My parents bought their property in ’73 and began building out here. They planted a peach orchard and we had chickens, goats, and a garden. Mom and Dad kept ledgers of their activity and the weather. I dug some up and thought I’d share with you some of their entries.
1988
Dad ordered our first family PC on January 15, 1988. Details:
- PCs Limited 80286 chip
- 1 meg memory
- 30 meg hard disk
- 1.2 meg floppy
- mouse
- 1200 baud modem
- DOS 3.1
- 8MHz cycle
- $3900.00
Yeah, seriously. Not sure about that modem but I do recall us having an acoustic modem — you’d get a call and have to place your handset on this cradle and the computers would literally chatter away like a couple of hens fighting over a june bug.
March 27th, 28th, and 30th were really kind of crap days for farming that year:
5:30 am March 27th. 32 degrees.
“all buds about to burst, several on every tree already in bloom.”
“gearing up to plant 450 trees (peach) tomorrow. Teresa and Deanna went after hay this evening. Ran out of gas in Badger Canyon. Adam and I went and bailed them out as Jerry wants to borrow the pick up tomorrow.” (I remember this trip — the truck had an auxiliary tank and a bad gauge so if you switched from the main tank to the auxiliary it looked like you had a full tank of gas. You did not.)
Saturday, March 28th 5:30 am. 35 degrees.
“Trees were delivered at 7:00 am. Scheduled delivery was yesterday afternoon. Teresa and Deanna went after hay at 7:00. Water pump went out on Datsun pick up. Had to have datsun today. Exhaust tail pipe came off Chevy pick up, had to fix that (that was the one I was using to haul hay).
Windy and cold today. Adam, Teresa, Deanna, Mary and I staked, drilled, watered, planted, and pruned 110 trees by 17:00. All were tired.
And, water truck wouldn’t start so, I set up a line to water trees with.”
Yeah, so I had to take two attempts to pick up hay (which we loaded and unloaded by hand), Dad had to replace the water pump in the pick up, the exhaust pipe on the Chevy, and then we all planted 110 trees.
I don’t remember being all that tough, but reading this exhausts me. The next day gets better. No, I mean, it makes for better reading, but equally frustrating…
Sunday, March 29 5:30 am. 32 degrees. sunny.
“322 trees total planted — +1 in older 4 acres.
213 today — Bruce, Mary, Teresa, + Adam.
The old folks are tired.
Universal joint on auger busted. 127 tree holes yet to dig.”
Judas Priest, I don’t know how they even pressed on. It was like everything we touched that weekend either died or broke. But it wasn’t over…
March 30 — 5:30 am, 26 degrees.
“Smudge pots smoke thickest we’ve ever seen.”
Back then farmers used kerosene heaters called “smudge pots” that they burned in their orchards to protect new buds from late-season frost. That year it was a doozy. Our orchard had mostly budded out or already blossomed. We didn’t use smudge pots, or really anything to protect the buds.
April 7th
“Bruce says it looks like we’ve lost a lot of the crop from that Mar. 30 cold.”
Well dang!
Then, dad left for a work trip at the end of the month. Almost as if it were planned, someone got the tractor and mower stuck.
It was me. I got the tractor and mower stuck.
Sunday, May 3
“40 trees in #2 dying or dead.
Tractor out.
Mower still stuck.”
Farming is for the stubborn.
