Rüben und Mais - Geschichten_en_v3
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Rüben und Mais
Beets and Corn
In the early days, we grew everything we needed: summer wheat, winter wheat, corn, barley, oats and clover. We threshed it ourselves. There were also sugar beets, fodder beets for the pigs and cattle, hops, lots of corn, and later, rape. Right after the war, there was also a raspberry plantation at the Wimmer farm in Inzkofen. The produce was marketed in Munich, which was a good business. Only the neighbors, I believe, harvested broad beans. I vaguely remember that the cultivation of hops ended in 1968. It was such a small crop that it wasn't worth buying a machine to harvest it.
I got to experience the intense beet harvest. For weeks, we brought home loads of beets. Just raising the beets was a huge hassle. After they were planted, you had to spend days hoeing the weeds. And woe to him who did not pay attention and accidentally decapitated a beet seedling! The most important thing was to not get caught. It was best to bend down and pretend to be pulling weeds out of the ground, and put the decapitated seedling back into the ground again, so that it stood up.... Later, it was just probably gone.
When the time came for bringing home the beets, my mother and my father went at it for weeks, using a kitchen knife to cut the leaves from the tops of the beets, and piling them up in a row. The children followed behind and kicked the beets out of the ground. If it had to be done more quickly, the beet topper was used. This is a 8" wide knife, attached in front of a handle, so you could decapitate the beets without having to bend down.
beet chopper; [MHIN1]
The sugar beets were done the same way, using the topper. Because the sugar beets were too short to kick them out, they were forked out of the ground. The red beets (for the cows and pigs) were topped the same way. We mostly grew the long, yellow beets which fetched a better price. They were not as easy to cultivate, however, because their leaves fell over, and to decapitate them took three times as long. Using a knife was much faster than using the beet topper.
The previously cut foliage was then brought home on the wagon and ensiled for the winter to feed to the cows and pigs. The tons of beets were then sent flying onto the wagon by hand or with a pitchfork. Anyone who could hold the steering wheel and work the gear shift was allowed to drive the tractor. Once the trailer was full, the beets were brought home and stored in the barn or in the old stable. The crop that overflowed the indoor storage area was wintered out in a field near to the farm. The beets were piled up on a roughly 4 foot high pyramid that was up to 100 ft. long. Covered under one or two layers of straw and coated by one or two layers of soil, they were well protected. This 2 ft. wide insulation prevented the beets and also the potatoes from freezing during the winter. This insulation of the food storage out in the fields was also a perfect home for mice. When getting out the beets, we often found nests containing a lot of baby mice.
In those days, it took forever to harvest the sugar beets. Uncle Hans spent long autumn evenings and nights digging beets out of the ground and tossing them into a big pile in the field. For that he had built a beet harvester onto his little Eicher tractor.
Even the leaves of the sugar beets were used as silage. I still remember how bulky Uncle Hans looked in his parka, because it was quite cold in the fall and he was often out until late into the night, harvesting beets, row by row, with his little tractor. I always admired him very much!
Even the leaves of the sugar beets were used as silage. I still remember how bulky Uncle Hans looked in his parka, because it was quite cold in the fall and he was often out until late into the night, harvesting beets, row by row, with his little tractor. I always admired him very much!
Sometime later in the fall, when the nights were frosty and the beet pile had been covered with foil and cut off potato plants to keep it from freezing, the freight car ordered to Moosburg station would arrive and it was time to transport the beets.
suggar beets near Inzkofen; [JWC13]
The sugar beets were loaded onto trailers and all available hands went to the station.
At the freight depot, there was an amazing machine. The whole trailer, loaded with beets was pulled into this machine. The trailer was then lifted and the beets were dumped into the freight car. It was, as I recall, quite exciting.
Later on, another machine was bought. It was no longer that interesting, because we were a bit older, and we couldn't see as much of the machinery inside. This one cleaned the beets a bit, and the soil could be put back onto the field.
