Chapter 16

THE FARM

The years passed pleasantly in Red Deer. When we had been there for about seven years, we decided to build a new house so we bought land on the edge of town in a new subdivision called Morrisroe which was called after the farmer from whom the council had bought the land and in fact the old farm house was still on the land. We visited a builder and with his help began to plan a house. By this time, it was 1975 and I had been working for a year at Michener Centre – my first job after fifteen years at home - so we were better off financially and able to consider different options.

The building progressed well and we put our house in Eastview on the market. We gave the realtor (our friend and nextdoor neighbour George Francis) the keys and asked him to take prospective buyers there during the day while we were all at school and work. We left it immaculately clean and tidy in the morning so that people would see it at its best as we felt that any house would look crowded and untidy with eight people in it. We perfected a morning routine - each of us would tidy and clean our own bedroom area - then I started work at 8.30 and had further to go, either walking in the winter or riding my bike in the summer so I had to leave earlier than Reg and the children. He would supervise the cleaning and each morning Marcus and Nick would alternate the daily vacuuming and the cleaning of the bathrooms. They did an excellent job and the house sold within a few weeks for $35 000 which was nearly double what we had paid for it. Of course, we had painted throughout, laid carpet throughout including kitchen and bathroom, Reg had built two more bedrooms and another bathroom in the basement and built a garage so we had made improvements.

Our new house at Morrisroe cost $30 000 to build and the land cost $5 000 so we came out of the move well and were very happy with our new and larger home. Still three bedrooms upstairs and three down, but the rooms were larger and there was a garage attached to the house, heated and lined and with an automatic door opener so that made coming home on a cold snowy day a whole lot easier. The block was pie-shaped so the front was narrow but the back yard was wide and Reg lost no time in planting trees all along the back boundary and establishing a large vegetable garden. He also completely finished the basement with three more bedrooms, a laundry, second bathroom and a huge rumpus room where we had a pool table that converted to a table tennis table.

We were very happy there but we didn’t stay long because ever since Reg had realised that buying a farm was possible in the Red Deer area, he had been searching for the perfect piece of farm land close enough to town for us to commute to work and for the children to stay in the same schools. He had found a half section (half a square mile) about 20 miles east of Red Deer on the Gravel Trail which ran south to Pine Lake. He approached the owner, Stan Powell, who lived on the other side of the road about selling his half section which had no house but fenced hayfields and pastures and 13 lakes – some small but one about a quarter of a mile long, but Stan said he was not interested in selling. Reg left his name and phone number with Stan just in case he should change his mind and a few days later Stan phoned and invited us to come out and look at the land the following Saturday and then to come across the road to their house for afternoon tea.

On a sunny spring day, we all walked over that glorious piece of land with its wooded hills, large and small lakes, one of which is on the left, abundantly grassed pastures and well-fenced hayfields and then went across the road to the Powells’ house and met Stan and his wife Totty where there was a sumptuous afternoon tea waiting for us. They had decided to sell the land to us and quoted the price - $40 000. `For a quarter?’ asked Reg. `No, for the half’, said Stan. What a bargain and of course we bought it. We began to make plans to move out there the following summer. We sold the house in Morrisroe, again following the same routine that had been so successful with the previous house – George Francis had the keys and showed people through only during the day when all was clean and tidy. We had been in the house for only about a year and got $52 000 for it – not bad for an outlay of $35 000 and again some hard work by Reg finishing the basement but well worth it.

Reg’s first purchase was a second hand Ford tractor and he drove it to the farm while we all followed in the car. Farming was his lifelong ambition and I always thought of this photo as the portrait of a completely happy man! Despite a number of excellent building sites on the farm we decided to buy mobile homes for the time being and found them inexpensive and well-equipped. We bought two because we wanted 6 bedrooms (Belinda had already moved out so didn’t need a room) – one was $14 000 and the other was $11 000. Each came with its own furnace, hot water service and all appliances plus curtains, floor coverings and furniture. We had them positioned parallel on the block but about ten feet apart and had a room built to join the two which was where we kept coats, boots, skis and skates. After we moved in Reg built a large deck at the front and one at the back to provide lots of outdoor living space as well.

