Farmyard

“ Here and there an old black and white farm-house, with its rambling outbuildings, speaks of other times and other occupations than those which now absorb the population of the neighbourhood. Here in their seasons may be seen the country business of haymaking, ploughing, etc., which are such pleasant mysteries for townspeople [218] to watch; and here the artisan, deafened with noise of tongues and engines, may come to listen awhile to the delicious sounds of rural life: the lowing of cattle, the milkmaid’s call, the clatter and cackle of poultry in the old farmyards. ”

“ Where the ploughs go, and the ploughmen; where the cattle are driven afield; where the farmyards tell how they are housed and kept; where the women sit with their milking pails or make journeys to the spring; where flowers trim the house-fronts, or where the little yard-gate says that everything, like itself, hangs by one hinge. ”

“ What I like best's the lay of different farms, Coming out on them from a stretch of woods, Or over a hill or round a sudden corner. I like to find folks getting out in spring, Raking the dooryard, working near the house. Later they get out further in the fields. Everything's shut sometimes except the barn; The family's all away in some back meadow. There's a hay load a-coming—when it comes. And later still they all get driven in: The fields are stripped to lawn, the garden patches Stripped to bare ground, the apple trees To whips and poles. There's nobody about. ”

“ Many an acre of forest have I cleared and I have built houses and barns, always saying to myself that one day we should have a comfortable farm where your mother would live as do the women in the old parishes, with fine smooth fields all about the house as far as the eye could see, a kitchen garden, handsome well-fed cattle in the farm-yard ... ”

“ Suddenly the limousine whirled off the high-road and shot along a beautiful private driveway under swaying elm-trees. We were on the farm! Wildly we gazed about for the fields of grain, the hog-lot and the cow-pasture, the big red barn, and, and all the other familiar stage-properties of our agricultural tragedy of years before. But we saw none of these things.
Instead our eye rested on well-groomed apple-orchards and cherry-groves, on clumps of pines and Japanese summer-houses, on strawberry-patches and vegetable gardens. The vegetable gardens may seem to the reader to suggest farming. ”

“ Here the farmer has always an abundance of straw. His farm-yard is never without it. Cattle and horses are bedded up to their eyes. The yards are put close under the shelter of a hill, or are protected by lofty and thick-set trees. Every animal seems comfortably situated; and, in the dreariest days of winter, these are, perhaps, the happiest scenes in the world; or, rather, they would be such, if those, whose labour makes it all, trees, corn, sheep and everything, had but their fair share of the produce of that labour. ”

“ He had put four years of his life into making this farm out of nothing, four years of incredible toil, energy, and young enthusiasm. He had a good dwelling, and spacious corrals, an orchard started, a truck garden, a barley field, a pasture, cattle, sheep, chickens, horses—all his creation from nothing. ”

“ In rear of the premises rise the outbuildings; stables, corn-crib, meat-house, &c., all of them quite as perfect in structure as the dwelling itself, and quite as comfortable for residence. If to all this we add a well, walled up with a section of a hollow cotton-wood, a cellar or cave in the earth for a pantry, a zigzag rail fence enclosing the whole clearing, a dozen acres of Indian corn bristling up beyond, a small garden and orchard, and a host of swine, cattle, poultry, and naked children about the door, and the tout ensemble of a backwoods farmhouse is complete. ”

“ On the north side of the line, opposite the ice-house, the dairy-house; then a square with a small power-house for its centre, a woodhouse, a horse barn for the farm horses, a granary and a forage barn for its four corners. Beyond this square to the west was the fruit-house and the tool-house—the latter large enough to house all the farm machinery we should ever need. I have a horror of the economy that leaves good tools to sky and clouds without protection. ”

“ The farmer and the farmer's family may or may not be cultivated persons. Cultivation does not come by nature; and the incessant and increasing duties of farm life leave one, however well disposed, but little time and but scant strength for æsthetic study. The farmhouse is the centre of the home life and of the homely thought and feeling of its inmates. The farm on which one has been born and bred is the centre and standpoint from which he regards the world without. ”

