Planting Corn, Haying Switchel and Hard Cider: A New England Farmer's Year

The Almanac and the Squirrel's Ear

A Suncook Valley farmer in 1865 answers to three authorities: the Almighty, the Old Farmer's Almanac, and his wife. Which one comes first depends on who is in the room. Mr. Robert B. Thomas started that almanac back in 1792, and you will hardly find a farmhouse between here and Lancaster without a copy hung on a nail by the chimney. It is dog-eared and greasy, and it swears up and down that the moon decides when you plant. My almanac says plant by the moon. My neighbour plants by the tavern clock, and his corn comes up crooked but cheerful.

The old men of Barnstead and Gilmanton follow a truer rule, and any natural philosopher ought to admire it: plant your corn when the young oak leaves are as big as a squirrel's ear. That is no superstition. It is a thermometer God hung in the woods. When the oak has leafed out that far, the ground is warm and the killing frost has packed its bags. Plant before then and your seed sits rotting in cold mud like a deacon in a cold pew, and the corn is wasted.

Then the seed goes into hills to the old rhyme: one for the blackbird, one for the crow, one for the cutworm, and one to grow. That makes four kernels for every stalk you hope to see. At Fort Wilkins I add a fifth, one for the deputy, since that is the only way he will ever touch honest work. Barnaby, my black bear, takes a sixth for himself. Last May he ate the scarecrow down to the pole and spat out the hat. He is the only critic of my wardrobe I have ever taken seriously.

Cider Down Cellar, Rum in the Hayfield

The still comes into the farmer's year as quietly as a cat on a feather bed. In the fall he presses his apples, and the sweet cider goes down cellar in barrels. Nobody has to lift a finger after that. The wild yeast that rode in on the apple skins goes to work eating the sugar, and by planting time the sweet cider has gone hard enough to make a Quaker cuss. Cider in a barrel is like a Concord politician: sweet in the fall, hard by spring, and rotten if you leave it alone through summer.

Then comes haying, from late June into July, the hardest weeks of the year. Men swing scythes from dew to dark, hot as the hinges of Hades, with sweat running into their boots till they squelch. For generations the New England custom was a rum ration for the hired hands. They got a tot in the morning, a tot at noon, and more at sundown if the boss was generous or the crew was mutinous. A hired man in haying season has two speeds, slow and asleep under the wagon, and rum improves neither of them.

The temperance ladies went to war against the haying rum, and to be fair to them, they had a point. I once saw a hired man full of noon rum lay his scythe into his own shin and go hollering across the meadow like a gut-shot goose. The ladies say rum in the hayfield ruins a man. I have seen the men. The hayfield ruined them first, and the rum only came to the funeral.

Switchel and the Copper Jug

In many fields the rum gave way to switchel, the haymaker's punch. It is well water, cider vinegar, a knob of ginger, and a pour of molasses or maple syrup. It cuts the thirst without putting a man to sleep in the windrows. Switchel tastes like a pickle that went to church and got religion halfway, yet a crew will drink it by the bucket and still be mowing at sundown.

Hot switchel, mind you, is a worse crime than anything the sheriff ever charged me with. Two summers back a crew boss over in Barnstead went to my friend Silas "Hacksaw" McAllister, the master coppersmith, because his men were drinking switchel out of a stoneware crock that went as warm as bath water by ten in the morning. Silas raised him a two-gallon copper jug, and the boss's wife sewed it into a wool jacket. You soak the wool in the brook and hang the jug in the shade of the wagon. As the water dries off the wool it pulls the heat out with it, and the switchel stays cold enough to make your teeth ache at two in the afternoon. The boss swore that jug got more work out of the men than the rum ration ever had. They would fight to be first to it. A cold jug and a fistfight: that is a New Hampshire hayfield, all right.

Frost Heave, Lead Seams and Bobolinks

Spring is the worst season for a still-man. Once the mud dries, every deputy in Merrimack County can get a horse up Route 28 without losing it to the axles. Last May a young deputy rode in with a warrant in his breast pocket. Before he could speak, I put a seed bag in his hand and told him the oak leaves were at squirrel's ear, we were behind, and he should drop four to a hill. He had been raised on a farm in Loudon, and a farm boy cannot bear to see a field go unplanted. He planted three rows of Canada flint, the straightest rows on the place, before he remembered why he had come. I paid him in coin stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., and he rode home with the warrant still in his pocket.

