We plowed a section near the back of the lot and grew large gardens for several years. The garden was huge that first year, nearly half our lot, and the yield was enormous, so its size was reduced in subsequent years, but continued to produce sizable yields of corn, tomatoes, green beans, onions, potatoes, radishes, beets, etc. - enough to give a lot of it away, free for the picking.
Dad brought home a used tractor shortly after we moved, the two-wheel, walk-behind type. Various gardening accessories could be fitted to these all purpose machines. The Stocks, our next door neighbors, owned one with a wagon. It became a major source of transport for Gary Stock after he left the Polio treatment hospital. Ours sported a three foot wide weed cutting sickle that attached to the front. It easily severed anything up to a half inch in diameter - tall grass and small saplings being its main staple. We also had a tiller that attached to the rear.
Don and I got the job of cutting the “back-forty”, and we kept that position through the rest of the decade. We received a benefit from the garden as it removed a large swath of yard from our mowing duties. Sometimes we’d let the grass grow a bit tall as cutting the “back-forty” was not our favorite chore. We were neither more nor less industrious than other kids of the time. There were simply more attractive endeavors to entice us, like the recently discovered countryside to the east: Learners Woods with two gravel pits, Wildcat Creek that flowed through it to open pastures, and beyond. Our interests were more in line with exploring new territory, not retracing previously cut paths.
The tractor enticed us for a short time, but it symbolized work more than play. We tended the chickens on a regular basis as their needs were a constant, but mowing grass was not as restrictive, and provided opportunity for manipulating our schedule. We could always find an excuse for putting it off, and we devised ingenious systems to avoid work.
On one occasion we enlisted the help of rabbits. I don’t remember the exact origin of our brood. A couple of old cages showed up with a big, mature rabbit of each sex per cage. Dad was probably, yet again, responsible for their appearance. The two rabbits got together one afternoon and a few weeks later there were fourteen more. We had fun playing with the cute little fur balls, but soon realized that they represented more mouths to feed, more responsibilities to shoulder, more limits to our freedom, more chores to take us away form the countryside to the east.
A plan formulated in our ever scheming minds. Why not kill two birds with one stone. There were rabbits to feed and grass to mow. Why not enlist the rabbits to mow the grass? Don and I busied ourselves in building a bottomless cage. It measured eight feet by three and stood a foot high. We’d gather the rabbits from their cage in the morning, toss them into the movable one, and return periodically to move the live mowers to new grazing.
There was just a couple things wrong with our innovation, chief among them - we had to be present. The cage got moved every half an hour. Leave it too long and the rabbits would cut the vegetation to bare ground. That didn’t leave time enough to explore the countryside to the east. Secondly, there would be one or two fewer rabbits in the cage each time we moved it. The uneven ground allowed them to wiggle free, and by evening the cage was empty or nearly so. At the end of the day we chased after errant rabbits for an hour, poking them out from under the chicken shed, and other hiding places. After a few tries we scrapped that “time saver” as a waste of time.
The next animal Dad brought to the “farm” tested everyone. It was a brown Jersey cow, and its recalcitrant behavior endeared it to no one. I never knew the train of events that left us owners of the beast, and I don’t think the poor cow stayed more than a couple months, but those months were memorable. Our first problem, no fault of the cow, was that we had neither a fenced pasture nor shelter for the poor thing. Dad tethered it to a cement block positioned in the middle of the yard, and that most certainly did nothing to encourage a positive attitude. The nameless cow became an escape artist, and for some reason it seemed to stage its breakouts on Sunday afternoons. Dad, Don and I spent hours chasing it through the neighborhood, and a couple of times it crossed the highway to the east, heading for open county. The critter, weighing nearly four hundred pounds, closely matching our combined weights, and was not so easy to “manhandle”. It once attempted to slam me up against a fence post when we had finally managed to corner it. After the four or fifth escape attempt the poor cow was turned over to the butcher.
The last addition to our menagerie were two skunks.They had been “deskunked”, but still possessed a hint of their odorant. I remember they showed up housed in a bushel basket with chicken fence across the top. A brick sat on top the wire to weigh it down - a temporary cage. It was not sufficient as they made their escape that night and we never saw them again.
So, at one time we had a hundred chickens, sixteen rabbits, two skunks, a cow, one dog, one cat, a parakeet, a canary, and a lone gold fish in a small bowl. Most were gone within a short time. The skunks escaped, stray dogs killed the rabbits about a week later, and then got the chickens a short time after that. We were down to a dog, cat, parakeet and canary, and gave up farm life.
