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

 Billy Welch, the man that lived here before my wife and I bought this place, always said that Decoration Day, as it used to be called, was time enough to plant your garden. But because the month of March was so dry and then we had warm weather I thought that perhaps I could get away and plant a little earlier but because there seemed to be a fluffy layer on top I even had some onion sets that didn't seem to be able to get a start.

 Of course Billy planted his garden so that he could cultivate it with a horse. I can remember old Nell, a part Morgan who would do just about anything Billy asked her to do. First he would mark the garden with his corn marker which was a pine pole with thills for Nell and then three oaken legs that did the marking. The marker was a home made affair using stuff from the woods. A pine pole and two inch hand auger. Two ash poles for thills three oak poles for markers two more holes in the log to make a handle for you had to pick the whole thing up when you turned at the end of the row. Some farmers would bolt old cultivator teeth on the end of the markers. If you didn't take the weight off the legs you soon had loose cultivator teeth or wobbly legs. These markers were really meant for field work to mark for corn or potatoes or any row crop. 

 Some times he would have time to plant some garden but didn't want to take time to get the horse out and harness it he would straddle his hoe handle, hug up on the hoe and put some weight on the handle and mark a row that way. 

 He had a kind of sweet corn that only grew about four feet tall and the cobs made just a nice handful and he always saved his own seed. We had that same seed for years and perhaps when we had a large group late in the summer come to visit and we'd cook big canning kettles of corn, we may have over estimated the amount of corn for we finally lost that seed. 

 For winter use he would put carrots, turnips, and rutabagas in the cellar. He had his own way of growing big rutabagas. About the middle of summer he would scatter a handful of seed in his garden and when the rutabagas got big enough to transplant, he would pick out the nicest ones and pull off some of the outside leaves and pinch off the taproot and transplant them in rows. He would have rutabagas as large as a small tea kettle. 

 He always had a bin of potatoes in the cellar. He would eat some green beans in the summer but always dried most of them for winter.

 He liked tomatoes and cucumbers. He used vinegar and sugar on his tomatoes and after his teeth got to bothering him, for I don't think he ever went to a dentist, he would split a cucumber and eat the insides with a spoon.

 For meat he would pick out an older cow that probably didn't give much milk and feed her heavily for he said new meat on an old cow was just as a younger animal. When the weather got cold enough he would kill this old cow and butcher her, his brother Clarence usually helped with this, and hang her carcass in one of those slanty fronted corn cribs. After the meat had hung for a while, his sister, who was Mrs. Rich Thomas who lived on a side road by the old Owego reservoir, would come up and can beef afternoons for her brother. The next summer when we were helping with the haying and it would get near noon, he never had a watch but watched the shadows of the eaves on the barn, he would tell us to take care of the team and he would go and cook potatoes and open and heat a quart of beef. Delicious!