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Thrashing In a Bad Year

The marine climate of Whatcom County is mild compared to the Midwest, but it does not guarantee that every crop succeeds. This time of year, late September, my father, Ted, and my grandpa, Gus, worried about rain. A heavy thundershower or a few consecutive days of steady rain could destroy the grain crop, meaning less milk to ship to the dairy, fewer eggs from the chicken house to sell to the grocery stores, and the pigs would not fatten up the way Grandpa liked. A farmer who is not prepared to face a bad crop doesn’t last long on the farm.

Dad and Grandpa never complained about a bad year in my hearing, but I could see it on their faces. One year, probably mid 1950s, the oats were ready to harvest. It had been a good year: the oat heads were heavy and drooping. In those days, Dad and Grandpa grew a traditional mixture of oats and vetch.

Dad went out into the fields after breakfast to check on the oats. I went with him. The days had begun to shorten, the air was cool, and the morning dew was heavy, but the sun burned into the back of my neck. A stiff breeze rattled the dry stalks. Dad thrashed out a head or two of oats in his hand and bit down on a kernel to test its hardness, then spat out the hull. I copied him. He said the oats were ready to cut and we had better get back to the barn and grease the binder.

I know it was the fifties because it was one of the last years Dad used the binder and a thrashing machine. By 1960, he was using a combine and the binder was relegated to the back of the machinery shed until he finally hauled it off for scrap.

I helped Dad by handing him wrenches and the grease gun when he asked for them. By noon, the binder was lubricated, a sickle that Grandpa had sharpened while we greased was mounted, a fresh ball of twine was threaded into the knotter, and the canvas apron that carried the cut grain stalks into the binding mechanism was tight and ready to go. Mom had called a few neighbors on the telephone. They arrived, and we all went in to noon dinner. The bundles from the binder would sit in the field a day or two before the thrashing machine arrived. I seem to remember it was Sorenson’s outfit from Everson.

While the men were eating and drinking coffee, the clouds began to come in from the West, rain clouds coming through the Strait of Juan De Fuca and over Georgia Strait (now called the Salish Sea) from the Pacific where they had loaded up with moisture. Dad cut the back swathe, the first cut around the field in the reverse direction and right up to the fence.

I helped the men pick up the bundles as they came off the binder and set them upright and to the side in shocks, so Dad wouldn’t drive over them when he began cutting in the right direction. All the while, the clouds were darkening and piling up against the hills to the east.

As I remember, Dad cut the back swathe and two rounds before the thunder cracked and rain came down like the clouds were emptying buckets from the sky. The rain flattened the standing oats already bowing under the weight of heads fat with heavy grain. Within a minute, the binder was jammed up with the wet straw that wouldn’t feed, and Dad had to stop. All the crew could do was go home. A few went in to Ferndale to the Cedars Tavern for hands of cutthroat three-hand pinochle in the back room, something Dad or Grandpa never did.

The thunder storm crashed and poured all night. In the morning, the oat field was flattened. The sun didn’t come out for a week and by then grass was growing through the straw and the oat crop was a total loss.

Dad and Grandpa were lucky. They also had a field of wheat that was shorter and a week behind the oats. Dad had wondered if he would have to cut the wheat before it was ready because we would have the thrashing machine for a few days before it moved on to the next job. The shorter stalks stood up to the rain and were not flattened. By the time the sun returned, the wheat was in prime shape and delivered a good crop that didn’t make up for the lost oats, but averted disaster.

It wasn’t the best year, but we made it through.

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Digging Potatoes

I saw a truck load of potatoes in a hopper truck pass through Ferndale yesterday. Somebody must be digging potatoes. From my fleeting view, the potatoes looked good—not too large, uniform size, smooth, clean. U.S. No. 1s, washed and graded in the field and ready for the warehouse. That’s not the way it was done on Waschke Road.

Potatoes on Waschke Road

My grandpa, Gus, was called the Potato King of Whatcom County in Roth’s History of Whatcom County in the 1920s. I don’t know much about the way he raised potatoes in those days, but I have good memories of my dad, Ted, and Grandpa raising potatoes in the 50s and 60s while I was growing up. Like many things on the homestead, planting and digging potatoes was a community event.

Planting

Planting in the spring began with preparing the seed potatoes. Grandpa would choose the best-looking potatoes to set aside for seed for next year. When Grandpa quit selecting the seed, Dad switched to buying certified seed potatoes—White Rose, Netted Gems, and Kennebecs as I remember.

There is an art to cutting seed potatoes. Sprouts start from potato eyes. A whole potato usually has many more eyes than needed for planting, so cutting seed potatoes can double or triple the yield from a sack of seed. Grandpa liked three to five eyes per potato piece planted. Dad, Grandpa, and sometimes my mother, would cut potatoes for several days in late winter getting ready for planting. To speed the work, Grandpa built two “seed cutters,” hoppers with slanted floors he filled with whole seed potatoes. The potatoes exited through an adjustable door that controlled the rate they rolled out onto a tray, which had a fixed vertical knife to slice the potatoes into chunks with the right number of eyes. The chunks fell into a sack and were dusted with sulfur, ready for the potato planter. The knives were kept sharp and I remember cutting myself badly on one when I tried my hand at cutting.