“ Suppose that a peasant farmer in Brie has so many acres of meadow, so many acres of forest, so many acres of rich arable land and a good-sized vineyard; do you imagine that on his death one son will take the pastures, another the cornland, and so forth? Not a bit of it! Each child will claim a slice of each sort of soil; and their children again will subdivide, till the strips of meadow, rye, cabbage, or vine, are not fields at all, but merely gardens. ”

“ You ought to see a field of corn in the shock; hay in a barn mow; the jars of fruit, the potatoes, apples, and great chunks of wood in the farmhouse cellar. You ought to see how a farmer gets ready for the winter—the comfort, the plenty, the sufficiency of it all! ”

“ We can sneak out of here and go away around back of the barn and farm buildings and through the orchard until we come to the fence that separates the orchard from the farmhouse lawn. Then we can crawl through and approach the house from the back. There will be no one around there now as they are all busy at the other side of the house where the summer kitchen is. We can creep along from the back of the house to the side window of the cellar that is always left open and we can jump through. ”

“ Twenty-five acres of arable land, stretching to the south; a grand old barn, with dusty, cobwebbed, hay-filled lofts, stalls for two horses and five cows; hen houses, with plenty of room to carry out a long-cherished plan of starting a poultry farm. ”

“ We know of no good reason why the walls of a farm house should appear like a hay rick, or its roof like the thatched covering to his wheat stacks, because such are the shapes best adapted to preserve his crops, any more than the grocer's habitation should be made to imitate a tea chest, or the shipping merchant's a rum puncheon, or cotton bale. We have an idea that the farmer, or the planter, according to his means and requirements, should be as well housed and accommodated, and in as agreeable style, too, as any other class of community ”

“ NCE upon a time there was a farm-house, and it was painted white and had green blinds; and it stood not far from the road. In the fence was a wide gate to let the wagons through to the barn. And the wagons, going through, had made a little track that went up past the kitchen door and past the shed and past the barn and past the orchard to the wheat-field. Not very far from that farm-house there was a field where the horses and cows used to go to eat the grass. ”

“ If these resemble the environments of a wretched hovel on the outskirts of a town; if the front door-yard is a pig-sty, and the back door-yard a cattle-pen; if the farm-house stands, bare and desolate, like a brown rock in a desert, beaten upon by sun and storms, by rain and wind, do you think the value of the farm is not impaired? ”

“ Acres and acres of already harvested grainfields are seen on both sides, crossed by roads at right angles; here and there are stacks of grain which have not yet been threshed, or heaps of straw, where the threshing engine has done its work; on almost every section of land we see a farmhouse and barn, a few gum-trees or cottonwoods, and many a windmill and elevated tank informs us where the farmer gets his water for his house and his scanty trees. ”

“ The farm barn, next to the farm house, is the most important structure of the farm itself, in the Northern and Middle States; and even at the south and southwest, where less used, they are of more importance in the economy of farm management than is generally supposed. Indeed, to our own eyes, a farm, or a plantation appears incomplete, without a good barn accommodation, as much as without good household appointments—and without them, no agricultural establishment can be complete in all its proper economy. ”

“ As we approach the farm we will probably see first the farm-house surrounded by shade trees, perhaps elms or maples, with the barns and other buildings grouped nearby. As we pass up the front walk we notice more or less lawn of neatly clipped grass, with flower beds bordering the walk, or we may find a number of chickens occupying the front yard, and the flower beds, placed in red half-barrels, set upon short posts. ”

“ To allow an orchard to have blank spaces, where trees have died, and when the living trees begin to bear, to wake up and put young whips in the vacant spots.
It is very shiftless to build your barnyard so that every rain shall drain it; to build your privy and dig your well close together; to build a privy of more than seven feet square—some shiftless folks have it of the size of the whole yard; to set it in the most exposed spot on the premises; to set it at the very far end of the garden, for the pleasure of traversing mud-puddles and labyrinths of wet weeds in rainy days. ”

