well I don't have any farm memories, I'm an Air Fore brat:) and I'm not a real farmer, remember LOL, but here's what give me those warm fuzzies. Nothing better than a cold, 40 degrees or so, rainy evening, little fog coming in, all 4 of my horses standing in thier stalls, out of the weather, munching contentedly on a big pile of hay, love that sound:) I sit and watch them for a while, listen to the turkey's calling back in the woods, then head back up to the house where my husband has a big fire in the fireplace, my border collies are scattered all over the place...couple of cats thrown in for good measure. Then I make us a big ol' bowl of tortilla soup LOL a glass or 2 of merlot and then an old Tracy and Hepburn movie. Ok not real farmy but there was hay and horses in the mix...okay I was wearing overalls and a ball cap...better?:) Oh and I had manure on my shoes.

**(c;LOL!! works for me, love the tortilla soup, and ah, I can hear the north wind blowing now... (sigh)

I don't know where the love of the country life came from! I actually grew up in Northern Virginia. Okay, I confess, I lived inside the beltway of insanity. But I always loved horses, and just about anything else with four legs and fur. There were a few exceptions.

We did have opportunity to visit relatives on a farm in Kansas in the summers. I loved that place. They had cattle, chickens, the proverbial farm dog, raised corn, and I think they had wheat too. It seemed to me the farm went on forever. For a city girl from the burbs, I thought it must have been huge (Texas size - Wink!). They had an old farmhouse with a wide porch that wrapped around three sides of the house. You could sit out there in the evenings and hear the frogs, crickets, and an occasional coyote in the distance. Even now, if the temperature is just right, and the wind is blowing just right, and the air has a certain fragrance, it stirs the memories. I have been known to go in and get my elderly mother at 11:30 at night to take her outside and say, "Doesn't it feel like Kansas?"

I guess that's where it comes from, but just layered on a love of animals. Boy, I would love to have that place now. The relatives sold it many years ago. We actually found it on the Terra Server earlier this year!

My brother and sister and I used to get dropped off at my Grandma and Grandpa's farm in N. Indiana for a month every summer. We had to do our share of chores, such as gathering the eggs, helping to feed the cows, weeding the garden, etc. The hen houses were in a fenced in lot with some geese in it, and my sister and I would have to go together to collect the eggs--one of us held the basket and the other one beat back the geese with Grandpa's cane. Then we would clean them off and weigh them on the very old looking egg scale, and sort them by size, and we would get to keep the money they brought for our allowance. I remember the year she decided to stop raising so many layers, and she proceeded to kill them off, and guess who had to clean them! When my grandparents died, all the children and grandchildren were fighting over who got the quilts, clocks, china, etc. I asked for one thing: the egg scale. It sits on my kitchen windowsill.

Sometimes we would go to my uncle's farm for the day, which was a lot of fun because he has a huge round barn. My aunt would catch a young lamb for each of us and put a halter and lead on it, and we could drag them around and bottle feed them. Usually she would have a baby deer she had saved and we could feed it, too. Once when I was swimming at my aunt's house, I asked her if chickens could swim. She said, "I dunno, let's see" and she threw one in the pool with me. Yes, they can swim, but they'll scratch the heck out of you when you try to get them out! At that time, none of my relatives had a horse for us to ride, but one of my uncles had a very tame cow, so he gave us pony rides on the cow.

These are my fondest childhood memories. I don't have a farm of my own yet, but I hope that while my kids are still little, we can get some land and some stock, and they can have these kinds of memories, too.

Here is a link that might be useful: Uncle Jerry's round barn

That's about the neatest barn I have ever seen.....and I've seen some nice ones in Amish country, PA. Round is so unique and then the farm animals on the roof to boot!
Thanks for sharing it.

When I was going to college I worked at a QH breeding farm. My favorite thing was being the first one at the barn in the morning. As soon as I'd start to slide the barn door open, I'd hear it. There's nothing like hearing the low nicker of all those horses saying good morning to you.

Oh, these are great, feels great reading them. Hope if feels great to remember for you all. I hope we can get everyone to keep 'em coming!!

