Threshing Time - Part 1 - Binding

If Pa had to boil down his favorite times of the year to just a few, threshing time would be high on the list. It could be the first hard frost and Pa will gleefully proclaim that threshing is “just around the corner.” Of course he would also proclaim the first frost was “just around the corner” at planting time too. This usually earned him a heartfelt glare from Mama because who could possibly be thinking of winter when the barley wasn’t even in the ground yet. 

Threshing time was, and still is, one of my favorite times of year as well. I love walking through the field in the early hours to pitch the shocks apart, the hum of the separator, the long thresher's table under the maple tree. And what I like most of all is the day shared with friends, family, and neighbors, who in some cases check more than one box on that list. This is all perhaps why I don’t care much for binding, a necessary evil of threshing, and also why Mama says that everyone loves threshing but no one loves binding.

Threshing is the process used at the turn of the ninetieth century, a few decades before, and many decades after, friends and neighbors gather to separate grains from the stalk they grow on. The grains can be sold or used for livestock feed and the remaining stalk, called straw, for livestock bedding. In order to thresh, grain must first be cut and made into bundles for easy handling. To do this, we bind. unlike threshing, binding is monotonous, dull, and usually done without the help of the whole neighborhood. 

Each year, I think I like binding, I get excited for binding, and when I am in the field up to my elbows in fresh bundles of barley with barley beards in unmentionable places with no shade trees in sight, I am less than enthusiastic. What it does have going for it is what Pa calls “quality family time.” By this he means we are all together in the field, working together in a way that most farms don’t these days with family members working spread over a thirty acre field. This isn’t a bad thing. Farm families work closer than any other family unit in my humble opinion, just not as close as they did a century ago, or even half a century ago. There is an old family story of great-grandpa binding off a field that was so hilly he tipped over the binder. A binder is wide and low to the ground. We wonder if this really happened, or if it is a silly story concocted to show just how big the hills on the Lynn Road farm really were. One has to wonder - as we do each year at binding time. 

Like all other field work, Pa walks to check the field, now soft golden waves. He pulls a stem and checks the stem. The straw should be a bit green yet. He plucks a barley head, rolls the grains around in his hand. Then he takes a few stems and checks the moisture while rolling a few grains around between his teeth. If the field is declared ready, the next day will have a team in the barn around noon time when all the dew is off. 

The morning will be spent going over the old McCormick binder one last time, making sure all the grease cups are filled, moving parts oiled, and the aprons fitted and snugged ready to carry sheafs of grain along the machine to the knotter and out to the bundle carrier. The long pole needed to be fitted and the traveling wheels used to stow the machine in the shed need to be removed and the large drive wheel cranked down. Mama rings the bell and calls, so we head in for lunch after the finishing touch of the pin in the evener. A two horse evener for the first round, and the three horse evener, a finger-pinching-monster which Pa calls the eighth wonder of the world, is on stand by.

Beauty, Valerie, and Rueben on the binder

The team, and often a third horse, enjoys lunch while we do. The water jugs are filled after a noon meal and, when I was old enough, Pa and I would head to the barn to harness the horses. Three horses are best for pulling a binder. It is a heavy piece of equipment. When all three are ready, we lead them out to attach the lines at the hitching post outside the milk house door. Pa ground drives the team up to the binder for hitching. The team is hitched up and we head to the field.

Opening the field means two horses on the binder and it is driven backwards or clockwise around (Usually- My great-grandpa had a Deering binder that was backwards from this with the blades on the right and the carrier on the left. Ours has the blades on the left and carrier on the right, as do most binders and also most tractor drawn machinery as well.). The old timers often put muzzles on the horses for this round because the horses are walking through the grain. They are like kids in a candy land and often need lots of encouraging to keep moving. There is also risk for a bellyache. A trip around the field backwards leaves the bundles deposited into the still standing barley. I follow along throwing these bundles out of the path of the next round, and also tagging along in case any adjustments need to be made along the way. One particularly wet year there were an astonishing amount of frogs hopping about as we made our way around the field. It was comical to watch the frogs bouncing off the apron canvases that fed the cut grain into the machine. The binder asks a lot of man and beast. Pa sits over 15ft back from the horses and has extensions buckled to the lines so the reach far enough. He has a 15 foot cane fishing pole that he uses to get the horses attention should their hearing become selective or his words are carried away on the wind. In addition to driving the distant team, Pa has a series of levers in front of him and his foot hooked in a pedal. The levers adjust the twine on the bundle; knot placement, how high or low the twine is tied. The pedal trips the bundle carrier to drop neat piles of bundles. You pull the pedal up to drop the bundles and push it down again to raise it up. It is indeed a complicated and miraculous piece of mechanical genius when everything is working correctly. Which it usually is. 