We moved to the farm during the summer and settled in there. We were in an area called Hillsdown and the local people were amazingly friendly, welcoming and helpful. One Friday night shortly after we moved in, having both had an exhausting week at work we had just settled down after dinner to read the papers when I looked up and saw headlights coming down our driveway – followed by more lights – and more lights – until our drive was full of cars. The neighbours had all come for a traditional welcoming party – they brought food, drinks, a large coffee urn and presents and all settled in for an evening of conversation and laughter. Reg frequently shared labour and machinery with the local men and every couple of months there would be a potluck supper at the local hall and each family would take a hot dish such as a casserole and a pie or a dessert and we would all tuck in, men at the table on one side of the hall and women on the other and children at yet another table all enjoying ourselves. Our children played on local baseball teams and went fishing and camping with local friends. Our closest neighbours, Stan and Totty Powell, from whom we had bought the land were a constant source of help and advice.

We had a great deal to learn about farming so I bought a book called Animal Husbandry which soon became as well worn as Doctor Spock had been in our early days as parents. With our neighbour Stan’s help Reg bought a shipment of heifers at the auction but they broke out almost as soon as they were delivered and then followed hours of rounding up until they were all secured again. They were supposedly one-year olds, not bred but one dropped a very small calf at the end of the summer – in our inexperience we had no idea she was even in calf until one day, walking along one of the tracks, I came across the little daughter drinking from her mother. Another of our early acquisitions was Sugar (right), a Welsh pony that one of my friends at Michener Centre sold us – several other horses followed but our children really always preferred motor bikes to horses.

We went into a share farming arrangement with our friend Lee Spohn. He was living in town but had a breeding herd of cows. He pastured them on our land and we got half the calves – Lee would have first choice and then there would be alternate picks. It was a fair arrangement and worked well for us for a few years but then Lee and his wife Kie bought a farm out near Delburne and took their cattle to their own land. During that time Reg had done a great deal to improve the farm – he put in four miles of new fencing and a corral with a cattle squeeze for holding the cows during treatments, built two 70’ x 30’ sheds with the able help of Madeline and Tom who were great workers, a loafing barn for the cows to lie in during the day when it was cold and snowy, a hay shed, put in an automatic watering system with a heater to stop the cows’ drinking water from freezing in the winter, built collapsible feeders to put the hay bales in and burned windrows where pastures had been cleared.

All this while we were both teaching full time – and in the summer holidays with the help of Marcus and Nick (photo left) Reg would cut and bale enough hay to feed the cattle through the winter. Marcus was a tireless worker, he had great stamina and could almost outwork his father. Nick was good too but I think he used to get bored with the job although he would always persevere because he wanted the money for traveling which he started to do at an early age just as his father had done. Every couple of years Reg would also grow a grain crop which he rolled to use for extra feed. The cows were bred to calve in March and we always had our share of difficult births but after the first year we never had to get the vet again thanks to our trusty Animal Husbandry book.

By the time Lee took his cattle away most of that work was done and Reg knew a great deal more about cattle and had decided that he wanted to breed purebred Polled Herefords. He had searched the catalogues for the best bloodlines and the Hilger family in Montana bred just the kind of cattle he liked so the next summer holidays we rented a campervan which sat on the back of our truck and provided us with hitherto unknown camping luxury – and off we went to Montana. The beautiful 5,500 acre Hilger ranch near Helena, Montana was homesteaded by the Hilger family and had been owned and run by them since 1867, before Montana became a state. It was now run by Bryan, Dan, Susan and Babe (Amelia) Hilger, all in their sixties, none of whom had ever married. On the right, Reg with Dan and Babe. Susan was older and not well and we didn’t meet her but the boss of the operation was Babe. Not only did they breed superb cattle but Babe also bred splendid Arabian horses. Every cow had a name and they were uniformly perfect in size and shape and placid in temperament. We picked out 21 cows and paid for them and later that year during the first snowfall a huge cattle truck pulled up and deposited our herd in the corral.

They lived up to all our expectations providing us with years of beautiful offspring. Sometimes we bred the cows to a bull and sometimes we had them artificially inseminated to one of the American champions. Reg liked to breed for temperament as well the usual physical attributes. He didn’t like dogs around cattle and instead trained his cows to come to a call. No matter how far away they were in one of the far pastures he would call and a minute later they would all appear running towards him.