I am not a farmer either but growing up in the Midwest we town kids thought there was no better vacation than to either travel to a cousin's farm for a week's stay or ride our bikes out to a friend's local farm. There we revelled in feeding chickens, watching piglets be born, tossing cow pies, getting chased by stampeding herd of cows through a little copse of saplings in the woods. Did any of you know that an 8 year old can scramble up a 2 inch sapling in about ten seconds flat and cling there for a dang long time? I have bovine PTSD now, but I still love the placid look of a cow chewing cud.
On top of the wonder of seeing animals and fowl, there was the beauty of the early morning sun lighting up the endless fields, the call of a rooster, the smell of meals in the big kitchens, dust on a distant road and always a good old farmdog or two at your side as you explored acres and acres of nature.
And now I have a freakin' freeway passing nearby, no cows, no piglets, no rooster. I do have early morning sun and dust on the driveway and a trusty dog by my side, so all is not lost, especially the pleasant memories of real farm visits.

I'm not a farmer yet but I will be before I die. It's in my blood. My grandparents had a farm in southwestern Michigan and I used to go up there every holiday, spring break, summer vacation while I was in school. My warm and fuzzies....

my grandfather (a huge practical joker) handing me a pair of boots so I could help him clean out the stalls and knowing it had a huge hole in the toe area so that when I stepped in fresh dung, it oozed right up into the boot.

spending hours in the fields with the cattle, just talking to them like they were all my pets. Naming each and every one of them, too. And my grandmother running towards me screaming something about a bull and to get out of there now.

The first time I saw a calf being born

The first time I saw the bull do his thing and my grandfather and father watching while I ran around screaming at the top of my lungs, "get him off of her, he's hurting her".

My first, hard lesson in what it takes so people can eat veal. To this day, I have never eaten veal.

My grandmother sending me out to the garden to pick fresh veggies and then pack it all up, along with some beef from the deep freezer and deliver it to the house down the street where the migrant workers lived during blueberry season. The look on their faces stays with me to this day.

Learning to drive a car down the country roads when I was only 12. Then being allowed to drive into town (10 miles away) when I was fourteen so I could pick up gram's medicine.

Learning to drive the tractor.

Milking my first cow, collecting my first eggs.

The fresh morning air coming through the upstairs bedroom window on a beautiful spring day.

I could go on and on but I won't bore you anymore. LOL!

broodyjen, I've seen your uncles round barn!

I grew up on an 80-acre hillside farm in East Tennessee. If you climbed the hills behind the barn, you could look off at Fort Loudon Lake, one of TVA's projects. Of course, that was second rate when we were young, since the farm property went all the way down to the water's edge and we went swimming nearly every warm day. I remember helping my grandmother in the vegetable garden, riding Elsie (our milk-cow), chasing the beef cattle down to the truck for the ride to the slaughter house, feeding the chickens, gathering eggs, etc. One of my favorite places in all the world was our apple orchard where my grandmother planted strawberries in the lanes between the trees. Our major money making crop was tobacco, a 13-month a year crop in East Tennessee, and the whole family was involved in raising it. My sister, cousin and I tramped over every acre of that old farm, played every game that farm children everywhere played back in the 50's and 60's, and kept the hills ringing with laughter.

Each year our neighbors would come in and help cut and bale the hay and put it in the hayloft. On those days, my sister and I helped Granny cook a huge meal for the men. Unlike her family tradition, we children were seated and fed before the "thrashing crew" came to dinner. Granny had grown up with the custom of feeding the children after the adults had fed and she had never liked waiting and eating the left overs, so we were fed and out of the way before the men came in. (Of course, she cooked so much that they never knew that they were getting the "left overs"!)

We rode horses (didn't get these until we were in our teens), bicycled up to the hard top (about a mile away) where there was a little country store, and spent our allowances on RC's and Moon Pies (we really, really did - that's not just an old saying!) We walked out back to the outhouse (except after dark when my grandmother made us use a "thunder mug" she kept under her bed.)

If I could go back to those days, I'd go in a heartbeat!!