Reuben, Valerie, and Beauty on the binder with 
finished shocks to the right.

Pa adds on the third horse and all the rest of the rounds are made counterclockwise. After about three rounds the bundle carrier is pulled out. Pa drops the bundles in neat piles of four or so. He trips the bundle carrier in about the same spot each time around the field. This way our shocks will be standing in rows and we don’t have to haul bundles from one row to the next. 

Mama and I work our way around the field building shocks, little huts of bundles to shed water while the grain finishes ripening in the field. Nine bundles in a shock. Eight stacked in a round and one cap, heads pointing to the east. Knots to the inside leave the shiny side of each bundle to the outside where it will shed water the best. Grandpa, Pa’s Pa, taught us the proper way to shock barley when Pa and Mama first got the farm.

Pa and the Rye Shock

Different grain crops are better suited to different shock styles. Some, like oats, prefer long tents with two bundles propped up with their heads together end to end. Barley has a weaker stem, therefore it weathers better in a round shock with a neat and tidy cap on top to help shed water, and preserve the color of the grains. Once we shocked rye in preparation for a farm show and the shocks were as tall as Pa. I took a picture of him looking delightfully “old timey” posed next to it. All in all, how a family chooses to shock is by personal preference. My Mama, Uncles, Grandparents, and eventually us kids were toted around the field in the coaster wagon with a pile of water jugs and other miscellaneous items. My babies have been carted around the field in this way too. Toddlers in sunhats and sunscreen with the little potty chair in the wagon too so we don’t offset our potty training missions by being a half mile from the house.  After a few rounds the excitement wears off and my envious eye follows Pa and the team around the field, wishing it was done and all magically shocked. Or at the very least that Pa will put the team away and add his zealous energy to the shocking, renewing mine in the process. 

An artfully hand tied bundle

Before binders there were reapers. It did just what the binder does when the knotter isn’t working. A reaper is a step ahead of cutting by hand. It cuts the grain and sweeps it into piles to be tied by hand. If the knotter on the binder fails, it leaves our barley in a neat pile where the bundle carrier drops it. Occasions like this have taught me to have a length of twine in my pocket just like Pa. I tie the bundles by hand, trimming the access twine with a pocket knife. Mama and Pa can both tie bundles with the straw itself. Like the old, old timers did, carefully twisting the straws around itself and tucking it in. Artful but time consuming.  

Often the work of binding takes us two days. These days if we thresh at all, it is usually just Mama and I shocking and Pa driving. In this way I am thankful we still use a team. With a tractor, binding requires two people; one on the tractor, and one on the binder. The invention of the tractor was a step back for binding technology, which I am sure has lead to the invention the the combine. Pa pulls the team around to get the last sliver of barley still standing. He rests the team for a moment or two at the end the the field. Then I help him unhitch the binder in front of the shed, put the horses in the barn and give them a little hay to enjoy while we finish up in the field. Mama and Pa and I put the last shocks together.

“There!” Pa says “Now she can rain!”

“But not too much,” Mama adds.

“Right. Not too much.” Pa agrees, standing and surveying the field with his hands on his hips.  We all look at the field in the setting sun. It looks perfect with its tidy rows of shocks drying neatly and, like us, getting ready for threshing. Pa and I go to unharness the team and Mama starts on the other chores. If we are lucky, we get to finish off the day with a slice of cake or some cookies and a cup of tea before bed.

