Summer Holidays

 I've been thinking about those week long holidays spent at my grandparents' farm.  I know I'm looking though rose coloured spectacles but they are the only ones I've got!

Very similar to "our" farm

I used to stay with them most school holidays but summer holidays were the best.  It was extra good if I could go towards the end of the holiday when harvest would have started.

The farm was "mixed" as most were in Lincolnshire in those days.  There were cattle being fattened as beef, sheep, a few pigs and a lot of arable fields.  They grew wheat and barley as well as crops used for winter cattle fodder like mangold wurzels.  It's the wheat and the barley I remember most.

Barley is harvested before wheat and back in the fifties it was a much more labour intensive business than it is today.  My grandfather was in partnership with his brother, and their sons and grown-up grandsons (as well as the regular labourers) would do their best to be there to help get the harvest home.  I can remember the harvesting machines making sheaves which were stacked into stooks to finish drying before being taken down to the yard for threshing.  The terriers resident on the farm had a great time killing the rats which had been hiding in the crops.

Building stooks

Harvesting would go on until the light was too poor so, although the men came to the yard for lunch, a picnic tea of sandwiches, cold tea and cake had to be taken to the fields.  That was my favourite bit of the harvest!  In retrospect I think grandad probably enjoyed this break with us (one of my cousins would also be there with his dad) and our chatter was a welcome diversion.  I hope so.

When tea was finished we were allowed to cadge a lift on the next tractor going back to the yard, having had a lovely afternoon in the fields.