Now my grandparents are gone, the farm belongs to two cousins, and all I have are memories - but what wonderful memories they are. My only regret was that our mother had to work and she commuted a long way and her days were long. But every evening before she walked in the house, my little sister would hid behind the kitchen door to jump out and say "boo!" And every evening, Mother would jump like she was shot!! She never got accustomed to Joy's little pranks! Farming was hard, but it is a true, pure, way of life and I would love to be doing it right now instead of sitting behind a computer all day. To those who farm full-time and put in long, hard hours providing food for the rest of us, I say "thank you!" And to those who don't get to farm at this time, I say, "your day will come." I know mine will.

Warm fuzzies--hummm-
I guess there's lots, being a great-grandmother--but this one's from the heart, not what i'm expected to say when you're my age-lol.
whip-or-will"s call in early spring, the first humming bird that shows up at the feeder,- waking up at 2 a.m, and hearing the mocking bird outside our bedroom window, telling me all's right in my world- baby bantam roosters trying out their first crow on me--the first snowfall--dosent take much to make me happy--my happiness is made up of the little simple things that we're usually too busy to notice.

Late 50s: we didn't farm as in cultivate so it was all about the animals.
The cats: they were versatile, big, affable moggies. Got on well with the cattle dogs, helped with the milking, happy to follow the people along a fence line. Have a photo somewhere of "Peter" sitting on the rugged rump of the pony. Three of them fitted peacefully under a wood burning kitchen stove on legs.
The milker's calves were locked up around 5 pm in a bark walled pen; they would yell for cuddles from us kids before they'd settle. Getting down on hands and knees to play fight with a young Brahman calf with the milk fresh on his muzzle while his mother took no interest.
Putting an old jockey pad on the taffy pony and pretending he was a racehorse. Without a cropper, there wasn't much you could do to stop him heading home full pelt anyway :)
There were two extra-large eucalypts on top of the range about a mile from the house, one is still standing. It's easy to make out from the highway below and I always look for it on trips south. Sad day when it goes but it may well outlast me.
Sneaking down the creek at smoko time and staying away for hours, to heck with the correspondence lessons. My mother was probably relieved, I was such an argumentative brat to teach.
Being attacked by the geese which were like an army, 70 strong at one stage.
Better stop!
Rose

wonderful stories...gave me the warm fuzzies just reading them all...thank you for sharing.

My grandmother had chickens I always wanted chickens.I remember really young telling my brother when I got older I was gonna be rich,have a farm,have mother and father of everything and let them have babies.We never had pets as a child.I now have 40 acres,1700 brick farm house old 1700 bank barn,tennesse walker horses,reg.texas longhorns,mini donkeys,chickens 2 dogs ,2 cats,raise mute swans.a large and small pond.I got it.

Got a real kick out of this thread, so many interesting storys :)After leaveing @ age 10 with a vow to come back and buy it someday,I tried but the price/effort was out of the question.
Guess the barns were my favorite place on the farm,and a empty one brings a tear to my eye. Anyways with tears and laughter, good thread... Thanks 1

My dad used to cultivate strawberries under his grape arbors. Anyways, I can remember him coming into have dinner, cussing and laughing. He had been out to pick strawberries, finding few, only to look up, up the row, to see his favorite dog, eating all the ripe ones ahead of him....
Another one. When I was about sixteen, I told my dad I was planting a cherry tomatoe plant in with his tomatoe patch. Dad watered and fertilized that plant with his tomatoes, all summer. At the end of the summer, my plant was about six foot high, no tomatoes, but full of buds. Dad came up to me and said 'son, that's no tomatoe, go cut it down'. I did, rather happily. You see, it was a marijuanna plant :) Ahh..youth.
One more dad story..My brother graduated from high school and threw a keg party in the field behind our house. Next morning, there was still plenty of beer in the keg. My father who was weeding in his gardens, must have decided it could not go to waste. He was raised as a farm child during the depression. During the depression, nothing went to waste.
My father was not a drinker. He made wine, but would either sell it, or give it friends. Anyways, that morn, he began by weeding, but it was hot, so he would saunter up to the keg, sitting cooly in the garage, and take a cup, drink it down , and go back to weeding. I guess I was about sixteen, and realized if I stayed in my room, I could get out of gardening chores that day. I kept watch on dad tho, quietly from my window, watching him every twenty minutes or soo, get hot and go for a cold refill of beer. After a few hours I burst out laughing when I saw him, obviously wobbily, trip over a low rabbit fence. Funny the memories that stick with you.

basilsmom--Whereabouts are you? My family's from Macy and Roann (kind of the Rochester area). I'm actually going there next weekend, a friend is getting married in Marion.