We had a two-row potato planter that required three men to operate. A tractor or team of horses pulled the planter. A set of disks opened trenches into which seed potato chunks dropped. My dad drove the tractor. Two men riding on seats behind the planter regulated the flow of potatoes into the trenches. Sometimes, when help from neighbors was short, my cousin Dave and I got to ride the planter and distribute the falling potatoes, a job that required more concentration and dexterity than you might expect. Another set of disks closed the trenches. It took a full day to plant five or ten acres of potatoes. We planted potatoes in early spring and more often than not, finished planting in the rain.

Dad cultivated the potato field several times during the growing season. The rows were spaced so he could drive the cultivator between the rows and eliminate weeds.

Digging

I looked forward to potato digging in the fall. Dad and Grandpa said that potatoes grew best near the woods, maybe because potatoes prefer acid soil, which meant bright fall leaves, especially the bigleaf maples, were always close in the background. The weather was cool enough for jackets and the air was moist with the fall scent of ripe oat and wheat fields and fruit orchards.

We had a single row potato digger that was pulled by the tractor. The digger was a blade that sliced a foot or so into the ground under the potatoes and vines. The potatoes, vines, and dirt went onto a wide chain belt that shook the dirt off and deposited the potatoes on top of the ground behind the digger. Our digger started out as a horse-drawn implement with a seat for driving the horses. When the potato vines were heavy, someone got to sit on the seat above the chain belt and use their feet to push the dry potato vines along and out the back of the digger. That job often went to a kid with legs long enough to push the vines, usually me or one of my cousins. That job was easy and fun.

The rest of the crew of relatives and neighbors “cleared vines” and “picked potatoes.” The vine clearers threw the vines to the side with pitch forks and the pickers followed, dragging burlap sacks between their legs, and tossing in the potatoes. The star pickers had heavy belts with hooks for the sacks so they could pick with both hands. When a sack was full, the picker would stand it up and grab a new sack from a pile of empties on the flatbed hay wagon.

While my Dad operated the digger, one of the neighbor’s tractors would pull a hay wagon through the field and the men would load on the sacks of freshly picked potatoes. When the wagon was filled, we’d haul it to the house and roll the potatoes down chutes through the basement windows where the potatoes would rest until they were graded and sold on “the route,” Dad and Grandpa’s weekly trip with the pickup truck to a string of small grocery stores and homes in Bellingham. In big crop years, the potatoes that would not fit in the house basement were stored in pits dug into the ground in protected spots in the woods. They lined the pits with cedar rails and straw, then covered the pits with dirt so the potatoes would not freeze.

Grading and selling

Grandpa and Dad sold Washington Combination 75% U.S. No. 1s on the route. As I understood it, we only sold U.S. No. 1 potatoes, but by calling them Combination 75% No. 1, we did not have to pay to have the spuds inspected. We might have gotten more for 100% No. 1s, but not enough to make up for the inspection fee. In any case, Waschke potatoes had a good reputation; the grocers on the route paid Dad and Grandpa a good price no matter what the grade. They also sold potatoes and eggs to Pete Vike, a purchasing agent, who provisioned the galleys of freighters that docked in Bellingham Bay in the 1950s.

Most of the potatoes were stored in the basement of the house. Grandpa and Dad did the grading. A No. 1 potato is smooth and evenly shaped, not small, has no knobs, rough spots, or scabs, and, above all, is not hollow. Large potatoes often have an inner chamber lined with skin. I don’t know why this is a defect. I like baked potato skin and an extra skin on the inside sounds to me like an improvement, but, no matter, a hollow potato was a cull. Any potato large enough to risk being hollow, Dad and Grandpa fed to the animals.

The potato grader was a chute, about thirty inches wide and six feet long built by my grandpa that sat in the basement. The bottom was slats and it was inclined downward at about a 20 degree angle. Potatoes were dumped onto the high end of the grader and they rolled downwards, dirt falling off through the slats. Dad and Grandpa would inspect the potatoes as they rolled downwards and toss any culls that didn’t make the grade into a bushel basket destined to the cows or the pigs. Potatoes that made it all the way to the lower end of the grader went into a burlap sack. When the sack was about filled, it was shifted onto the scales and was filled to exactly one hundred pounds for sale on the route.

This all sounds like a lot of hard, boring, manual labor. I suppose it was, but it didn’t feel that way. The crew of relatives, friends, and neighbors were on a mission. Not a dollar changed hands for the work of in the potato fields. Those who helped got potatoes on their dinner tables, help with haying, cow dehorning, a share in the offal at butchering time– help whenever they needed it. That’s the way it worked on Waschke Road.

