The Harvest is gathered

Genesis 3:19:-“By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food”

          The mealie crop would ripen and completely dry out in winter so now was the time for reaping.   Grain bags would be ordered and a check made to see that there was enough thick string for sewing up the bags with sail needles.   Was there enough coal tar to mark the bags and was the branding iron clean.   The threshing floor in the square of gum trees was cleared of rubbish and weeds, the wagon wheels were greased and the trek gear and yokes made ready for hauling the crop from the lands.

            Reaping the mealies by hand must have been a backbreaking job which lasted for several weeks.   Daddy and his farm labourers and a few hired hands would start early in the morning each with a grain bag, hanging from their backs and they would pick the dry head and drop it into the bag until it became too heavy to lug along.   Another empty bag would be attached and so they would reap row for row, leaving the half filled bags behind them.   During the afternoon, the oxen would be inspanned and they would pull the wagon into the land to load all those half bags.   With a heavy load, the oxen would pull the wagon back to the threshing floor where the mealie heads would all be emptied out onto a heap.   This would continue day after day until the heap looked sky high to a child.   No climbing on to it would be allowed as that would cause the heap to spread.

            There would be two heaps of mealies waiting to be threshed, the white mealies for human consumption and the yellow mealies for animals and poultry.   You could not grow the two types of mealies too close together as the wind would cause the pollen from the one type to be blown to the other.   I have seen a beautiful white mealie cob with yellow pips here and there and a yellow cob with white seed intermingled.   My Dad used to grow some popcorn for us as well and this had to be far from the other fields as popcorn crossed with plain maize would not pop.

            After the mealies had been reaped, a span of oxen pulling the wagon would be sent into the lands where the dry cowpea ranks with leaves and seedpods would be loaded and brought to one side of the threshing floor and piled neatly into stacks of winter feed for the animals.

            When the mealie harvest had been completed, everything was made ready for Uncle Edgar Payne to bring his threshing machine to our farm.   What excitement it was!   The empty grain bags were laid out in long rows and a man would come along with the coal tar bucket and the branding iron and stamp B R W on each bag.   The hot coal tar had a special odour which Daphne can still recall to this day.   When the tar dried on the bags they would be piled high and ready to be filled, sail needles and string were in place for sewing up the bags and a big farm scale was in place to weigh every bag of mealies for the correct weight.   A drum of clean borehole water was in place for the workers who would be subjected to dust and leaves.  

                        My mother had two very big three legged cast iron pots which were now cleaned and made ready for preparing food for all the workers.   In the very big one soup would be cooked and in the smaller one “Mielie pap” would be prepared.   This would be the job for one of the servant woman.   She would have to collect enough firewood for about two days

Photo taken at the Engine museum
in Stutterheim

            The day before the big event, a tractor would arrive towing the big machine to our threshing floor and it would be placed where required and secured firmly.  The tractor would be set in place with the pully secured in readiness.   Throughout the time it required to complete the job, my mother’s cousin, Edgar Payne. would be there to oversee his staff.

            Early the next morning with white frost covering everything and smoke rising from the cooking fires, the workers would arrive and everybody would know exactly what his duties were.   Coffee was available for those who wanted to warm themselves and the tractor would start up.   Two people would carry mealie heads on a flat bag to the machine where they would be tipped in.   On the front of the machine was a long funnel where the dry mealie leaves were blown out, at the back was the place where the mealie grain came out into the grain bags and somewhere in the middle the empty cobs were being shaken out.   Everything went like clock work with rows of full grain bags being weighed and sewn shut,   the pile of dry leaves was growing and growing and the now empty mealie cobs were being moved and plied up.

            In between there was a time set aside for breakfast and later a tea break.

By lunch time the piles of maize heads had dwindled to more than halfway with threshing progressing well.   Some years the job could be completed in one day but when there was a good year, two days would be needed and when the threshing was done the tractor would move off towing the big machine to the next farm where everything was in readiness for them.   The temporary labourers would be paid as they left with the tractor to do the same job again.

            The grain bags had now been filled with maize and all weighing the same would have been sewn up with two ears sticking up from their corners.   The time came for the tedious job of carting the full bags on the ox-wagon to the agricultural Co-op in .Viljoenskroon.   The maize required for the farm people, animals and poultry would be stacked in the store.   Whenever mealie meal (maize meal) was needed, bags of seed would be sent to the mills in town to be ground into fine meal and yellow mealies would be crushed for the fowls and other animals.   The mealie cobs would be gathered into a big pile and used for burning in the kitchen stove.

           The gates to the lands were now left open for the stock to graze on the mealie stalks and ‘karkoer’ melons and whatever else was not required from the lands.   I do remember us children playing in the piles of dry mealie leaves where we tunnelled through the loose piles.   The leaves would scratch us and the dry mealie hair would creep in our clothes until we itched and could not take it any longer.

            Soon the lands would be ploughed and harrowed in readiness for ploughing again when the spring rains came and the whole procedure would be repeated.

            I found this to be a very difficult story to write as it all happened about sixty six years ago so I ask my readers to forgive me for any omissions or incorrect information.

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