Harvesting grain and picking berries

Kjettestorp field, late 1950s or early 1960s

"Well, as you’ve heard now, a lot of the farm work was done by hand when we were young. They had horses, of course, to pull the equipment like plows and things. There were no tractors, of course, or anything like that. The only mechanical thing we had was the threshing machine. Several farms went together to buy the threshing machine. They formed an association, so to speak. They had meetings about the threshing so the schedule was drawn up

Astor Karlsson with what I assume is some sort of horse-drawn grain harvester

when the machine was going to different places. Then also other people would call and want to rent the threshing machine. Morbror Ernst was the machinist. He followed the threshing machine along as anyone was using or renting it. When they were threshing they had to hire some people to help because there were many stations to be manned. One person had to feed the threshing machine and one person stood on the platform and cut open the bundles and gave them to the guy who was feeding it into the machine. There

I believe Thor Boberg is in the middle here, but I'm not sure what they're doing.
Perhaps this is an earlier form of thresher than the one mom describes?

had to be at least one guy, maybe two, up in the grain bin to put the bundles up to the person who was cutting off the bands. I did a lot of that cutting off the bands. That was often a girl. And I sometimes went to the neighbors too. If there was no young person at a certain farm, they might ask one of us to come too. Dad had to watch where the grain came out. They hooked on burlap sacks and when those got full, he had to shut off the flow and put on a new sack. That was a full-time job because they had two different

Someone carrying a sack full of grain perhaps? It was next to the previous picture in the album.

spaces where the grain came out and you couldn’t let it run over or there would be grain lost. Then he had to haul it down to the visthusboden where he took it upstairs and emptied it in the different bins where it belonged. Whichever household was doing the threshing that day, it was expected that the wife there would feed all those men. Of course, this didn’t last long, depending on how big a farm you had. Threshing usually only took a few days at each farm.

We also had a lot of potatoes. In the spring, Dad would go with a certain plow and make furrows and we would come along after and set the potatoes, as it was called. We dropped the potatoes into the furrow with a certain space in between. Then they came with another piece of equipment and covered them up. In the fall, then Dad again would have to make a certain furrow, so as to not cut into the potatoes but to expose them. We would have a short-handled hoe and we would pick up the potatoes and hoe around in the dirt a bit to make sure we didn’t leave any potatoes behind. When it was time to pick up the potatoes, then we hired people, kids mostly. That was one thing young people could do. At potato picking time, the schools often were closed for a week or two so kids could go out and earn some money.

In the fall, we would go out in the forest and such and pick lingonberries and blueberries. We would pick all we needed for our own use through the year and then we sold the extra, all we could find to pick. They made some kind of drink that I thought was the best drink that I thought was the best thing. It was called enbärsdricka, juniper drink. Juniper bushes, the first year berries are white and small, kind of like white pepper corns. The next year they’re larger and bluish-brown. That’s when they picked the juniper berries and made that

This one shows the Swedish forest in 1978. There were a few wild blueberries ripe at that
time. Henrik Boberg leads the way here with his fishing pole and perhaps some fish
he caught :) Behind him follow Ingemar Bäck, Annika Boberg, Elizabeth Moore Powell,
Mom, Dad, Jim Moore, and Lennart Boberg.
 

drink. I don’t know how they made it exactly. I don’t remember that. We also picked cherries. We had several different kinds of cherry trees in the yard. Some of them were just eating cherries, but we also dried cherries for the winter. We had apples and pears in the yard too. Some big cherries we used to sell in town."