“ We set off towards a row of houses on a higher part of the slope. Each has its long and narrow piece of land, an orchard immediately behind the house; then patches of wheat, barley, poppies, beetroot, grass, and potatoes, cultivated, with few exceptions, by the several families. But labourers can be hired when wanted, who are willing to work for one or two florins a week.
We went into one of the houses. There sat a family grinding and polishing glass, alternating field-work by a day at the treadles. ”

“ Each system of husbandry, too, will give prominence to certain departments of the homestead. Thus in a dairy farm, the cow-house and the dairy offices are the chief feature. On a fattening farm, prominence must be given to boxes and covered yards, and to the arrangements for preparing food. On a mixed farm, which generally partakes of all systems, the buildings must be more numerous, and suited in some respects to all purposes. ”

“ The soil which their rude shares upturned to the sun was indeed virgin and fertile, but before it could be cultivated it had to be cleared of its heavy growth of timber and underbrush, and with the means then employed, to clear a farm was well-nigh a life's labor. Each pioneer with the help of a few neighbors—which help he paid for by helping them in return—built his own house, his barn, his sheds, and fenced his "clearing." ”

“ That it be a farm house, is sufficiently apparent from its locality upon the farm itself; that its interior arrangement be for the convenience of the in-door farm work, and the proper accommodation of the farmer's family, should be quite as apparent; but, that it should assume an uncouth or clownish aspect, is as unnecessary as that the farmer himself should be a boor in his manners, or a dolt in his intellect.
The farm, in its proper cultivation, is the foundation of all human prosperity, and from it is derived the main wealth of the community. ”

“ I know that penning them ten hours of each twenty-four in a filthy yard, where they have neither food nor drink, is unwise; and I feel confident that it is already high time, wherever good grass-land is worth $100 per acre, to limit pasturage to one small field, as near the center of the farm as may be, wherein shade and good water abound, into which green rye, clover, timothy, oats, sowed corn, stalks, etc., etc., may successively be thrown from every side, and where shelter from a cold, driving storm, is provided ”

“ The farm garden should be ample and contain not only enough vegetable and small fruits for the use of the family, but a surplus to sell [342] or to give away. The farmer used to large areas is reluctant to undertake anything so small as he imagines the garden to be; hence, too often he plows it and leaves the planting and cultivation of it to the “women folks.” If he knew how to manage a garden he would find that the half-acre of land devoted to small fruits and vegetables could be made the most profitable and pleasurable part of the farm. ”

“ Having essayed to instruct our agricultural friends in the proper modes of erecting their houses, and providing for their convenient accommodation within them, a few remarks may be pardoned touching such collateral subjects of embellishment as may be connected with the farm residence in the way of plantations and grounds in their immediate vicinity.
We are well aware that small farms do not permit any considerable appropriation of ground to waste purposes, as such spots are usually called which are occupied with wood, or the shade of open trees, near the dwelling. ”

“ The farm-house expands, shuts up again, turns itself completely round, a window winks at you for an instant under one of the gables, and then disappears; presently the farm-house itself vanishes, and a rough, half-shaved corn-field, with sturdy sheaves of wheat staggering about its back, comes running up out of a coppice to overtake the farm. ”

“ If he can get no muck within a mile, let him cut, when they are in blossom, all the weeds that grow near him, especially by the road-side, cart them at once into his barn-yard, and there convert them into fertilizers. In Autumn, replace the hay-rack on the wagon or cart, and pile load after load of freshly-fallen leaves into your yard; taking them, if you may, from the sides of roads and fences, and from any place where they may have been lodged or heaped by the winds, your own wood-lot excepted. ”

“ Every out-building upon the farm, let it be devoted to what purpose it may, having a wooden floor on the 56 ground story, should be set up sufficiently high from the surface to admit a cat or small terrier dog beneath such floor, with openings for them to pass in and out, or these hiding places will become so many rat warrens upon the premises, and prove most destructive to the grain and poultry. Nothing can be more annoying to the farmer than these vermin, and a trifling outlay in the beginning, will exclude them from the foundations and walls of all buildings. ”