Killing kittens and pups

Another chore that I did not like to do was to kill kittens and pups. When you have cats and dogs they can produce more kittens and pups and you can handle. You can't give them away because everybody in the country already has their own kittens and pups. If you don't destroy them you will be overrun with cats and dogs. My dad gave this chore to me and my brother. He would say," you boys take the kittens or pups out and kill them." There was no discussion there was just obedience. My brother and I wanted to do it in the most humane way. But there were not a lot of choices left to us as to how we did it. It would've been nice if we could put them to sleep, and option we did not have. So we would take the hind legs of the pup or kitten and swing with all of our might and crush their head into a tree or a rock so that they would die instantly. You know they have died instantly when there is no crying on their part.

I know this sounds cruel but it was more humane than what city people did. They wood box up there kittens and pulps and bring them into the country and dump them. This left infant kittens and pups to fend for themselves which was something they could not do. These kittens and pulps starve to death which is a hard way to die. This is cruel and unusual punishment.

Picking Ticks

My least favorite thing to do was to the de-tick myself. The Ozark Mountains were full of ticks. There were big ticks, medium ticks, small ticks and seed ticks. Whenever you were out and about in the fields and woods you would gather ticks. When you brush by grass and limbs on trees the ticks would transfer onto your clothing. From there they would crawl into your body. These ticks would get to your underarms, in your hair, on your back, on your private parts, legs and about anywhere. They would bite into you and if not removed they would swell up and become fat. Sometimes when we had been out for a long time my brother and I would go behind the house strip our clothes off and de-tick each other.

Making sauerkraut

I love the times when we could make sauerkraut. We grew the cabbage in our garden. We took a number two wash tub into the garden and cut cabbage off the stock and carried them to the porch. We took off the top leaves in order to get the dirty leaves out of the way. We cut the cabbage away from the core and cut it in long slices. My favorite part of cabbage is the core. I love to eat the core when it's fresh.

We had a wide mouth crock jar. This jar was a little over 2 feet tall. We would put a layer of cabbage which had been sliced and cover that with salt. We would put another layer of cabbage and add another layer salt. Thus we layered cabbage and salt to the top, check that, almost to the top. We would take a clean cloth which was white and place over the top of the last layer salt. We would take a rock which had been cleaned and lay it on top of the cloth. This would hold the cabbage down while it was souring. We children were always slipping into the crock jar removing the rock and the cloth and taking out the cabbage and eat it while it was in the process of souring.

Picking huckleberries, blackberries and wild plumbs

One advantage of living in the country was the many fruits that you could gather that grew wild. My grandmother and we children would gather lard buckets (gallon tin buckets that we bought lard in) and head for our favorite huckleberry patches. This was hard work. You could not very well get down on your knees to pick the huckleberries as this would crush the plants. So it meant you had to bend over while you were picking the huckleberries. You also had to be aware of snakes. There are a variety of snakes that live in the Ozarks of Arkansas. Some of these are poisonous snakes, for example the rattlesnake, copperhead and water moccasin. You did not want to reach for huckleberry only to have a poisonous snake put its fangs in your hand. So you had to be very careful where you step and we put your hands.

Rattlesnakes do not like to be around people so they tend to move away when they hear you coming. Moccasin are generally found around water for not much to contend with and picking huckleberries. But copperheads do not move away from people and are likely to be found where there are ripe berries that small rodents might want to eat.

It is however, a beautiful site to see several lard buckets full of huckleberries. When we got home with our huckleberries we had to wash them and cleaned them. Then they would be canned and fruit jars for use later on where they would be put in pies or make jelly out of them.

Blackberries were my favorite. Not that they were easy to pick, they were not. They tend to grow in thickets which are very close together. They grew to heights off for the 6 feet tall. One good thing about picking them you did not have to bend over. The bad part about picking them was that they had briars on them. At the end of the day picking blackberries the ends of your fingers would be pricked. All day long you were picking briars out of your fingers. But the end result was worth all of the pain. As the old sage says, "no pain no gain." Some of these blackberry thickets would cover an area larger than the big back yard. In order to get to the berries in the middle of the thicket we would take boards that were about 8 feet long and 12 inches wide, we would ladies board up against the blackberry bushes and began walking on the board which would cause the bushes in front of us to go down to the ground and allow us to walk out of the board for 8 feet. This would let us pick the berries on both sides of the board. Of course we would destroy the berries were the board was setting but better to destroy some berries then not be able to get to the others. When we were at the end of the 8 feet of the board we would place another such board and walk out on it etc. etc. thus we conquered blackberry thickets.

Blackberries have many uses but my favorite one is blackberry jelly. The process of making the jelly was to clean the blackberries by washing them thoroughly. Removing all lambs and stems and leaves saw all that was left was just blackberries. You would then heat them in a pan with a little bit of water on to the berries would begin to disintegrate. You would then push them through a colander to begin the process of removing the juice. A colander would remove most of the seeds. But to get the pulp out you had to use cheesecloth. You would put the cheesecloth over a large bowl and pour the pulp and juice on it. The juice would easily go through it meeting the pulp in the cheesecloth you would wrap the pulp around the cheesecloth and squeeze more juice out. From the juice she would make jelly and from the pulp you would make jam. To make both jam and jelly you had to add sugar. You had to cook it long enough for it to jell.

We had a couple of wild plumb thickets on our farm. These plum bushes grow to about 6 to 8 feet tall. The size of these plum were a little larger than the largest of grapes. They turned a bright yellow when they were ripe. We cook these in water until they were soft then ran them through a colander to remove the seeds and peelings. We then added sugar and salt and cooked it until it jelled.