PART SEVEN Oral Histories and Family Memoirs - Mountain Light ...

trampled down, straw added to get a good hard floor. Cut with a sickle and bundled, then bundles opened
and spread into a big circle, about 100-200 bundles, then trampled out with horses and wagons, left alone
in the middle, then with a pole go all around the ring and turn it over to shake the wheat [kernels] out.
Then repeat with the horses. Later horses turned a tumbler rod. The women shake the stalks and rake it
out on a pile. The chaff and wheat are piled into the center of the ring, 200-300 bushels. Then it is run
through a fanning mill and deposited again on a big canvas or bagged. Sometimes wheat was taken to the
Volga River and loaded by hand onto boats which were stranded in the river because of low summer
flow, but that‟s where the buyers were. Very little oats and barley were raised, oats for the animals.
A. Kiselev, “Sheaves in the Field”
The wheat straw and chaff were taken home to temporary sheds [see farmyard map]. In August a
big rain often came and father left the family on the Khutor and seeded rye. Last of August very few
weeds in the summerfallow [too dry?]. The livestock fed there anyway. Late spring, manure piles along
creek used to make fuel [Mistholz], horses trampled and water added to a clay-like consistency, then put
in molds for a week and dried. Then piled up and taken home in winter for fuel.
Sunflower harvest usually started in early September when wheat harvest finished. Sunflowers
were cut with a hand sickle, two rows at a time, laid two weeks to dry in a long pile. Then wooden forks
naturally shaped from timber Now ——< , tossed into wagons and taken to the threshing floor. The stalks
were saved for winter sheep feed, or sold at the mill to make syrup. When cut in the field, stalks stacked
into two long rows, then the wagon brought through after two weeks for drying. Then forks used to put in
wagons so the heads always lay in the middle and dumped off so heads are in the middle and flailed like
rye, first in the middle, then turned in the middle and repeated. Then the women rake and shake it, then
rake the stems out onto a pile, all the seeds in the middle, then to the fan mill to separate the seeds from
the leaves and chaff, which is taken to feed the sheep. The stems were burned or used for syrup.
Seeds were sold by weight at the mill so sometimes a little dirt got thrown in! The best price for
sunflowers was sometimes over one ruble per pood. Sees had to be kept dry, if too late in the fall, then
spread out on canvas and old men and kids walked barefoot through them to aerate and stored to dry, then
hauled to Saratov for the best price. Must be very clean.
Potatoes were the last crop, dug in late September and October. Two men and women with steel
potato forks. Dig all day and put in wagons, sometimes dumped behind the house to dry and then put in a
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