Are you older than dirt??

[powderman]

STREAK. I've never used a pulley but have dipped many a bucket from a well. When our power goes out I still have to do that from our cistern. A lost art to dropping it just right. One of the boys wanted to try it. After several failed attempts I told him good thing it wasn't an emergency or he'd die of thirst. I waterd 5 head of cattle for 2 weeks by dipping and carrying it every day. HEH, we used the sears robuck catalogue. POWDERMAN. 

[DEACONLLB]

25 for 25 100% The milk delivered to your door I always liked as a kid as mom would let me lick the cream off the cardboard cap. Here is one not on there when we had ice boxes you stuck a sign in the window, it was a square with 25 50 75 100 and had an arrow that you pointed to the poundage of ice you wanted, stuck the money on top of the box and ice man would stop at your house tap on door and walkn in and say ice man and put the ice in the box take the money and leave. Never be able to do that today. Those were the days when we sat around the radio and listened to the thin man or lone ranger or jack armstrong or sky king. Better stop may be telling my age
 
Deaconllb

[streak]

How about churning the Ole` Bossy`s raw milk in a crock urn and making butter?
That was an art! Then after the butter was taking out of the urn the residual was put into the ice box to chill ( clabber) and that would congeal and that with a little sugar sprinkled on it became our " yogurt"! My grandmother would take the butter and put in her butter mold and it had a rose pattern in the bottom of the mold and the butter came out of the round mold with a pretty rose on top of it. She would then sprinkle some papirika on the rose pattern and the rose would really show up on the butter.

[torpedoman]

I remember all 25 but i'm not old i just had an early childhood.  streak sitting on the front porch shaking a mason jar of cream on a summer afternoon was pure torture and i still have mama's butter mold hers had a wheat pattern. and the little one she used to make pats

[ironglow]

  Yep..making butter...There were all types of churns..but we usually used a plain old mason jar

[streak]

Well we got the milk making out of the way!
Now how many got to watch their grandpa setup the smokehouse for the fall hog killing? Man talk about smoke and it was mainly hickory and a little pecan.It always amazed me how he kept that fire going sometimes all the way through late may. The hams, bacon, etc. were either smoked sugar cured or salt cured! Talk about a good breakfast! Some of that home made butter, slice of smoked ham ,or bacon, or sausage and homemade biscuits, red eye gravy, blackstrap molasses, fried or scrambled eggs!
Yea! We ate good back then!!

[ironglow]

Yep; smokehouse same way but with hickory or maple.  Garden produce differs, due I suppose.. to geographical differences.
   Beans were either Navy Or Great Northern..pulled when fairly dry and stacked on a pole to finish drying..  Our syrup of course, was Maple.  Mmmmmm.... "cackleberries' along side some hot, buckwheat flapjacks and Maple over a dollup of butter.
   Maybe some blackberries or blueberries picked in the wild..stirred into the pancake batter. 
   Here in the north at least,  we have a plant which is first to spring up in the marshes..we call it "cowslip" .  Have to pick almost as soon as it springs up, because once up..the yellow blossoms are on in 2-3 days...not as tender & sweet then.  Cook up, add a bit of butter & vinegar..tastes much like spinach.  We always figured it to be a good "spring tonic"... I make it a ritual I still follow, each year.  Haven't had any success yet..passing on the idea to my kids/grandkids..   Maybe when I'm gone..
 
    NOTE: There are apparently several plants which are loosely called "cowslip"..you just have to know the plant before you use it !

[bobg]

   I remember my grandmother churning. I sure did like her buttermilk. She had the butter mold with the rose on it. She had 100 chickens. Every Saturday morning her and gramps would deliver butter and eggs to there customers. Any left over eggs were sold to the little store in town. Gramps raised one calf and a hog to butcher every fall. I was never there when he did the beef only the hog. Gramps shot the hog and hung it in a tree and the work started. No smoke house though. Everything was put in the freezer. Grandma had two gardens and grew everything they needed. She sure did a lot of canning. I stayed there every summer and don't remember them ever going to the grocery store to buy anything. They must have had to buy flower and sugar but i don't remember that. Knowing her she probably bought 100 pounds at a time. She was about the cheapest person i have ever seen. She would raise hell with gramps for spending 20 cents for a box of 22 shells for me to burn up. In later years after gramps passed away she called me and said i might as well croak Bob. Said she couldn't get on a ladder to clean her gutters or paint the house any more. Said she wasn't much good for anything. Three days later i get a call that she had died.I could tell a lot of stories about the old girl but i have rattled on enough. Let's just say there was no reason for her to be cheap. When she died she had $120,000 in the bank.

