FARM CHORES

     When we were growing up,.my brothers and I each had our own farm chores.  We had various animals on the farm.  We mostly had pigs and chickens.  Sometimes we had some sheep and calves, and I had the rabbits for a short time..
     My brothers took care of the pigs and chickens and other animals.  My job was to gather the eggs, clean them, and put them in egg cartons. My mom often sold the eggs to the store or to individuals.  I can barely remember my mom selling eggs by the gross.  That is 12 doz.  We had a big box that held the eggs.  To clean the eggs we had an old pan and put water and soap in and washed and dried them. I don't know if that was such a good idea now that I know that egg shells are permeable.
      Feeding and watering the pigs and chickens was done twice a day, and gathering the eggs was done in the evenings.  My brothers got up early in the mornings before breakfast to do their chores and then again when we got home from school or in the evenings.
     I really did not mind gathering the eggs except when there was a setting hen. The hens would not get off the next and you had to pull them out.  I had seen my mom do this in the past and every once in a while would get pecked.  I did NOT want to get pecked.  Sometimes I would take a stick and try to poke them enough to make them get out of the nest.  We used old paint cans to put the eggs in. Sometimes we would get 2 full buckets of eggs.  Other times we would get only a hand full.  One very cold winter day, I remember Weldon went to gather the eggs.  The hens did not lay well in the winter time. He got 2 eggs that day and accidentally dropped one.
The nests looked somewhat like the cages pictured, but they had straw in them.. Once in a while I would help my dad pull out all the old dirty wheat straw and put in fresh straw.


If a chicken wanted to set, which meant they wanted to sit on their eggs until they hatched, we would take the hen and put it in a homemade box.  The box was square, maybe about 2 feet tall.  There were boards all around the edges.  There was no bottom.  It just sat on the dirt.  The top had chicken wire. There was a wooden hinged lid that we could raise so we could put the chickens in and take them out easily.   I can remember sometimes putting the chickens in the cages we used for the rabbits.  After being in the cage a few days, we would put the hen back with the other hens.
    Sometimes I would have to help clean out the chicken house.  That was one stinky dusty job.  I really hated doing that.  Most of the time my brothers did it, but there were times when they were busy with other farm jobs, so it was up to me to help my dad.  We would take a grain shovel and scrape the cement floor and then scoop the poop into a wheel barrow.  Then we would take that and dump it somewhere.
    In the summer if my brothers were too busy, I would go with my dad to go cut iron weeds to feed the hogs or chickens.  We would take the little Falcon pick up and use a weed whip (an Oklahoma golf club as my dad called it) and cut the weeds.  Then I would take a pitch fork and load them into the back of the pick up truck.  Then my dad would drive the pick up to the hog lot or chicken yard and we would toss them over the fence.  The chickens and hogs really loved those green weeds.
   Once in a while I had to go feed and water the chickens and hogs.  My dad would usually come out to help me. We fed the chickens rolled milo and something called chicken mash that helped them to lay eggs. We gave them oyster shells to make the shells on the eggs harder so they did not crack so easily.   I carried a 5 gallon bucket of water from the watering tank to the chicken yard and poured it into the watering trough.  

The watering trough was made of heavy iron.  The one pictured is a trough that is similar, but the watering trough we had for the chickens had a pipe down the center of the trough. It was not as long as this one either.

When we fed the pigs, we had to put feed into the hog feeder which was in the shed part of the barn.

The feeder looked a little bit like this one.  You put grain in the top and it came out the bottom.  We put in rolled milo and something called pig supplement.  It was a green power type feed.  Then we would take a long stick or hoe handle and mix it all together.  I hated having to put feed in the hog troughs if the pigs were big.  They would rush at you and try to get the feed before you could even pour it out into the trough.  So I would take the bucket with the feed and go outside the barn, climb a fence, and then run to the trough and pour out the feed before the pigs knew what had happened. The pigs were accustomed to my brothers coming directly through the barn door and to the hog lot trough. I was a lot smaller and I did not want to get trampled by the pigs.  
      Some of the other chores we had to do were unloading the feed bags into the barn.  I usually just put the 50 lb bag on the edge of the pickup truck.  Then my older brothers would grab the sacks and line them up in the barn.  We had to hoe the garden, pick vegetables, pick fruit, and help with the canning or freezing. We also butchered chickens, which was discussed in a previous post.
      When we got older we started going to the field and hoeing cotton, maize, or corn.  My brothers irrigated the crops and my job was to carry the tubes and throw them into the rows that were going to be watered. That was when we had ditch irrigation.  I got to help set tubes once in a while.  I could set the 1 inch tubes, but couldn't do the 2 inch tubes very well. Later we used gated irrigation pipe, and I would help carry the pipe and put it together. Sometimes I just drove the pick up and let them load the pipe on the pipe racks.
     I don't remember a lot about feeding the sheep or calves.  I do know we had to be careful of how much milo we fed them or they would bloat.  I loved the smell of cotton seed hulls that we would give the calves.  They smelled kind of sweet.  The calves also got alfalfa hay, which was a nice smell to me.
    Growing up on a farm was an interesting life.  There was always something to do, and it was good to be in the country.  It was often hard work and not fun, but the things we learned from it were good. We learned responsibility, good work ethics, and a general knowledge of farm life.  I really do have fond memories of growing up on the farm.