When I was a kid, we lived on a farm for a while. I had two sisters. My dad was a Chemical Engineer and had no interest in farming. My mom was lost in an alcoholic haze most of the time. Probably caused by living with my dad. Of our 100ish acres, 10 acres were woods, 5 acres contained the house and barn and garage, and pond, along a long gravel driveway. That left 85 acres of tillable land that I came to learn was one of the reasons that my dad had a son, or so he told me. 

Our neighbor, Mr. Colgate, had a big farm next to ours, and had a sharecropper kind of agreement with my dad. He had the big tractors and plows and discs, planting and harvesting equipment, and assorted trailers, so he and dad would split the cost of the seed and fertilizer, and he would plant and harvest the crops, and they would split the profit at the end of the year. Best of all, for Mr. Colgate, was that he also got free labor in the form of my 12/13/14 year old 110 pound skinny ass. We planted corn and wheat and oats and alfalfa hay. Mr. Colgate rotated crops like a wise farmer would do. 

He was a good guy. Easy to work for, and a kind man. I was a scrawny kid doing things I had never heard of before. Driving a tractor, riding an ancient sidebar cutter to hack down the 3 acres of pasture for the horses and cows, standing on a moving wagon grabbing the hay and straw bales shooting out of the combine harvester, and stacking them on the wagon. It is how I learned to drive, running the tractor and wagon from the fields down the road to the barn, and backing the trailer into the barn where I would either toss or receive the bales into the hayloft. It was hard work for a skinny city boy teenager. 

We had 4 horses, and 5 ducks on the pond, and a varying number of calves in the barn. We would buy 3 day old calves, raise them for a year, and sell them for veal. We had two dogs, a Great Dane (Sweetie) and a dachshund (Fritzy). All these animals needed feeding, and grooming, and except for the dogs, poop scooping, which was also one reason my dad had a son. Occasionally on my morning feeding visit to the barn, I would find one of the calves laying on its side and bloated, and I learned how to push a piece of garden hose down its throat to the first stomach, and let the gas out until it was deflated, and lift it back to its feet to have breakfast.

My horse was Gypsy, a Morgan Barrel Racing horse, who was well trained before I got her, and we had a good relationship. I rode her a lot. My sisters had horses, but they weren’t as into riding as I was. My horse was pregnant when we bought her, and when she foaled a roan filly, (Lucky), she became my moms horse, and was almost never ridden. I saddlebroke her when she was big enough, and learned what it was like to fly into the air and land on the hard ground.
Another of my jobs was weeding the garden, a largish plot behind the house. My dad would do stupid things, like stop at the garden stand on his way home, and buy 5 dozen tomato plants that were wilted and unsalable, for a dollar, and bring them home and put them in washtubs of water in the basement, to revive them. Then it was my job to take them and plant them in the garden that Mr. Colgate had plowed and disced all ready for plants. Then I had to weed it. To be fair, my sisters sometimes came out and helped me. 

Then, when the tomatoes or cucumbers or green beans came ready, we harvested them and took them inside and canned them. I learned all about canning, washing the endless jars, boiling them to sterilize them, cooking down whatever was to be canned, filling the jars, putting on the tops, setting them neatly on the counter in rows. Hot water, hot jars, hot veggies, steamy kitchen, tender hands, and getting up 15 minutes early for school the next day so I could tink the lids with a butter knife to tell if the jars had sealed, and emptying the ones that tunked, and washing them up for the next night. Then running down to the barn and feeding the horses and cows, and carrying a coffee can of grain for the ducks out to the pond, then back to the house, put on school clothes, feed the dogs, and run out the long driveway to catch the bus to school, a 45 minute journey. We were the first and last stop for our bus. It was all hands on deck during canning season, and my sisters and I hated it. My dad was not present. He had a son. There was barely time to do your homework. 

Another dumb thing my dad did was sign up for a government program where he could get a thousand, yes, a thousand, pine tree seedlings, for like 40 bucks. All of which lived in washtubs bundled into clumps of 20 in our basement, waiting for my dad and I to take this heavy steel tool he bought and lug it out to where we were planting that day, and plant a couple clumps of pine tree seedlings. The tool had an angled blade which would leave an angled hole in the ground, I’d jump up and down on the footpegs to make my 110 pounds make the thing penetrate the ground, pull it out, and  stick a tree in it, stomp both sides to close it up, and on to the next one. My dad came along the first time to show me how to do it, and we planted the first 60 trees in about 3 hours. Then he lost interest, and it was up to me to plant the other 940 pine trees. After all, he had a son. I worked on that for about 3 or 4 months.

That was about the time where I read Old Yeller, I think, and learned about a travois, and I built one and taught Gypsy to not be afraid of it, and my life got easier. After we had planted up the hills by the crick near the house that ran through the property with pine trees, I had to start back in the woods at the very back of the farm. It was a 30 minute walk from the house, but only a 15 minute ride on my wonderful horse with the travois, and I would load a hundred or so trees on the travois wrapped in wet burlap, the shovel thingy, and my lunch, and make a saturday of it in the woods. Some days I would tie on a spool of barbed wire and fence pliers and staples and the fence stretcher, to repair the fences that needed it. Hunters from the city would come and hunt during hunting season, and just cut through the fence with pliers rather than climb it.

 
That led to my next job. My dad came home one day with a hundred No Trespassing signs. I took some with me every time I went out to plant trees and mend fences. I stapled them on fence posts and trees. That definitely cut down on the illegal hunting. Sometimes I would hear shotguns firing in the woods and I would take my 22 rifle, and saddle up Gypsy, who was black which helped us not look like a deer, with the two dogs running behind, and run the hunters off. Bunch of drunken A-holes mostly. Didn’t see the signs. Sure.

One day I came across some hunters hunting rabbits. They had a clever thing going on. Rabbit dogs which were mostly Beagles, were trained to flush a rabbit, and then herd it back by the hunters, so they could shoot it. The hunters were staying on the other side of the fence, a neighbors property who allowed hunting, and lifting their dogs over the fence to my side, and they would herd the rabbits back across the fence and the hunters would shoot them. The next day after work, dad handed me some No Hunting signs to put here and there. 

When I was 16, my great grandma got a divorce from her deadbeat alcoholic husband, at 86 years old, and bought a house in town, where we had to move to take care of her in her golden years. I hated to sell Gypsy but I was a kid, I had no say in the matter.

Life on a farm is hard. I learned some valuable lessons.

     – I will never have a big garden.

     – I will never grow enough vegetables where I have to can them. Ever.

     – Horses are almost as cool people as dogs. Some of the most excellent people I have met were dogs.

     – The reason that farm kids have less of a problem with drugs and alcohol is that they have no time for it.

     – Any desire to “live off the land” was burned out of me forever. I could do it, but naaaaaahhh.

I hope that idiot in the White House doesn’t reduce us to that.