Some Observations from the Hill
by H H "Hub" Brown

 I thought perhaps Fritz had sold one of his bull calves for I can hear a cow mourning, but Pat tells me he has moved them all over to his place to wean them. There's a couple up at Slaterville Springs that Fritz usually furnishes a bull for that when her husband separates the calves and their mothers, the wife packs up and goes and visits a relative. She can't take all that mourning.

 Pat thinks we may have our seasons reversed for we had cool weather all summer and now it's turned quite mild. This will soon change probably.

 For my lunch today, I had the last beet greens of the season. One time I stopped at a little stand in West Corners. The people that ran it had a pizza oven and also sold fruits and vegetables. I saw a small container of sweet yellow apples. They looked as though they had been around a little too long for they had started to wither. They had been set off the top of the stand so I asked the lady what she was going to do with them. She told me that she never knew I was a scavenger. She then wanted to know what I would do with them. I told her I would quarter them, core them, and cook them and then put some of cream and a little sugar on them and eat them. 

 The little row of beets in my garden looked a little down trodden, the large leaves that lay flat on the ground looked as though they had been walked on several times. With my cane in one hand and a small shovel in the other, I uprooted them. Then I cleaned them and cooked them. Then I had to sort them for some had edible roots and some were just little hairy roots. Before I cooked them, I had pulled off all those tired looking leaves and cut the little hairy roots off. Being a scavenger you never want to keep track of your time. I cooked them all together but still had to sort the edible sized bottoms out and peel them. 

 Earlier this fall I had offered a lady some turnip tops for greens and she said she used lemon juice on her greens. Younger people don't seem to like to use vinegar. If they knew of the many ways that vinegar is good for you they would use more of it.

 Years ago when I worked in Endicott, a lot of those old country people would bury a big box or a barrel to store cabbage, root crops and anything that needed protection from the cold. Nowadays, you don't have to do that, the stores have everything if you have money enough to pay for it.

 Last month I mentioned that Fritz had been given another calf down at the packing house. He first told the man that offered the calf that he didn't have time to bother with one right now. The man said, "Oh, come on, it's a nice heifer." So Fritz said OK. And they put the calf on his trailer. But after he had gotten the calf home he saw it was a bull calf. Heifers are again brining between $500 and $600, but what a bull calf will bring depends on his appearance. If he is clean sided, good and lively and gets around good they will bring a fair price but nothing like a good heifer calf. Fritz took his calf to Athens.