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Welcome to our blog, Genzano it story
and this post, Harvesting the very old ways
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Dear readers, usually here we paste some photos that belong to this event, but unfortunately we are having difficulty to do that, so if you would like to see some of the photo that we had in mind, you have to go to this web address in hub pages, where the entire article is shown; Farming today compared to the old way, I hope it works for you.
Harvesting the very old ways
Now, before we come to a close, because we
want to compare the old ways of farming with today farming, we need to say how
harvesting wheat was done before; here we need to say also that I have
witnessed the last part of this old practice when I was young. You see, when I
was young we were already using a horse drawn harvester, and it was very
helpful; but there were people that had some very small holdings and we had one
of these ourselves, so we had to use the old ways of harvesting our wheat for
that small wheat field, because that was the only way to do it for one reason
or another.
So, let me describe how harvesting was done
in those old bygone days; at harvesting time strange as it may seem today, one
could hire some specialized people that were good at using the sickle, these
people usually went from town to town to do this seasonal harvesting job; we
need also to explain that in Southern Italy because the terrain has different
altitude the wheat reaches maturity at different times, this was helping these
seasonal workers to have a longer span of work, now just to compare those very
hard times with today times, I have to tell you that these workers were
sleeping anywhere they could on a sack filled up with straws under a shelter if
they could find one, as they could not afford anything else. In the morning
they would get up early and wait in the town square hoping that somebody would
hire them for the day.
Now let us say that we had a small plot about
one acre and we could not use the harvester of those time, because it was not
possible to go there, we would then hire four people and form a gang that could
harvest one acre in one day and collect it in hips that would be later on taken
on a cart to the farm house to be threshed one way or another.
In the old times anything that had grown in
the field was collected, it needed to be collected for the people to survive,
it was the only way because the fields did not produce as much as they do
today, because they could not be cultivated as good as we do today. You see
today we have the tractor to cultivate the fields and we have many types of
fertilizer to help us grow more wheat, but let us go back to talk about old
harvest times.
Wheat trashing the very old time
Now I suppose I have to say briefly how the
older generations used to thresh their harvests, in order to collect all their
produce. Now, let us suppose that it was only a few bundles of wheat to be
threshed one could even extract the wheat by hitting them with a stick, but let
us say that we had a cartful, or many cartful’s for that matter, then we had to
use a different method, which is the way that most farm used in the very old
times for centuries, so let me tell you how it was done.
I happen to know this procedure, because in
the farms when I was young we were still using this method with smaller crops
most likely broad beans, lentils, chick peas, linseed, and other farm produce,
and the elder would always be telling us that this was the way that they used
to collect their wheat as well and usually it took them a few months to collect
all the season produce. So now let me describe this to you, so that we would be
able to compare the great difference.
In order to do this, first of all we needed
to prepare a piece of ground that is very solid and smooth, this could be
achieved by stripping the old dry grass on a piece of land that had a large
clay content, then wet it with a little bit of water to make it compact; once
that was ready we would place our wheat or whatever was to be threshed and
collected on this clean ground, then we would get our horses mule and donkeys
whatever animals were available and drive them around and around until
everything was threshed. Of course there was a lot more to say, but let us make
it short otherwise it would become too boring.
Now, once the threshing was done we has to
separate the produce from the straw and any other foreign matter, this was
achieved by removing the straws from the top layer making sure that no produce
was left with the straws, at the same time we would collect the bottom layer in
a hip, once that was done we would have to clean that produce by using the
wind, to take away the finer parts that were still mixed with the wheat or
whatever it was, and there were many other things that we could use to get this
wheat clean, by the end of the day we could have collected two or three hundred
kilograms of produce.
In the very ancient times was even worse, see
what they were using in the Medieval Times, here is a link to check out some
ancient farm tools including the Flail and Winnowing Basket used to collect and
clean wheat.
I hope that this gives the modern reader a
view of how thing were done in the old times, so I do not want to say much more
about how all this threshing and cleaning of the wheat was done, because even
writing about it is boring today, but anyhow it needed to be done in those
days, because that was the only way to collect our wheat to make bread and
other things. Now, my dear reader’s do you see how hard was then even to
collect wheat for ourselves.
I hope I have been able to write something
that really sets up the great difference of the ways of life that we were
living then and the ways of life that we are living now, for this I want you to
compare and judge for yourself how much better off we are today.
To the young people who think that today life
is hard, let me describe to you what I have witnessed when I was young, because
then life really was harder then today, you see those days everybody had to
find how to earn enough to feed themselves there were no handover from the
government. So, the very poor people of those days were trying to collect
anything they could to feed themselves.
So at harvest time this is what I have
witnessed, I have seen old and poor people mainly old ladies go around the
fields and pick up any ear of wheat that was left behind in the fields, one ear
of wheat here and anther there until they had the strength, each day until
harvest time was over and there was nothing else to collect; and I tell you
what these poor people were happy if in the end they had collected enough ears
of wheat that they could trash and clean themselves, perhaps they could have
collected enough to make 50 to 100 kilos of wheat during harvest time and they
were happy because, they could make bread from this wheat and not go hungry for
a few months.
Now I hope that you see what I mean when I
say that the youths of today don’t know anything about hard times?
Anyhow as you can see this is just another
story of my life, which I am telling in Hub-Pages, and I am posting some links
for the other stories here under, if you like to read them?
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Genzano it story
Farming the old way
IS GOING TO BE CONTINUED;
Next time with, framing the very old way
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Farming the old way
IS GOING TO BE CONTINUED;
Next time with, framing the very old way
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Some hub links
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