Summer - Chores and Work

Summer - Chores and Work

	Clyde Ehlers tells you step-by-step how to put a harness on a horse. Watch This Video (Quicktime required)

Everyone in the family had additional chores in the summertime. Children were expected to gather eggs, churn cream into butter, feed and harness horses, clean the chicken house, feed chickens and hogs, help plant and harvest crops, help cut hay and store it in the barn, tend bees, pick summer fruit and use it to bake pies, preserve and can vegetables from the garden, and much more. After a long day in the field and evening chores, most families ate a late supper by the light of kerosene lamps. Most children were so tired, they went to bed soon after supper. During the summer, farm families and neighbors banded together to harvest wheat and oats and separate the grain from the stalk, a process known as threshing.

Bee keeping

	Try This: Look up how bees turn pollen from flowers into honey. Write a report and illustrate your report with pictures of bees and flowers. The process of keeping bees and collecting honey is much the same today as it was in the 1920s.

Many farm families kept bees. The honey was used on bread and for cooking. Bees were important, because they pollinated the fruit trees in the family's orchard. As a country school teacher, Ruth Nettleton remembers the fun of keeping bees and using the honey to make treats for her students.

"We had plenty of honey and I can, you can cook with honey… They [the bees] were kept near the orchard. They helped pollenize the flower, the trees…One experience with bees that I had when I was a little girl, father was gone and there was a swarm of bees…My sister, Julie and I thought we better get those bees [into the] hive… So she got a ladder and went up about one step. And I knew exactly how to do it because I had helped father… I had gone up the tree and she held the box and I shook the bees…We were just kids…10 or 11 maybe…I had bees for years and years." -- Ruth Nettleton (Quicktime required)

Laundry

How do you wash clothes for a big family without a washer and dryer? Almost no rural homes had electricity in the 1920s, so laundry was usually done by hand—washing clothes and feeding them into a hand-cranked wringer. Work clothes, diapers, underwear and socks—everything was washed in water heated on the stove. It was then hung on a clothes line to dry. Some farm women scrubbed clothes on a metal washboard. Norma Ehlers remembered their family's washhouse was by the windmill, which pumped water that could be used for washing clothes.

	How did people stay cool before air conditioning? Ruth Nettleton lets you know. Watch This Video (Quicktime required)