Corn
As far back as I can remember, the corn was chopped with a forage harvester. The cutter bar on the tractor mowed three rows at a time. The plants, lying on the ground, were aligned by hand using a strong rake. The chopper, which was towed by the tractor, picked up the stalks, chopped them into two inch long pieces and threw the chopped corn and stalks into a wagon attached behind it. The sides of the wagon were raised about six foot to transport a reasonable amount of silage. The chopped corn was driven directly into the barn for feeding or into the silo for preservation for the winter. It was loaded into the silo with a conveyor belt or piled up and covered airtight with foil. The silo always required two or three people (usually my grandfather or my mother and one or two children) to distribute the corn with a fork and stomp it down to pack it tightly. That was quite a popular job because you always got corn down your back and got locked in when the next hatch in the silo wall was closed. Salt was always added to the grass silage.
The wagon we used to load and unload the silage was not the best, because it was wider than the hopper to the conveyor belt. As a solution, we built a wooden platform next to the conveyor belt and pulled the corn with a manure fork from the opposite side to the conveyor belt, where the scraper floor ran. Much more practical was the automatic wagon that we borrowed from Huaba in Schweinersdorf. It worked the other way around, with a moving floor and a small front cross conveyor belt, which brought the corn out of the wagon and fed it to the long conveyor belt for the high silo. The click-
Now I've just taken a little break from writing. I cut up an apple and ate it with slice of bread. Just as then, when my grandfather was sitting with us kids in the morning, his brown pen knife cut an apple into 6 pieces which were given to us along with a slice of bread. To me, it tastes just the same! Depending on the condition of the apples (which came, of course, from our own orchard), my grandfather peeled the whole apple in one very long spiral. That so fascinated me as a three year old that I also tried it. The result: I almost cut off half of my thumb!
After the new barn was completed in 1974, there were suddenly three times as many cattle indoors than in the old stable. Of course, they ate three times as much. As a result, therefore, much more corn was sown and harvested. The forage harvester couldn't shred it fast enough. It took far too long and the chopped corn was also much too coarse. The new Pöttinger MEX II cut-
Despite the advanced harvesting technology, the ''old days'' were not over yet for my parents and we still continued to salvage every stalk and kernel of corn behind the machines. It is now almost unimaginable. One of the children always had to run behind the corn chopper with a sickle to pick up lost cornstalks and hang them onto the next row so they could be harvested on the next round. For days, we ran behind the ensiling machine with its ever loudly roaring engine. Occasionally our father didn't pay attention to his driving and the shredded material, which should have been thrown from the chopper right into the trailer, missed it and hit us directly. This was not fun and we were soon well camouflaged.
Because there was so much corn for silage, we usually had several vehicles traveling home to bring the corn into the silo, either with the conveyor belt into the silo or directly into the „drive through" silo.
There were always many teams on the road. One of the cousins often helped out with his tractor. Once the trailer was unloaded, trying to get more corn in before the next team arrived, I usually had the job of compressing the silage by driving over it, using the old but heavy Schlüter tractor. Sometimes the heavily loaded wagon with the chopped corn, as well as the truck, got stuck in the corn. This happened often, and it had to be towed free. Occasionally, it got stuck so tightly that two tractors had to be used to get it back out (the drive through silo was 100 ft long). A lot of chains and ropes were torn there. It is hard to believe -
At the beginning of the corn harvest, we cut the corn around the edges of the field by hand with a sickle. We then had room to drive the tractor and the chopper into the field to cut the middle. We brought the whole corn plants home. In the afternoons, after school, my brother and I went with my grandfather to cut the corn with a sickle. The front loading platform of the Fendt tractor was so full on the way home that you could barely see over the top. Once home, the corn was chopped, rather coarsely, with the old chain feeder stationary chopper and fed directly to the cows and pigs. They were always very happy to get the first five or six wheelbarrow loads of the first fresh corn of the season!
Written down on October 12, 2012 by Johann Wiesheu (*1965), Munich
Translation by Maximilian Grötsch and Peggy Chong
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