"Threshing Icon" - George Hoffmann

George Hoffmann at 
my parent's wedding 
reception

It is most impossible to tell the story of theshing time without introducing a character named George. Mr. George Hoffmann was and still is an ever present force at the farm. He first met Pa when he was a frequent visiter to the shop where Pa was blacksmithing. George was there for my parent's wedding, my baptism, and he was a regular visitor to the farm until one day he just never left. I was three years old when he sold his house and moved into the downstairs bedroom at our house. I remember moving day, perhaps my earliest memory of him and in general too, eating sub sandwiches at his kitchen table. It was all temporary you see, he was in between places at the time. But he never found another place until nearly thirty years later. Indeed he lived in my childhood home longer than I did. After a few years of living with my family, he began to spend winters in Texas, but always came back home to the farm for the rest of each year. I think our farm it was where his heart called home all those years, and because we were his family - but not in the biological sense of the word.

George, myself, and Pa in our farm wagon pulled
by Dude and Rusty

George is the same age as my paternal grandparents. I often forgot that as a kid. He was my babysitter, watchful eyes waiting for my mistakes, but still carrying a guiding force of which I have learned many things.

Like a parent, or grandparent, it is hard to imagine George with a life before the farm. He was born and raised a ways south of our farm. He had spent his life in various capacities. George never married. He spent time caring for his mother, serving in the military as a mechanic, and he had been a carpenter his adult working life. He’s pretty handy with a carpenter square when the need arises, provided he was up for a project. George simply doesn’t do things he prefers not to do. He has great stories of working for the Fromm Brothers when he was a kid, raising silver foxes. He shares our great love for old things. He keeps collections of anvils, threshing machines, lawn mowers, case SC tractors, and what ever else strikes his fancy at the moment. In the early years on the farm, we threshed with a different machine almost every year - and they all belonged to George. At one time he had three of them he kept at the farm; a John Deere, Case, and a Huber. 

Pa and I on the ground, George on top of his John
Deere thresh machine

In the early days of my life, we only had one vehicle. A 1987 Dodge pickup truck. The kind with an ornamental rams head sticking up on the hood. On days Mama needed to go somewhere, she would have to drive Pa to work. Often she left me sleeping at home, provided George was there to keep an eye on me if I woke up. One time a deer met an unfortunate end with the front of the pickup, delaying Mama’s return. George watched me all that morning, bribing me with pretzels to pick up my toys. 

“Ok,” he’d say, “put that back in the toy box.” I did as he asked. “Good, here’s a pretzel. Now put that one back in the box. Good, here’s a pretzel.” The process was repeated many times until Mama came home to find the toys cleaned up and George and I munching on pretzels. To this day, I still think of George and pretzels together. That, and cold pork n’ beans. Despite living with us, all those years he rarely ate with us. It seemed he’d rather enjoy his meals cold out of the can, in the driver seat of his car or with friends at McDonalds. I always thought it a special day when George sat down to table with us.  

As a kid, he never yelled at me but once, though he did have a sly way of tattling on me. The time he yelled at me, it was for climbing the elevator parked in the yard. “You’ll get down from there!” he hollered. I did, rather alarmed. His single sentence brought my Mama running too. Thank God I wasn’t heavy enough to counter balance the machine and ride twenty-five feet to the ground on it like an over sized seesaw. Usually, he would raise Mamas attention by asking me what I was doing loud enough for her to hear. “Are you suppose to be cutting that up?” he loudly questioned once. I had been playing fabric store. This brought my mother running and that was the end of my fabric store, and consequently, the end for many of my dress up clothes, which I had shredded.

Like any farmer with a sense of humor, George loves badgering people. Another favorite pastime of his. He badgers the folks at the grocery store to carry single serving ice cream containers so he could eat them in the car. He badges sales people for free stuff. No one probably knows this better than the ladies who worked at the Guarantee Bank. “Open a checking account - Get a cooler.” He’d come home with two. One for me, one for Mama. “I told them they were small and I needed two,” he’d always say, and that is how I had everything I needed to start my own household by the time I moved out. He brought pizza wheels, Pyrex baking dishes, ice cream scoops, thermal cups, glasses, you name it, and an endless supply of pencils, pens, and keychains. 

