Tag: Farming

The Old Red Barn

~ Christine Goodnough ~ 4 Comments

The Bloganuary challenge today is indeed a challenge for me: What is the earliest memory you have?

You see, I have many bits and snatches of early childhood memories, but which one is the earliest? Impossible to say, so I’ll go with my memory of playing in Grandpa Forsyth’s old red barn. This one was built in 1917 when Grandpa and Grandma Forsyth came to the Melfort, SK, area to farm and it looked like a zillion others that dotted the prairies when I was young.

These folks weren’t really my grandparents, but because I was raised by Dad and Mom Forsyth, I refer to his parents as Grandpa and Grandma, though I never knew either of them. My birth parents (Dad Vance being a sister to Mom Forsyth) being dirt poor, lived in a small trailer on Grandpa Forsyth’s yard. I had a brother Jim, who was eleven months older than me, and we were inseparable. Donna, 2 1/2 years younger, would have been the baby.

Apparently before I was four, Jim and I were left to pretty much run free on the farmyard. I still remember that one of our favourite things was to run into the barn and into the part aside which was the chicken coop. Here the ladder to the hayloft was hung. We’d climb up this ladder and jump down from the big doors of the hayloft, get up and do it again. I can’t tell you the exact distance to the ground, but it had to be a drop of at least a dozen feet (3 metres). I don’t know what Health & Safety would say these days about 2- to 4-year-olds leaping from barn lofts, but we survived and had great fun.

At least until Dad and Mom Forsyth moved to BC when I was four and took me with them. We came back to the farm later, but then moved to the city when I almost six. After that my connections to my siblings were limited to summer and Christmas holidays. Folks visited the old farm for a number of years –in summer to gather the orchard fruits– and I still remember the old red barn.

Summer Baled

~ Christine Goodnough ~ 3 Comments

Driving along a country road these days, you’re apt to see many round bales, either dotting the field or lined up end to end in neat rows. Many of these are straw bales, used for bedding cattle during the winter; my verse is about bales of hay. In winter the deer bother these, cutting the mesh with their sharp hooves and pulling out tufts of hay.

Summer, Baled

Richness of earth,
warmth of sunshine,
rains of heaven, farmer sweat.
Summer, captured in clover.

Cut, sun-ripened,
then rolled and bound.
Scattered in prairie fields
at random or neatly aligned.
Summer, bundled in bronze.

Snow-disguised, benign lumps
wind-dusted betimes, garnished
with a hawk, a raven or two.
Summer, frozen and frosted.

Hungry deer pull and munch
the sweet strands of summer,
certain it’s all done for them.
Complacent cows nosing
disrupt cozy-nesting families
of summer-fattened mice.

Image: Artificial OG — Pixabay

Socks and the Fox

~ Christine Goodnough ~ 7 Comments

The Ragtag Daily Prompt today is FOX. A nice simple word; a creature we’re all familiar with even if we haven’t personally made one’s acquaintance. Since my Socks tale was well liked, I’ll do a second story about the beloved pet pig who saves the day — and include the illustration I drew just yesterday. 🙂

Socks And The Fox

The crow watches silently as a fox slink its way along the fence, aiming for Farmer Rushton’s chicken coop. Hope springs eternal and, to the fox, smells like chicken dinner.

But here comes Rushton’s pet pig, Socks, lumbering around the corner of the barn, sniffing the air curiously. Now, what can a pig smell besides pig? Fox, evidently. Socks gets a whiff of the different scent and lets out a questioning squeal.

Fox freezes. Socks, curious about this odd scent, snuffles her way toward its source, stopping now and then to peer around with her small piggy eyes. When she finally catches sight of Fox she squeals like a banshee and dashes toward him.

Fox has been blessed with a natural adroitness, so he scrambles up the fence rails and sits on the top one, glaring down at Socks. Putting her front hooves on the first rail, she’s staring up at him, snuffing and grunting like half a dozen magpies.

Now the crow joins the katzenjammer. In spite of the racket, Fox’s keen ears catch the sound of the farmhouse door slamming and human voices approaching. Fox has no fear of this knuckle-headed pig, but a human is another creature entirely. Recalling the loud crack crack that often came with the farmer, and seeing puffs of dirt explode all around him, he leaps off the fence and dashes for the nearby woods.