You started a great thread, Leslie!

Thanks! I love all the stories, hope they keep coming!!

Not so warm or fuzzy, I remember my uncle's cow stepping on me, totally squishing my (of course bare) toe into the concrete milking pad. The pony I learned to ride on leaving me to walk home, the rooster that would not leave us alone but would attack every chance he got. Swimming in the river, riding my horse into (and out of) quicksand, my dog always at my side. I think warm pony breath on a winter day... That's got to be the one.

Not so warm or fuzzy, my computer blew up last night after I turned it off! I had to use work computer for this, I hope it is nothing serious, if so I will probably only be able to check in once in a while till? hoping just the power supply box thingy, I dont know much on the internal workings of a computer...

What a wonderful thread! LONG!

It was from my mothers stories about living on the farm when she was a girl that I got my farminess.
My family has a story telling tradition and she was the one who carried it along for so many years and then handed it down to me. She passed in 1984. I still ask her questions about my animals. It seems to jog my memory. Either that or I'm just plain nuts! :)

Mom was born in 1912 near Sheridan, IL. She was the youngest girl in her family. There were 8 children. Five boys and three girls.

My grandfather paired the kids up to bring in the crops and take care of the animals. She and her "baby" brother, Bob, did mostly corn picking and husking. It was a large farm and her father worked them hard. But it was her work away from work that made her happy.

When she was old enough she asked her dad to let her take care of the animals when they got sick to see if she could save them. He told her that she could do it on one condition and that was that she must keep up with the other work just as she always had. If he felt that she was slowing down because of the sick ones, then he'd make her quit. She kept up.

Her sisters didn't want to make their skin and hands look worse than they already did from working outside and she really wanted to take care of the animals. She had a bum lamb named Peggy that she raised in the kitchen beside the wood cookstove. She said that when the warm weather came, Peggy followed her everywhere, including into the house... Until her mother told her, "No more!"

She slept all night(s) in the brooder house until all the babies had hatched. Just to make sure that everyone was okay.

Then there was a mare that had gotten tangled up in some barbed wire and was in bad shape. Her father and uncle were going to shoot it, but she begged him to please let her try to save it. He just barely agreed and they called a vet to come and sew the horse up. I can't remember the number of stitches now, there were many, many stitches holding the torn up horse together. Everyone warned her that the horse was going to die. But she slept in the barn every night and took care of her until she had healed up. The mare lived and was given to my mom as her own. She named her Fly because of the way they could fly across the ground when she rode her.

One day one of the neighboring farm ladies came to my grandparents house and told them that it was unseemly for that red haired girl to be racing that horse around bare back with her legs showing. Mom said that she forgot to complain about her pig tails flying out behind her.

When Mom was 20 she went to Chicago on her own to take nurses training. She became a nurse and met my father, eventually, changed her religion and her entire family banished her for it. She was actually disowned. Only her baby brother, Bob, came to see her and invited our family to his home. None of us children ever knew anyone else in her family.

Since the family farm had been long since "lost" during the depression, it no longer belonged to anyone in her family when I was a child . The family who lived there allowed Mom to bring us kids to the farm and we walked the woods digging up wild flowers to take home and plant around our house in town. We walked the dirt road and she stopped beside a very small pile of what turned out to be wood. It had been a hog pen when she was a girl. She had to slop the hogs there and had hated it. Apparently there was one very mean sow there who she got into a disagreement with one day. She took us through the barn and through the house showing us the rooms where the kids had slept and telling us more stories.

There are many, many stories. I won't tell so much here, but that gives you an idea of how farminess entered my heart and soul. I could no more live without this way of life than I could live without breathing.

We had to live in town when I was a kid, but we had lots of animals and spent a lot of time in the country. Usually one of us dragged home some poor torn up or hit animal and Mom taught us how to treat them and care for them.

One of my sisters and I have lived on farms as adults. There was our family home place in TN and then my sis had a farm in southern PA.

