Homestead mailing list

["Marie McHarry" <mmcharry AT gmail.com>]

On 6/18/06, Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com> wrote:
> Marie, surely you are much too young to remember that far back!

Okay, Smarty, I read about someone who did the work probably in the
'30s. I can't remember what I did yesterday though I wasn't born until
after the war when being shot at had finally softened Dad up enough
that he considered matrimony.
> Perhaps you are thinking of Edward Faulkner, who published Plowman's
> Folly in 1943. Before Faulkner, F.H. King published Farmers of Forty
> Centuries, which included information on how the Chinese used no-till methods.
That sounds right.

When my father was farming, he rotated crops and spread lime and ran
cattle on stalks. He always said that putting a field in alfalfa was
good for several years of corn and beans. Nowadays, putting a field in
alfalfa is an investment, and it's hard to find good hay around here,
especially since farmer's seem to feed their cattle mainly waterway
grass. It's a pity that alfalfa doesn't work well in waterways....

Thanks for the names. It's always nice to know that I didn't just make stuff 
up.

Marie