Friday Farm Fun

Last Sunday while I was harrowing, the calves decided I was as good as any TV show.

This is the time of year the irrigation canal fills with water and we start watering fields. Half of our property is flood irrigated. This is the easiest and most relaxing way to irrigate. Wandering through the fields a shovel over your shoulder and setting irrigation dams in the small irrigation ditches is a lot easier than moving forty foot aluminum irrigation pipes.

The small narrow ditches are blocked off with polypropylene tarps cut to fit the ditches to make the water overflow the ditch and spread across the field. My husband used a ditcher hooked to the John Deere with a three point hitch to clean the ditches out the last two weekends. And now the water is flowing.

Western Wednesday- Laundry on the Trail

There are many conveniences these days that help us with our day to day chores. One such convenience that I don't think I'd want to do without is the washing machine. Here is some information I gleaned on washing clothes in the Old West.

If a person found themselves traveling far from towns, the best way to clean clothes would be to beat them on rocks near a stream. Where they could be dunked, the dirt smacked out of them, and then dunked again and hung up to dry on bushes or rocks.

Did you know that dirt was rinsed and beat out of clothes before they were put in the boiling water? They did this to not set the stains with the hot water. One way to do this if there wasn't a washboard around was a rough board raised on legs. The garment being washed was dunked in water, placed on the board and beat with a paddle, shoving the dirt and water out of the cloth and into the grooves in the board. This was done thoroughly, the garment was rinsed, turned over and beat again, making sure the stains and dirt were gone before they rubbed the soap on the garment and boiled it. After twenty minutes of stirring the garments to make sure the soap had filtered through it all, they were lifted out with a square, long-handled paddle and put in a barrel or tub of fresh clean water, rinsed and put in another tub of fresh water, then hung up to dry. 

A heavy cast iron kettle was usually used for boiling the clothes. A fire was built under the kettle after a bucket or two of water was added, so as not to crack the kettle from the heat. As the water continued to heat, buckets were added until the right amount was in the kettle and the water boiled. Wood had to be kept under the kettle to keep it hot. 

The long paddles were made of pine because it was a light wood. The long handled paddle for stirring the garments had a square handle. This kept the handle from spinning in their hands when they pulled a heavy object out of the kettle and less clean garments were dropped on the ground.  The paddle end had rounded corners to make sure the kettle could be scraped thoroughly to get all garments out of the water before it was dumped out.

I can say after reading about how they did laundry I'm thankful for my washer. Research and digging up how people did things in the past is one of the reasons I enjoy writing historical books. 

Monday Mystery - Dorothy L. Sayers

Sorry this is late. I had a busy weekend and when I sat down last night, I didn't have the energy to write a blog post.

Dorothy L. Sayers was an English crime writer. And one I read while in high school. She was born in June of 1893 and passed away in December 1957. She was one of the first women to receive a degree from Oxford as a medieval linguist and Christina theological scholar.

Many thought her well-rounded, charismatic character Lord Peter Wimsey was modeled after and Oxford don.
Lord Wimsey made his debut in Whose Body? in 1923 and won over the world with his  charm and deductive reasoning. The Wimsey family motto was, "As my whimsey takes me." Sayers once said her character Lord Wimsey was a combination of Fred Astaire and Bertie Wooster.

The first murdered person in Whose Body? was found in the bathtub and the reason it was unusual was it was naked except for a pair of gold pince-nez.

The Five Red Herrings published in 1931 took place at an artist's colony. While Lord Wimsey went to the colony to fish he ends up investigating the death of an artist who fell into a jagged ravine while painting a landscape.

In 1933 Lord Wimsey finds himself a prime suspect in Murder Must Advertise. A view into Sayers humor is  the last line in the book. "Advertise, or go under."