As a child in Tennessee we would Cann up to 200 quarts of green beans at this time of the year, As we carried many jars up an down the basement steps I would help pack the beans in the jars with my little hands that fit just perfectly in the hole of a jar, not to mention the disaster of washing and canning peaches, oh how I hated to see a huge tub full of peaches to be washed as that was one of my jobs, :/ we would Cann around 400 quarts of peaches, especially when we expected one of the sisters to get married the following winter, as peaches was a must have food item for the tables, also should I mention the pile of sweet corn we had to do?! Ugh.... give me a break!!!
Canning seemed like a never ending job!! Did we really eat so much!?!?
Applesauce was a huge need at our house as well, and of course 400 quarts of tomato sauce, lots of okra, peas, lima beans, cherries, strawberries, blueberries, and what not all. I guess with cooking 3 meals a day for 14 people should be a common thing, right,?
These canning duties were all geared towards the women's job, although the boys would help gathering the vegetables from the garden in the mornings.
Then comes a lot of work on the farm as well, in the hot summer sun my brother's would go out and bind the oats with a team of horses and a grain binder, then in the evenings we would make it a family event to go out an stack the bundles up into little teepee type houses for the oats to dry out so that the thrashing machine could do its job. Some nights we made neighborhood events for setting up the bundles of grain, that was the most enjoyable time of working on the farm when you could involve friends, the bishops kids were neighbors as well but I know we did a bit more evening work with Creek Enos'a kids as I remember Anna leaving something by a grain shock on purpose so that she could come back to pick it up and stay for the night, haha!! Some sly things going on.
My children better not think I don't know their tricks, because we all lived them. :)
Then this time of the year is when we would start thrashing the grain and all of us little ones had a part in something if we were old enough to go to school, as all the neighbor guys came to help out with their wagons we would get jugs of water or lemonade ready for each wagon, the women would cook a big meal of mashed potatoes, gravy, dressing, beans, chicken and applesauce along with fruit, cake an pies, and then whoever had the best production of grain crop was usually expected to furnish ice cream from the store for an evening treat and we did that several times, I also remember one of my brothers catching a black snake while unloading grain and he wanted to save it as normal the people would kill snakes when they saw one, anyway. . He grabbed it ,stuck it in his pocket and took it to the corn crip for mouse catching, ugh!! The thought of a snake in the corn crip was something I was super scared of. And this reminds me of the rats we had roaming around in our buildings dodging all the cats, so I'll talk about that in a later post.. :)
