Planting Oats

The oats were planted in late March or early April and were usually planted on land that had grown corn the year before. Typically the oats were seeded by a rotating spreader attached to the back end of a lumber wagon (uncle Carl used a small two-wheel cart that he had adapted). Prior to the seeding the oats used for seed were run through a fanning mill to remove weed seeds, extraneous debris and inferior kernels — the oats as it came out of the previous year’s threshing was used to seed. Following the seeding the land was disced once or twice to cover the seed with soil and also to break up and mash down the cornstalks left over from the previous year. A final operation might then be applied — with a packer or roller that served to further smooth the ground and further mash down an cornstalk debris still sticking up. This would facilitate the later harvesting the oats with the binder.

By late June the oats would be mature and the harvest would begin. Since the field had been seeded with oats right up to the fences, the field would be “opened” up by pulling the binder with a three-horse team. (To provide the third horse my uncle borrowed one of the two horses that Will Lines had; his team were named Maud and Lucy.) The swath cut by the binder on this first turn around the field was directly adjacent the fence — this meant that the horses were walking through the standing grain further in from the fence. By using horses for the opening swath, less grain would be broken down than if the tractor were used to pull the binder.



Re-creation of sketch in Carl’s notebook

After this first swath had been cut, the binder went around the field in the opposite rotation and was pulled by the Farmall tractor. The binder had a carrier on the side on which the bundles collected after they were tied and were periodically dumped by the person riding on the binder (namely, my uncle Carl). The bundles were dropped to form windrows. The workers shocking the pat bundles would erect the shocks along these windrows. As the grain would need to dry further before it could be threshed and stored, it would stand in the field for awhile. Typically this drying period would be a week or so and then the threshing would begin.

I can recall being at my grandmother’s house for a Sunday dinner when my uncle Carl described to me (us) how the oat shocking was done. This was doubtless soon before the first oat harvest in which I was involved. The first step was to set up two bundles on end with the end where the grain kernels were uppermost. These two bundles would sort of lean against each other. Then two bundles would be leaned against these first bundles to support them. Then four more bundles would be added leaning again against the first two bundles. The shock was then capped with a ninth bundle after it had been spread out to provide sort of a roof to keep the rain off.



Re-creation of diagram of oat bundle arrangement

In the seeding operation uncle Carl ran the seeder while I drove the Farmall pulling the disc that covered up the seed. On one occasion I made the turn at the end of the field not quite soon enough and one of the projections on the front of the tractor got caught in the fence. The woven wire was damaged somewhat but I managed to extricate the Farmall and the disc (fortunately the latter did not get into the fence). The damage could be readily seen but it wasn’t enough to damage the effectiveness of the fence. I never reported the event to uncle Carl. I can imagine what his reaction would have been. The event occurred in the big field just north of the building site, along the fence between the Peterson and Woodard farms.

Back before the days of the grain binder, the cut grain was simply discharged out of the side of the reaper onto the grain stubble. The bundles then had to be made manually by taking some stalks of grain, wrapping them around the amount of grain suitable for a bundle and twisting them together. Altogether a very tedious and time-consuming procedure.