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Hog Butchering

Hog scrapers

Last week’s blog featured the old pear tree planted by my great grandfather, Gottlieb. The old tree and some welcome cool rain in Whatcom County reminds me of a several day fall affair that took place each year under the old pear tree— hog butchering. Usually in October or early November rather than September, hog butchering was both a job and a gathering of relatives and friends. The hog scrapers used for butchering were stored by hanging them in crotches in branches of the pear tree. The scrapers eventually were surrounded by the tree and grew into the trunk. They are still there, left from the last hog butchered on the farm in the mid-nineteen fifties.

The pear tree was close to the hog barn where Grandpa raised his pigs. See it in the real estate photo here. It is the building to the left of the barn. You can see the pear tree in the photo. If you look at the picture of the pear tree in last week’s blog, Remembering the Orchard, you can just see the remains of the old scalding trough.

Gathering

Hog butchering was a fall event in many cultures, including the north central Europe from which my great grandparents emigrated. The Waschkes must have carried the tradition of the community event over from Germany.

My grandfather, Gus, was at the center of the event, which occurred after the temperature began dipping into the lower forties overnight, cool enough that meat could be cooled without refrigeration before it began to spoil and early enough that cured bacon, ham, and sausage would be ready for the holidays.

Raising pigs

Pigs were fed on kitchen scraps, cull or spoiled fruit and vegetables, and skim milk, all by-products that Gus could not sell to his customers in Bellingham. Before refrigeration was common, whole milk was an unsaleable because it spoiled quickly. Dairy farmers any distance from markets sold only cream or butter. My grandparents, like most dairy farmers in the area, had a hand-cranked centrifugal cream separator. When electricity arrived, my grandpa attached an electric motor. He filled out the pigs’ diet when necessary with oats, wheat, corn, and barley he grew in the fields, but their critical role was to use the nutrients that could not be sold otherwise.

Hog salmon

My dad, Ted, told me that when he was a kid, Deer Creek used to be choked with spawning salmon in the fall. Grandpa would sometimes take a wheel barrow and pitch fork to the creek and return with a load of salmon to feed to the pigs. The wasting flesh of spawning salmon from the creek was not fit for humans, but the pigs did not mind. Feeding spawning salmon was a bit risky because pigs slaughtered too soon after feeding on salmon tasted fishy. That meant only the earliest runs supplied hog salmon.

Mash

My dad used to say that pigs eat almost anything, but their fussy digestion will slow their growth if their fodder disagrees with them. My grandpa, Gus, cooked the pigs’ rations to improve its digestability. Every few days Grandpa would cook up a batch of mash, a sloppy porridge of whatever was available, heated until the texture began to smooth out and become more digestible. Skim milk was often the liquid, but after refrigeration arrived, water was more common.

Hog mash was usually unappetizing, to say the least, but I remember fishing a cooked potato out of a batch of mash and eating it. The mash was just rough cull potatoes boiled in plain water with lots of dirt mixed in, which made an interesting seasoning. I could not have been more than five years old and I thought the potato was pretty good.

The scalding trough

Grandpa built a heated trough that he used both for cooking mash and scalding for butchering. The trough was about eight feet long and three feet wide. It was made from heavy galvanized sheet metal bent into an elongated U. The ends of the U were thick fine-grained first-growth cedar slabs that looked as if Grandpa had split them out with a froe and shaped them with an axe and draw knife. The sheet metal was nailed to the wooden ends and the joints sealed with tar. The trough sat on top of a concrete firebox with a low brick chimney for a draft at one end and an opening for stoking the fire at the other.

A few years ago, I demolished the old firebox. Dad had already salvaged the sheet metal of the trough to seal off a corner of a calf pen against the winter northeaster. The chimney bricks were held together with lime and sand mortar (no cement) and had fallen in a heap. The firebox itself was in fair shape. When I broke it up with the front loader on the tractor, I discovered that Grandpa had reinforced the fire box with steel water pipe, which held the concrete together in the heat from the fire.

Butchering day

On hog butchering day, Grandpa would fill the trough about half full of water and start a fire under it. Then butchering would begin. Pigs were scalded and scraped immediately after they were killed to remove the stiff and inedible bristles while preserving the skin which gives flavor to bacon and ham and breaks down into collagen that gives the characteristic taste and texture to many pork dishes.

Like most kids, I was a blood-thirsty little guy and I took in the butchering process with relish, but I won’t go into it here. My grandpa could kill and butcher a hog without flinching, but I saw him treat those same hogs with tenderness as he took care of them. He would suffer himself before he would allow the animals in his care to be hurt. Slaughtering was a fact for homesteaders and kindness and compassion in the face of gory necessity is both contradictory and endearing.

The organ meats and innards were divided up among the neighbors who helped with the slaughter. All together, there were often more than a dozen relatives and neighbors helping with butchering and sharing in the bounty.

The first day of hog butchering ended with the hog carcasses suspended head down from branches of the old pear tree. They hung on gambrels, wooden crosspieces with sharp iron hooks that secured the animal’s rear ankles,  They were left hanging over night to cool before the next step. I’ll write about that some other time.