PROGRESS

Since the use of machinery, farm work has changed considerably over the years and is still changing.

Potatoes were ploughed out and a lot of scratching had to be done with the hands to uncover them from the soil, pick them up and take them to the cellar. From the plough, came a potato digger of different types, each few years, an improvement over the old one, until today they use a Combine Potato Harvester and the potatoes fall into large bulk boxes on trucks, which drive along side the harvester as they are dug. Then the potatoes are hauled to Potato warehouses or cellars. Some are taken to

the Frozen Food Plant to be used for making Potato Chips and French Fries.

Hay was cut by hand with a scythe, and gathered into piles or coils at the end of the day, if it looked like rain, to keep the weather from bleaching it. Then came the hay mower, rake and loader. Now the load- er is replaced by a baler and the bales loaded unto wagons, and taken into the barn loft by means of an escalator and packed into rows.

Grain crops were cut with a sickle, gathered and tied by hand into sheaves.

Later the reaper and then the binder were invented and it bound the sheaves, and some members of the family usually done the stooking.

The sheaves were left in the field for two or three weeks, then they were taken to the barn loft and a threshing day came several times during the winter, when oats or straw was needed for the animals.

The Threshing Machine too, was improved upon, when all the stooks were threshed outside and the straw was blown into the loft and the grain blown into the granary. Today another invention the Combine Thresher is still more modern, when the oats is cut and threshed in one operation. The oats are hauled to the granary by truck and augured into the bins. The grain has to be fully ripe before it is combined, so it makes it late in the season getting grain and straw into the barn. The straw is baled too, the same as the hay.

MUD DIGGING

Mussel mud digging was a part of farm work during the winter, as long as the ice lasted on the South-West River. Down the river there were two different places called the mussel beds, where this operation was car- ried on. One man operated the fork and by means of the capstan, a horse Was hitched to a pole and the horse tramped round and round all day long, lifting the fork full of mud — filling the sleighs of the farmers, who came long distances to haul mud, as this was their only supply of lime and pot- ash for the soil. They would unload their sleigh—loads of mud on the river banks and get another load and do the same, then when they went home at night, they would take a load of mud with them. Then from the mud piles on shore, they could haul it home at their convenience.

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