I still have my animals even though the town city limits have swallowed up our property.

I love reading your stories. I'd love to read more of them. I wonder if there's a way to have our stories self published... An idea... :)

Please tell more! And more! I just love to read them. :)

Maggie chickenmama1

Walking down to the barn with Dad on Christmas Eve to see if we could hear the animals talking...

Being able to hike across our fields to Grandma's house...

The smell of the barn full of freshly baled hay...

I always felt that in an earlier life, I was probably one of those die hard pioneer women crawling across the prairies in my covered wagon LOL!!! From the time I could walk, I yearned for the country life. My parents raised us in the "burbs", but I was always pestering them for pets, an d raising any plants I could get my hands on. Unfortunately, my mother hated any/all animals so I had to be content with a small dog @ the age of 10.
However, when I met DH, I told him we were going "to the country". He didn't believe me, but almost 30 years later, we have 52 acres with beef cattle, pigs, chickens,cats, dogs, turtles, fish. I love it and will never ever go back - Ellen

LOL, i've already posted on my memories-only a few-, but ellen reminded me of the worse time in my life. I'd always lived on a farm, till 1959, when my then-hubby moved my three little girls and i to kansas city, for work.i'd sit and look out the window at all the buildings, and people--and cry.afer my 6 year old barely escaped being drug into a alley by a group of boys--I CAME BACK TO THE FARM!!be it ever so humble--its home.

Maggie, your mama sounds like my kind of woman!

Hi ladybug.

I don't see any other Maggie here, so you must be posting to me...? Thank you so much for telling me that! I had a birthday yesterday and I think your post is the best gift I have!

My mom was really great with all animals, except pigs. I loved growing up the way I did with all the animals. Mom also did rescue work with hurt birds. She taught us so much. She loved horses the most, though. We did have horses when I was very young and we were living in TX. When we moved to IL, we had to sell them, but later on when we got the place in TN, she bought two horses. Her horse was a Tennessee Walker mare and the "kid horse" was a cute little mix of a thing...I think he was Tennessee Walker and Welsh pony. I'm not sure of that, but he sure was was a cute little guy.

Thank you again for your post. I really do appreciate it. :)

Maggie chickenmama1

wow! you all have some really great stories. I am subbing today for our principal's secretary. Since school hasn't started yet things are pretty quiet. Nice to have a chance to get on the 'puter for a little while. I still need to order a new power supply component for my computer. Sure do miss it!! Well, we took our cow back to the vet for a follow up on her TB test, everything looks good. Now waiting on a Brucelosis test results then we will be set for milking in another month or two. Daisy gets inches wider everyday. Looking forward to seeing if I can still remember how to milk. LOL!

Thanks to Lesli8 for starting this thread. It is nice to read these wonderful memories.

As I grew up in a bland hot suburb north of dallas, my memories of visiting my grandpa's house in the country in Michigan are imprinted on my brain.

I remember picking fresh strawberries and raspberries with my grandma in the garden.
Exploring the old barn, chicken coop and old garage for treasures.
Riding with my grandpa on his big blue tractor.
Finding robin's nest in the bushes and admiring my grandma's rock garden.

My favorite smells were the dirt in the garden and fresh strawberry freezer jam :-)

My Nana is by far the person I remember as giving me any thoughts to gardening, farmlife, general good living. Such activities as her on the "watch" while me and a cousin raided her pea patch while Pa slept. Pa didn't like kids in the garden, LOL.
Me jumping into the backseat of their old car, only to crush the piles of squash and pumpkin pies that were ready for delivery to various friends/relative for the holidays. She had worked for days on them, all homegrown veggies, etc. I just started to cry in shame and she put her arm around me and said: "Why do you think they are called SQUASHED pies??"
The unlimited amounts of kittens, puppies, tadpoles, racoons, and even pigs that us kids took pity on and carted into the house. The explanations of why the chickens and turkeys had to be slaughtered. Picking wild strawberries, blueberries, raspberries. The fried, mashed, or boiled potatoes that only Nana could fix to taste that way. The chocolate cake that was always runny in the middle but with cream dripping off it. Ahh, those are fuzzies. Lori