Here I am shovelling the deck after a heavy snowfall. Farming in that climate is not easy in the winter when the daylight hours are only from about 8.30am until 4.30pm. Reg would get up and go out in the pitch dark to feed the cows – often it would be -30C and the tractor would be hard to start and impossible if he had forgotten to plug in the block heater or if there had been a power failure during the night. He would come in frozen despite all the warm clothing – a quick shower and breakfast and off to town for all of us for the day’s work and school. Then when we got home he would go out again to shovel out the loafing barn and put down fresh straw for the following day, check the feeders to see whether the cows needed more hay, check the water system to make sure it hadn’t frozen during the day, check all the cows to make sure all were well and happy and do any odd jobs that had come up. We had our own well and during the winter the pump in the well sometimes froze and then Reg would have to go down the well shaft with boiling water to get it started again. If we’d had a heavy snowfall he would need to clear the driveway with the tractor before we could get out in the truck to drive to town.

It all sounds like a lot of hard work but this was the realization of a long-held dream for Reg who had always wanted to farm and it turned out to be a wonderful life for our whole family. The children and I helped whenever we could and we loved having so much space – horses and motor bikes in the summer, cross country skiing and skating on the lake in the winter, lots of wildlife and birds and many visitors. I had wonderful vegetable gardens – in Alberta everyone planted their garden on Victoria Day weekend which was the last weekend in May. Any earlier and you would lose everything to frosts, any later and there would not be time for the plants to mature. I recall one weekend when Tom and I planted the vegetable garden in a heavy snowfall and yet it was one of our best. In one of our early years there we planted the garden in one of the hayfields and then went away for a long camping holiday. When we came home the garden, having had no care at all and no water other then rain, was completely hidden by shoulder high hay but in amongst the hay was a wonderful crop of vegetables. We often had more than we could use or freeze and I would fill the back of the truck and the children would cut and tie bundles of firewood and we would take it to the Farmer’s Market in Red Deer on Saturday mornings and sell the lot.

We had a lot of cats – definitely not by design, more by accident. A stray wandered in one day, the poor thing was very thin so I fed her and we took her to town with us the next day to be spayed. As soon as we got home she escaped from us, ran under the house and emerged with two kittens. That’s Tom on the right with his kitten Ted, one of the babies from under the house. So then we had three, then Celene was going away and left her cat with us, Madeline and her boyfriend were moving to Quebec and gave us their two cats and then there were two more from Tom and his girlfriend because they also were going away. So I had 8 cats. Reg built a hopper that held a 20lb bag of cat pellets which would trickle into a tray at the bottom and be replenished when it was empty. It was kept on the deck and every morning I would put out a large tub of warm water for the cats to drink from and they all lived under the house or in the sheds and were always healthy. Occasionally we would come home from work in the late afternoon and find a skunk or a porcupine dining at the cat cafeteria. Sadly our population of squirrels and chipmunks declined but then so did the cat population, either they found more hospitable homes or they went to feed the coyote babies – all part of the food chain!

The farm prospered mainly due to Reg’s efforts and those of the children too although financially we broke even rather than making a huge profit out of it. I used to say that we were both teaching in order to be able to afford to farm. That was true as so much of our combined income went into more fencing, a new or rented bull every year, a new tractor, a new mower for our very extensive lawns and so on. But it was worth every penny in terms of lifestyle and the realization of a dream for Reg. As the children all got part time jobs in Red Deer they began to move to town, renting basement suites where they would stay on work nights and come home at weekends. We usually kept all our heifer calves to become our future breeders and sold our steers as yearlings and so our herd grew in numbers and in quality.

Although we had planned to build a house on the farm we never did, the mobile homes proved to be perfect for our needs with plenty of rooms and somewhat separate quarters for children and adults and a pool table in their living room that converted to a table tennis table by the simple addition of a flat top and a net. We always enjoyed having visitors and one memorable year when Reg had flown to Australia to visit his family, I unexpectedly had a couple of friends who were en route to South Africa from our days in Mount Waverley with their four children, about the same ages as ours. Fortunately that year for a family Christmas present we had bought a new – I think the first - electronic game called Pong, a tennis-like game with a ball and two paddles, played on a TV set. I set it up in our bedroom and the 10 kids would sprawl on our bed having endless Pong tournaments. Great fun for everyone. Reg at last arrived home with food poisoning but Bill our visitor worked for Shell and had a full medical kit with him so he made a quick recovery and we all had a good time.

This aerial view shows our two mobile homes joined together by another room where we kept coats, boots, mitts, skates and skis and which was appropriately called the mud room. The two big sheds on the left were much admired by our neighbouring farmers who felt that that was an indication of who controlled the finances – large sheds, small house. One of the sheds became a calving barn every spring, we would bring the cows in when they were about ready to calve as we were often helping them at night and it was still very cold outside in March when most of the calves arrived.