[ironglow]

  We butchered both along with wild game..deer etc.  Beef & venison are fairly straightforward..hogs a bit different.  In Russia I understand, they burn the hair off a hog..in some places they skin them.  We always scraped the hair off with a 'hog candle'.
  First, the hog had to be soaked in very hot water with rosin added to loosen the hair.  We rarely had rosin on hand, so we used wood ashes (lye content) to loosen the hair.
 
   See below a hog candle;
.

[bobg]

   That is what gramps used ironglow but i couldn't remember what he called it. He had a barrel that he dipped the hog in and pulled it out and used the candle on it. They lived in Eldred. I haven't been down that way in years but my brother told me he was. He said all the out buildings had fallen down and the house was a dump. Grandma would roll over in her grave if she knew that.
   Another little story about the old girl. When i first started hunting i didn't have a gun. Gramps loaned me an old 12 ga. double he had. When i returned it he told me that when he was gone that would be mine. When he passed i ask grandma about it. She hollered and yelled and said she bought that gun and no one was getting it. My father said he was with her when she bought it. Said she paid $10 for it new. Found out later she sold all his guns but the old Remington 22. I fooled her though. When she died i grabbed the 22 when no one was looking. Doesn't anyone else have someone in their family like that?
   

[Savage .250]

Some of you guys might remember this one...   Keeping a pitcher of water on the kitchen sink to prime the hand pump so you could get the water started. 
 
 Not everybody had "city-water."   

[powderman]

BOBG. Your Grandmother grew up being frugal because she had to be. The Amish have a saying that applies quite well even in todays society. WEAR IT OUT, USE IT UP, MAKE DO, OR DO WITHOUT.
Patty and I used to butcher our own hogs. Had no way to scald them so we skinned them. We used mortons sugar cure and put the hams, bacon, and jowls up in the attic, worked quite well and delicious too. I always wanted to try that with a venison ham.
I had a tractor, old dbl lunger John that I took all the cultivator shafts off of but 2, made the rows with it and even used them to cover once, worked fine. WE planted 8 types of dry beans, + green beans of course. After everything was up put the shovels back on and cultivated. Dry beans, after drying, we hulled on the front porch. Afterwards we set up a fan and winnowed the chaff by dropping the beans in front of it, then stored in gal glass jars. We canned over 1200 jars of food several years. Health won't allow us to do garden on that large a scale anymore, I miss it. POWDERMAN. 

[AtlLaw]

prime the hand pump so you could get the water started.

OH!  OH!     I remember that!  Forgot all about it 'till you mentioned it!  When my GranMa died we moved into the family home place.  Big kitchen, a hand pump right next to the sink, a huge cast iron wood stove, a crank telephone where you just told the operator who you wanted to talk to.  That was before them new fangled party lines!
 
Then there was Momma washing clothes in a tub with a wash board, the ice box, the milkman, my father's big ol' something or other with a straight 8 engine and semiautomatic transmission, the Hudson Hornet I spent years trying to rebuild - before I even had a license, ol' cousin Rupert hayin' our side field with the horse drawn cutter, rake and wagon, shootin' critters out of my bedroom window with my 22 or grabbing a shotgun and walking out the door with my dog and being able to walk (hunt) all day, going anywhere I wanted without seeing the first "No Trespassing" sign.
 
Now that y'all got me thinkin on it, it's really amazing how much has changed over the years... 

[streak]

I got to walk behind my grandpa wile he was plowing ! Learned alot about plowing, never did much but my daddy did. My grandpa would either use a mule or a horse for the plow. What I found ,at that time, was the different types of plowshares and what they were designed to do!
Talk about plowing, how many of you ever experienced harvesting peanuts?
I had that experience, and shall never forget it! First the peanut field was plowed up and then a wagon pulled by a mule team was brought along the plowed rows and with pitch forks we walked alongside of the wagon and pitched the peanut vines onto the wagon. Sand and dirt flying everywhere! After the wagon had a load then we went back to the barn about a 1 1/2 miles away. Now we had the chore of getting the peanut vines up into the loft, so two of my cousins went up into the loft and opened the wide doors into the loft. Those of us on the wagon would pitch the vines up to them for them to stack in the loft, once again dirt and sand everywhere! These doors were about 15-20 feet rom the ground so it was a pretty good pitch to get the vines up to the loft.
Later on on cold sleety rainy days in the winter we set up in the loft and pick peanuts into Mrs`s Tucker`s empty lard buckets. Then we would take some and parched them for snacks.