Spring also brings frost heave, and frost heave is no friend to a still-house. One April a farmer past the Gilmanton line had built his hearth straight on the dirt. The ground froze and thawed and froze again until his firebox tipped like a drunk on a stool and cracked clean through, leaving the pot at a slant. By luck it was cold and empty. Since then Silas has set every pot he builds on a dressed granite slab, sunk below the frost line the way you would set a gatepost. A pot that shifts strains its seams, strained seams leak, and a leak near fire is how a still-house becomes a bonfire. When I called him gloomy, he answered, "I'm a careful one, Doc. Gloomy is what the careless man's widow gets."

He has a soft side too, whatever he pretends. He once set a fresh-raised coil to cure on the sill of a hayfield shed, and a pair of bobolinks built a nest in its turns, with four speckled eggs. Silas waited three weeks until the chicks had fledged, and in the meantime his customer bought a coil off a tinker in Concord. Silas is not soft about lead, though. An Epsom farmer once brought him a dented sap kettle with its seams smeared thick with soft grey lead and asked to have it made into a still pot. Silas would fix it for a soap kettle and nothing else, because lead in anything you eat or drink is a slow poison.

From the Field to the Worm

Every jar starts in the field. Grain is cooked and fermented into a thin, sour wash before it ever sees fire. The yeast does the real work in the fermenting tub, and the still only gathers up what the yeast already made. A still cannot put in what the field did not grow. Bad corn makes bad mash, and bad mash makes a jar that would strip paint off a Methodist steeple.

At your apparatus, the run comes off the worm in stages. The first trickle, the foreshots, and the heads behind them carry the sharp, volatile wood-spirit kind of stuff that blinds and kills. That goes to the ground or the lamp and never into the jar. The hearts follow, the sweet, clean middle and the only part worth having. Last come the tails, oily and dull, which you set aside. A man who keeps his foreshots because he hates waste is the same fool who keeps a rotten molar because he paid to have it filled.

Your copper is the other half of the work. A clean copper surface takes the sulphur stink out of the vapour, but a pot that is never scrubbed has stopped doing its job. Join everything with silver solder or proper unions, and never with lead. Keep the fire low so you have time to watch your cuts, because a roaring fire runs heads and hearts together in one muddy rush. Never walk away from a hot still. Spirit vapour catches like dry hay in August. I watched a still-house in Northwood burn to the sills in the time it took its owner to answer the call of nature. To put it in four parts: granite under the pot, no lead in the seams, a low fire, and your eyes on the worm.

Ashes to the Soap Kettle, and Two Myths Buried

A letter came up from Wilkesboro, North Carolina, from Cletus "Rabbit" Miller, whose uncle swears the old-timers threw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg "to clean out bad heads." Rabbit, hickory ash belongs in the ash hopper by the farm wife's back door. She runs water through hardwood ashes to draw off lye, then boils the lye with kitchen fat to make soft soap. In my granddaddy's day we shipped potash to Boston by the barrel. Ash is alkaline, which makes it good for scrubbing and bad for drinking. A thump keg does not sort good from bad. It only gives the vapour another trip, and the dangerous early fraction boils off first whatever you drop in. The only cure is the cut. Ash in a thump keg is a Sunday hat on a hog, and red oak shavings belong in a cooper's barrel.

Two more myths go in the ground with it. The first is the blue flame. A spoonful of spirit that burns blue tells you only that the spirit burns. It cannot tell you whether there is wood-spirit in the jar or lead from a bad seam. My barn burns too, and I would not drink it. The second is jacking. Some fellows leave hard cider out in a January cold snap, draw off the strong liquor that will not freeze, and swear the applejack is purer than anything off a still. Freezing throws away water and nothing else, so every harsh, dangerous thing stays in the jug, packed tighter than before. A still-man can cut his heads away, and a jacker cannot. Freezing a skunk does not make it smell better. It only gives you a concentrated skunk.

A plain word before I bank the fire: making distilled spirits to drink without a federal permit is against the law in these United States, and these pages are offered as history and instruction. So plant at squirrel's ear, drink your switchel in the hayfield, send your ashes to the soap kettle, and keep your copper clean, your cuts honest and your fire low.