Farming

Ryan & Diarmuid

Life on the Farm

Nora Corless remembers...

"Farming was quite like what it is now but it was a hard time and there was no money to spare.

The jobs she would do could be from sweeping the ground to milking the cows and collecting the eggs.

She and her siblings would love to help out and do whatever they could without any visible reward.

Life in the fifties was pretty tough. First thing in the morning the few cows would have to be milked, if the farmer was lucky enough to have two or three. Then breakfast would consist of oatmeal porridge and maybe an egg.

Then in the springtime the land would be ploughed with two horses,no machines, to lessen the work in them years."

"Now to sow the potatoes, “slits” as they were called, were left down in drills just about a foot apart and then covered by a scuffler, as it was called.

In September then the farmer and others would put a prascin over their knees and down they go rooting out the spuds. The farmers would help each others in them times.

Not many had the privileges of having a motor car in the fifties but were lucky to have an old bike, just paying £1 a month for it and barely even having the price of it.

Now the corn had to be sowed and get the land ready. The farmer would go along with his bucket of corn and shake it all over the land. In the month of Sept. the machine would cut it. Very often the Scythe would be used."

Self sufficiency

"The people around the fifties always supplied their own meat by rearing up pigs and slaughtering them. Then its cleaned and put into a barrell for a few weeks, then taken out and wrapped in newspaper around the fletches, then it’s hung over the fireplace and it’s smokey bacon.

They also rear chickens, geese, ducks and turkeys. The women of the house looks after that business. She also bakes bread in an open fire, it’s called a hearth. There was no dishwasher, no washing machine and not even a sink so most stuff had to be done manually."

Harvesting

"In the Spring, the men would go out and plough the fields, with his two horses, to get ready to sow wheat, oats and barley.

In the late summer, when it would be ripe a machine would come and cut it and the farmers would make them into sheaves. Then after a few days it would be horse drawn into the haggard, ready for thrashing. The thrashing mill would dispense the straw while the seed would be dispensed on the other side."

Kathy Tannian's memories of life on the farm...

”I lived in a family of 9. My Mom died when I was 10 and my grandad lived with us also. On the Farm we were pretty much self-sufficient, we grew our own crops such as turnips, carrots, onions, potatoes, cabbage and wheat for flour. We brought the wheat to Connollys mill in Kinvara . We milked our own cows by hand.We churned our own butter and anybody that visited the house had to stir/churn the butter or it was bad luck and butter might go bad…. We killed our own pigs chickens and ducks for meat. The neighbours all helped out the day we killed the pig. We had plenty duck and hen eggs. My grandad loved the duck eggs. We only bought a few things at the shop like paraffin oil ,white loaf, soap and lots of cigarettes…"

Back then farmers used to name their fields .The field that my house was built in was called Garry nó móthar .There are loads of other names like the haggart,Garry reede,and the paroues .

Katie

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