[powderman]

ATLAW. I wondered if anybody remembered the semiauto transmission, I only remember one. On my Uncle Bills farm we used the hand pump every morning and evening to water all the cattle, hogs, chickens, and sheep carrying 5 gal buckets, yes, the old pump needed primed every time we used it. He put new leathers in it and it helped but I think it was because the well was pretty deep, water came out like ice.
STREAK. I raised peanuts one year just to see what it was like. We enjoyed them but never considered it worth the bother after that.
Anybody remember the old steel wheeled tractors with the lugs or cleats on them?? Not sure what they were called, but they were for traction. POWDERMAN. 

[streak]

You guys were "pretty modern"with those hand pumps! Every thing at my grandpa`s place that needed water was hand drawn at the well and carried. Water for chickens, clothes washing ever monday, bath water in the #3 washtub out on the porch! Also cooking and mopping floors.
Grandpa had a stock pond so all of the livestock got to drink out of there.
I remember one night the church baptized 5 or 6 people in that pond. That was an awesome sight as people from the church had lanterns and torches to light up the area. They sang hymns and then the preacher started the ceremony. As all of the ladies to be baptized all wore snow white gowns, all I could think about how dirty those gowns were going to be coming out of that pond!! But they were not to bad and the moon was full and it really did add to the scene. That took place back in the early 40`s!

[bobg]

  powderman, any chance that steel wheeled tractor was a Crosby. My grandfather had one. It had a big flywheel on the side that he run something off of. It set next to his sugar shack. Might have run something in there when he was making syrup.

[powderman]

STREAK. You were really blessed to see a baptism ceremony like that.
BOBG. Don't remember and there was no paint left on it. I remember that it would beat you to death going accross solid ground. POWDERMAN. 

[ironglow]

  OH Boy ! Priming the pitchur pump..ours was outdoors rather than beside the sink (water is where you find it).  After working the horses (big Belgians), I would have to take them to the pump and let them drink from washtub i had pumped full of cold water.  I remember one day leading old Daisy there to drink.  Daisy was a sorrel Belgian, about 1900 lbs and 16.5 hands high. She was very gentle and rarely got excited.  Well, I led her to the washtub barefooted...and as she planted her front feet to drink...she stepped right on my big toe.  Now, I was soon excited..but Daisy wasn't; so it took some time before she lifted that foot!  I wasn't any more than bruised..probably because Tom, the other half of the team had drunk first and soaked the ground..making it mushy.
***********************************************************************
  The "semiautomatic' trans car I'm guessing was a Chrysler or DeSoto 8 cylinder, with what Chrysler called "Fluid drive".
**********************************************************************
  Those old steel wheel tractors.. Those steel cleats had a terriffic "bite"...but spin half a turn of the wheels..and you're buried..
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  Streak, those plowshares.. horse drawn had sharply curved moldboards..because horses/mules are slow compared to tractors and it requires a sharp curve to flip the sod all the way over (grass down). With a tractor, moving faster a gentler curve will still flip the sod OK ..

[gstewart44]

My grandpa raised beagles and worked them well.   They lived in rural NC and during summers and fall when I would visit we would walk the woods behind his house for squirrels and rabbits for dinner.  Granma always kept a good garden so she would make a fine stew with taters, carrots, onions, squash and whatever meat that we brought home for the pot.   He had a nice LC Smith SxS 28 gauge that he always let me use.    Fine memories.   

[streak]

My grandpa raised beagles and worked them well.   They lived in rural NC and during summers and fall when I would visit we would walk the woods behind his house for squirrels and rabbits for dinner.  Granma always kept a good garden so she would make a fine stew with taters, carrots, onions, squash and whatever meat that we brought home for the pot.   He had a nice LC Smith SxS 28 gauge that he always let me use.    Fine memories.   

And that is what it is all about! Great fond memories!!