These are my recollections as a small boy growing up on a dairy farm in late 1960's Although we didn't have a lot of material possessions I wasn't unhappy & certainly wasn't bored. Summer holidays were spent helping out on the farm with plenty of time for adventures!
On hot summer days we cooled off in the river, swinging off the leafy branches of Willows that trailed their leaves in the slow flowing stream.
A treat on a hot summers day was a trip to the watermelon patch where there would be an array of melons with exotic names such as Warpaint, Candy Red & Candy Stripe. They came in all shapes & sizes, round ones with skin almost black, striped melons & melons that looked like a cocoon half a metre long! Hunting for the largest melon one would gently tap the melon listening for the hollow tone of a melon ripened to perfection .With more melons than even a small boy could eat, a treat was to smash a melon open & then eat the chunks of luscious red flesh allowing the sticky red juice to dribble down my chin & flow down my tummy!
Hot summer nights often meant hay baling. At sunset we would follow the tractor & baler to the paddock & wait for the night air to replace some of the moisture sucked from the leaves by the baking sun. Slowly the tractor would chug down the neatly raked rows of dry lucerne, the baler hungrily gobbling up the hay & then with rhythmic thumps a perfectly formed bale of hay would be born! Another tractor pulling a trailer built from a long dead truck would follow the baler with its rows of over sized grassy bricks. We kids would ride on the trailer helping to drag the bales into place. Slowly the stack would grow till it seemed a 100 feet off the ground & we would ride back home perched high on stack with the, sweet smell of hay, Christmas beetles buzzing in the tractor lights & gazing up at a million stars in the dark summer night.
On hot summer days we cooled off in the river, swinging off the leafy branches of Willows that trailed their leaves in the slow flowing stream.
A treat on a hot summers day was a trip to the watermelon patch where there would be an array of melons with exotic names such as Warpaint, Candy Red & Candy Stripe. They came in all shapes & sizes, round ones with skin almost black, striped melons & melons that looked like a cocoon half a metre long! Hunting for the largest melon one would gently tap the melon listening for the hollow tone of a melon ripened to perfection .With more melons than even a small boy could eat, a treat was to smash a melon open & then eat the chunks of luscious red flesh allowing the sticky red juice to dribble down my chin & flow down my tummy!
Hot summer nights often meant hay baling. At sunset we would follow the tractor & baler to the paddock & wait for the night air to replace some of the moisture sucked from the leaves by the baking sun. Slowly the tractor would chug down the neatly raked rows of dry lucerne, the baler hungrily gobbling up the hay & then with rhythmic thumps a perfectly formed bale of hay would be born! Another tractor pulling a trailer built from a long dead truck would follow the baler with its rows of over sized grassy bricks. We kids would ride on the trailer helping to drag the bales into place. Slowly the stack would grow till it seemed a 100 feet off the ground & we would ride back home perched high on stack with the, sweet smell of hay, Christmas beetles buzzing in the tractor lights & gazing up at a million stars in the dark summer night.
Milking time was fun with helping mum & dad by pushing the wooden handles that opened the doors to let each cow out after milking, a new cows was then brought in & she was given a large tin of powdery grain & her wet nose soon coated in white flour as gulped down her treat.Her long grey tongue would then lick the last remaining flour from her nose. The milking machine with its constant pulsating beat would take the milk away from the cow to the releaser where a rubber flap opened allowing a flood of milk to escape in to a small container where the milk would flow over a water cooler & then into a ten gallon can. Filling about 3 cans each milking these were loaded onto a trailer & taken to the main road where they would be placed on a stand for the milk truck to collect.
If any one is interested I can write some more.
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