Blenheim Orange wrote:
I used to walk through the orchard first thing every morning on the way to work eating whatever was ripe right off the tree - apricots, nectarines, peaches, cherries, plums, pears, apples, and always lots of cane fruit... I sure miss that.
Mike
Oh, yes, and a big vegetable garden and orchard next to the farm house, three kinds of apples, pears and cherry trees covering over an acre and another acre plus of vegetables. Nothing like a meal of 3-5 kinds of vegatables that had been on the plant that morning or the day before. With fresh baked cornbread and home grown pork or chicken.
Each spring the first thing Granddad plowed and harrowed was the garden. Grandma would have ordered seeds (plus she had some she liked saved and dried) from the catalog and the mailman would deliver them, along with huge cardboard travel boxes of baby chicks (100-200 every spring). So then it was planting time.
Those baby chicks, they had a shed 16'x16' with a concrete floor and a brick furnace that burned coal and wood in the middle to warm it and the chicks lived in there until big enough to go outside. She would start fires in the furnace about three days before the chicks were delivered so the whole concrete floor and the inside walls would be warm. One year the hatchery got her order mixed up with someone else's and the rural route mail carrier brought them a week early. Chick house cold as could be. Granddad used large 18" planks to fence off the corner behind the wood stove that heated the dinning room and the chicks went in there for three days and two nights until the chick house was warm enough. Now those baby chicks would do a pile on so the ones on top could hop out. I rode the school bus out to the farm two days in a row and did my homework at the dining table - and caught and corralled chicks making a getaway. Good thing they went to sleep early and didn't do any midnight jail breaks.