Harvester Scout) and one of the first to clean his own grain.  This is the farmstead's elevator - where grain was cleaned, dried and stored for a short period of time before moving to the granary. This structure, and the machinery once contained therein, was built entirely by my grandfather.  The building's machinery was housed in the centre portion. Once prepared and ready, the grain was "elevated" and poured into one of the side bins. This is the traditional shape of a prairie elevator and although they are a rare sight today, in my mind's eye I can still see orange, grey and white sentinels standing guard over prairie rails.

The Granary

These buildings dot the prairie landscape - some larger, many smaller.  They are often found boarded up, rotting away and leaning away from the prevailing winds. This building would hold the cleaned, dry grain from his elevator - waiting to be taken and sold to the commercial elevator in town. The church, elevator and Chinese restaurant are the heart of every small Saskatchewan town.

To Be Continued...

Part 2 can be found here.

Sunday Supper

We're having some wonderfully warm, low-humidity days!  Temps are in the low 30s and a slight breeze blowing makes for pleasant work outside. Those who didn't get their haying done before our last stretch of rain are back in the fields, trying to get the work done before it rains again.