How to Harvest Grain

The road between the house and barn at Kjettestorp in 1978. Left to right are
Magnus Boberg, Jim Moore, Henrik Boberg, Elizabeth Moore Powell and Annika Boberg.
The field behind us is the one you see in the photo below.

"Well, now that we’ve seen what the outside of Kjettestorp looked like, now we can talk about how it was to live there. In the early 20s through the

middle 1900s, the countryside was dotted with these little dairy farms, and they lived self-sufficient life. We grew what we consumed. Very few things were bought in town. Of course they had to buy coffee, and different things like knitting and sewing needles and some fish. Although when Farfar when he was alive, he did a lot of fishing down in Lake Föllingen, Dad was not so inclined to that, some but not so much.

The hook for gathering bundles of cut grain
which hung on Mom's kitchen wall.

There was a lot of hard work but also people were proud of how they took care of themselves. I remember one time when I heard one woman say to another, “Have you heard that Rut bought bread in town?” Rut was Morbror Nisse’s wife. We called her Rut i Grönede. She worked so hard outside all the time that she maybe didn’t have time to do everything, but it was talked about like it was such a disgrace to buy bread in town. I remember one year after I had come to America that Sara wrote to me, “I’m glad we don’t have to work so hard doing everything ourselves, but if our mother and Ingemar’s mother knew I bought beans in a can for Christmas, they would be turning in their graves.”

Maybe we should talk about the different things we did. In the spring, Dad planted the wheat in one field and the rye in another field and the oats in another field. We sometimes grew some feed for the cows too. When they

I'm guessing that Mom is holding one of the wooden rods

that she describes that went in the middle of a bundle

of grain when they were set up to dry.

harvested grains, they had a scythe. Men would go first with a scythe. It was done so the grain fell in a neat row. Afterwards came a woman with a hook and gathered up so much grain and tied it with straw and made a bundle. The hook was the right size so it gathered up the right amount of grain for one bundle. You couldn’t just grab the grain with your hands because it was sharp and would give you splinters.  I have one of those hooks on my kitchen wall to remember. I didn’t do a lot of this gathering up. I did some; we all did. When it came to oats, Dad soon bought what was called a slåttermaskin. That machine could be set, so it dropped just enough for a bundle. This was a great improvement because then we didn’t need to carry that hook along. We just gathered up the bundle that was already there and tied the bundle with straw. 

All of these bundles -- for whatever kind of grain -- needed to be set up to dry. Sometimes they had a wood rod in the middle to gather it around because it had to sit out and dry for so long -- I don’t remember exactly how long, a couple weeks, or three -- and it always rained some in that time. It had to be hung on there in a way that the rain ran off so it didn’t soak the bundles."

This is the field to the north of Norrgård at Kjettestorp. You can see the bundles of grain
set out to dry with wooden rod sticking up from the middle of each one. Taken around 1953.