He kept the lawn in tip top shape mowing it several times a week for the love of his Wheel Horse vintage mowers. Some of my earliest tractor driving experiences took place sporadically here and there on a wheel horse under George’s watchful eye. “Hannah!” he’d say, “come here once, what do you think of this?” I would nod unsure of what the answer was supposed to be or what was coming next. “Sit down. Here’s the clutch, put you foot on that and put it all the way down. No - all the way down” At this point, he’d rev the engine a bit. “Ain’t she a honey huh?” He’d say beaming down at me, “take her for a spin.” “Don’t wreck nothing!” would be what he called after me, after I drove away. I would mow for a while until I finished or until he kicked me off. The opportunity usually didn’t appear again for months, but any education in the handling of machinery, no matter how small, is valuable on a farm. 

Occasionally he would lend a hand in haying or some other task if he happened to be around. He enjoyed turning a wrench and agitating Pa while he was working on tractors. Anyone who could survive the agitation came out with more knowledge of the puzzle of the tractor than they started with. When he was around for hay baling and Pa was still at work, it was just he and Mama starting out. The constant argument was always who got which job. Did George drive the tractor because he was old? Or did he throw bales because he was a man and presumably stronger than Mama? (This was also a debatable point). When Pa came home, all was well and everything returned to normalcy.  

George and his own 10-12
pulling a two bottom plow

George appears in numerous photos and home videos, especially in the early years, turning his hand at a variety of farm tasks. He is around driving a tractor on the plow, he is there tuning up machinery, he is on the tractor moving wagons around, and a million other things. But he is best known for his love of threshing. Walking through the field of shocks, you always know where George did his work. He preferred building long narrow shocks. 

“Threshing Icon” we have heard him called. He spends his summers traveling around from show to show getting in free by displaying either a lawn mower, or some small items such as a “hand operated fork lift,” which was actually just an ordinary fork. He always slept in his car rather than pay for a camping space and gear. His crisp, white shirt and sharp, wide brim, black hat can be seen pictured in numerous newspapers pitching bundles into the separator or stranding atop the machine surveying the operation. Beware the misspelled name. “Can’t these guys spell? What’s the matter with them?!” There he is, newspaper in one hand glasses in the other. Spread on the table we can see a nice photo of George, looking dapper and pitching bundles. Below the photo reads something like “George Hofman pitches hay” at such and such a show. Short one “f” and short one “n”, not to mention it is usually oats or wheat and definitely not hay. Long ago at the Union Thresheree, George coaxed Mama up on to a bundle wagon, and he showed her the proper way to pitch bundles into the operator. Heads first so it all threshes out neat and clean with no stress to the machine. Years later, he taught me how to do the same by continually ordering me around in his usual way. “Heads first! You hear that?! Too fast! Too slow!” Now I can humbly say that I pitch bundles better than most due to my strict teaching. I can tell just by the sound it makes if a bundle has gone in sideways or in reverse.

Right to Left - George, Pa, and my cousin Nathan 
threshing with George's John Deere thresher 
in the summer of 1990

Threshing at home, George oversees the tractor and helped to make sure the thresh machine was set up

correctly. Everything leveled right, greased up, and the belts all put on the right pulleys with twists in them where there should be. On a clear day you could hear his curt instructions from the house as he and Pa set up the separator. If one thing can mess up a threshing operation, it would be running the machine backwards. Though it doesn’t put the grain back on the straw, it can sure jumble things up in a hurry, sometimes even sending straw out where the grain should come out. What a mess. This occasionally still happens at shows, but either George or Pa are usually there to set things to rights again.

George is one of those people who have had a larger influence on me that he might ever realize. One never knows when they might need a highly developed skill of bundle pitching. I think of him every time I slice up a pizza with my freebie, insurance company pizza wheel, every time I cook out with that barbecue set he got for me, and every time I need a girl needs to hand it back to someone who might be badgering her a bit. For all these things I am grateful.