No chicken dinner tonight. He might have made it, too, if it wasn’t for that disgusting pig!

Image by Viola — Pixabay

Socks Our Hero!

~ Christine Goodnough ~ 17 Comments

It’s Thursday and high time for my response the Six Sentence Story prompt, hosted by GirlieOnTheEdge. This week’s word is TERM. If you go to her blog you’ll see the InLinkz button to click on so you can read the other responses to this prompt.

Here’s a story I’ve been wanting to write for awhile. Someday I’ll planned to flesh it out more but for now I’ll squeeze it into six (okay, some very long) sentences to meet the writing challenge. Hope you enjoy it.

SOCKS, OUR HERO

Sheriff Wilson, trying hard to look stern, explained to Farmer Rushton, “I’m here to investigate a complaint made by some fellow who came here last night that you have a – his term was ‘vicious wild boar’ – running around your farmyard.”

“There’s nothing vicious about Socks,” Rushton exclaimed, “and furthermore, she’s a sow, not a boar. But our Socks is as friendly and playful as a puppy; you know yourself she’s been Tommy’s pet ever since she was the runt of the litter last year – and she loves to meet our farm visitors.”

“Well, this fella stopped by last night when you folks weren’t home and says he was just having a look around – I’d use the term skulking myself – when he came past the barn and suddenly this vicious pig was charging at him, screaming like a banshee.

He ran but hit some slime, slid, and went head-first into a huge puddle of ‘barnyard sludge’–” Sheriff Wilson couldn’t hold back a chortle “– and the ‘berserk beast’ came wallowing in right after him so that he barely escaped with his life – and without whatever else he might have been hoping to take away, I might add.”

Rushton grinned, then shook his head and said, “Well, I’ve sometimes grumbled about how much water my kids use when they make a mud puddle for Socks to cool herself off in, but I won’t begrudge Socks her beauty baths from now on.”

Original image by Iris Hamelmann at Pixabay

Cutting the Mustard

~ Christine Goodnough ~ Leave a comment

Good morning everyone. The Ragtag Daily Prompt this morning is MUSTARD — and yesterday’s prompt was HORN. I’ll touch on the two in one quick sweep.

I wonder how many prompt followers will think of the old song, “He’s Too Old to Cut the Mustard Anymore.” Probably not many, as this song was popular before I was born. I only dimly remember it, and my mom singing snatches of it around the house sometimes. In this song a fellow is blowing his horn about all the things he could do when he was young…but the frailty of old age has set in and his mobility is limited. Once the girls were all eager to spend time with him. Now “they push you around in a four-wheeled chair.” If you’re interested, you can read the lyrics here.

My Dad Vance would have identified with this song. Always a physically fit and active man, when he was in his seventies he’d walk the seventeen miles from Moose Jaw to Belle Plaine to visit his sister, no problem. But his one hand was starting to shake — the beginnings of the Parkinson’s disease that finally immobilized him. He hated the thought of being tied in a wheel chair, but for him it became a reality because he couldn’t get up and walk by himself.

Of course there’s the MUSTARD plant…and wild mustard. This is canola country and wild mustard, a close cousin to canola, is a real nuisance if it infests a canola field. Wild mustard seeds remain viable in the soil for many years, they sprout mid-spring, plants establish quickly, and anything that will kill it will kill its cousin, too. Worse, here in western Canada it’s developed a resistance to most weed killers. This picture is from Cornell University’s Agricultural Weed ID site.

For comparison, here’s a Pixabay photo of canola in bloom:

Image by GayleenFroese2 — Pixabay

I think that’s enough about old age and wild mustard. Monday morning laundry is waiting for my attention. Have a great week, everyone.

Marginal Ideas

~ Christine Goodnough ~ 16 Comments

The Ragtag Daily Prompt this morning is GOODBYE/HELLO
And Sammi has published another Weekend Writing Prompt

.
 Carnivores, goodbye!
 No more inefficient beef.
 Hello, veggies and grain to feed the world!
 So they ploughed the pastures,
 even the marginal lands.
 And the winds came…
 and the land blew…
Image by Couleur — Pixabay

My response springs from a discussion I had with Mr Bump earlier in the week about using land for grain and vegetable production rather than pasture. This 31-word tale describes what happened here on the prairies when the settlers came. The “Dirty Thirties” taught us that some land just can’t be cultivated.