I do a lot of traveling and talking to a lot of people as part of my job. Last week, I met a man in Georgia who was 86 or 88 years old. His mind is beginning to show signs of deterioration.
As he was sharing a story, I picked up on something interesting. He was describing a day plowing the fields with his grandpa. He said back then they used a mule to drive the plow.
Sometime later, I asked him about the details of the mule harness, and to just learn more about the process in general. By that time, he couldnât comprehend and didnât understand.
I am keeping my ears open for other opportunities like this one to learn things like this of the past. If anyone has such stories or knowledge, please share.
I am interested in the simpler way of life. A fantasy of 10 acres of plowed field out in the middle of nowhere is very appealing to me.
My grandfather on my dads side used to own a farm in Missouri. He used to make his own stump blasting powder for clearing stumps from sugar and some other ingredients. I never did get him to teach me how he made it before he passed. That would have come in handy when I had my rural property with trees I had to harvest each year for firewood for the winter heating stove. I had so many stumps the tractor would have to 4x4 over to get to some of the trees.
There is so much lost every day. But for the first time in history, much of that knowledge is being recorded. If you find that 10 acres youâll be able to research the mule harness or just about anything else.
I agree with Tom, though. At some point hard copy books are going to be the only source.
Peter, I am pretty sure he was mixing sugar with saltpeter (KNO3).
As to the stumps left after firewood harvest, please check coppicing and pollarding of trees, that would save both trees and a lot of work.
I too am interested in learning old time techniques, even of just for the sake of preservation and interest. You probably have heard of the âFoxfire chroniclesâ, but if not, itâs a series of (first it was magazines, then) books with old time stories and techniques from Appalachia collected in the early seventies by a teacher and his English students from Rabun Gap, Georgia. It started as a school project but soon became more than that.
The books cover topics from log cabin making, bee keeping, to natural remedies, tub mill building and basket making, land clearing. Gardening by the signs etc is also featured. Very interesting and great reference work, not all the info is strictly instructional but there is loads of good info on old time living
I would love to browse you library, for a whole winterâs month sometime! We love books in this household and I am always looking to add more useful ones like what you describe to our collection. If you ever write down a list of those books, or video the spines, I would love to get a peak at that
A lot of those knowledge was captured in various projects in books that went by the name Appropriate Technology. Most of those are out of print, but there are still digital records of them.
Down that road lies smoke bombs, rocket motors, slow burning fuses and farm kids throwing footballs filled with large home made rocket motors.
Familiar with both. The trees were allelopathic so I was originally thinking of clearing them to open up the area to pasture. They are also known as âwidow makersâ as they get termite struck often and the limbs are so heavy that getting hit with any falling limbs while walking under them kills people each year.
In the end I left them to regrow and used the area as a winter firewood source for heating. The only heating in the house.
I checked out the material from the link you provided. I saw a lot of valuable information in there. That is at least 2 winters worth of reading there!
Itâs really interesting stuff in there.
I didnât grow up on a farm. My pawpaw did back in the 50âs. In his youth, he grew up poor, but he has the richest stories of those days. He learned so much in those days, getting a lot done with so little. The ability to improvise, invent and think outside the box was necessary.
I am missing a lot of that and see this type of practical knowledge highly valuable. He once told me: âLearn everything you can. One day it will be useful, even if it doesnât seem so now.â
I have found over the last few years, the more I learn on the way things work, the more my general knowledge grows, the more I am able to solve all sorts of problems.
There is a lot of good stuff published by the US government during the war and victory campaigns from the early to mid 1900âs that you can download from the Library of Congress. Thomas Jefferson and Benjiman Franklin wrote a lot too, but I donât remember specific titles. Most of my old books have just been in storage for a long time, there isnât room in my house now to keep it all out for easy access.
There are tons of stull on the internet now days but most all of it that has any real value is just old stuff, repackaged and renamed by people giving the impression they thought of it, which they didnât, and itâs often mixed with a bunch of hooey. There is less hooey in the old stuff.
One little book I like a lot is called âFive Acres and Independanceâ, it is from the 1940s or 50s but has been reprinted lots of times and I think you can still get it. I remember when the Fox Fire books came out, and I got all excited to read about the old stuff but most of it was just the kind of things that I grew up with. Rendering lard, smoking hams, canning everything, stuff like that. There was other stuff too that I had not been exposed to, like building log cabins and more on foraging wild things than I knew about.
Grandad had a tractor bought new in 1949 I think but he didnât use it much because he was too proud of it and didnât want to get it dirty. Or maybe because he was pretty much blind as a bat and the horses could mostly steer by themselves. Or maybe because he didnât want to buy gas. Anyway, by the mid 1960s it still looked brand new. It wasnât until the horses got struck by lightning that he put it to full use.
Keep your hand tools sharp and donât throw them on the ground or leave them in the rain. Donât work on Sunday, except for milking the cows of course or if the proverbial ox really is in the proverbial ditch. Donât waste anything, donât buy anything you donât really need, help the neighbors.
One thing in a lot of the older stuff that may not be applicable for a lot of folks is the âbetter life through chemicalsâ thing. I just read past that part.
Reminds me of John Seymour, I think he wrote the same thing, 5 acres and self sufficiency but was more to the European climate or was it England?. If you want self-sufficient gardening ideas, he and Alice Cooper? Wrote a few books on the topic.
People nowdays (me included) want to hoard books in case of needing to know something later. Iâve found that life doesnât really work like that though and the only way to truly embody something is to do it.
Practice is the difference between something being lost knowledge or living tradition.
Go and do the thing you find interesting and worth preserving. If you think you should farm with a mule in 10 years then start with a mule next year. If you like your family recipe and donât want it to die out then start cooking it now.
On another note, I saw a cool old garden tool the other day. Shouldâve took a picture, maybe I will next time. Cultivator maybe, tiller? I donât know but it was just a wheel with a couple stationary tines behind it that you walked behind and pushed to get the weeds between the rows. Your dirt would have to be somewhat loose with few weeds for it to work but doesnât need gas to operate (and therefore wonât be broke down all the time).
