My mom's maternal grandparents had a dry farm in Trenton, and her dad was raised by his grandparents, who were farmers. My mom grew up in Logan, but they had enough property for a few fruit trees, sixty beehives, and a huge garden. My dad grew up on a farm in West Bountiful, where they grew asparagus, corn (field and grain), tomatoes, wheat, potatoes, barley, and hay, and they raised cows, hogs, and hens. Dad's dad was a hardworking farmer until literally the day before he died, and he and Grandma both grew up on farms. When I was a year old, Dad got a job in College Station, Texas, and we lived there until I was seventeen.
I was kind of a tomboy when I was a kid--I suppose that's what happens when you have two younger brothers, no sisters, and no neighborhood girls to play with. I would lead my brothers on our adventures in the backyard and pasture. We never succeeded in persuading Dad to make us an actual treehouse, but that didn't stop us from equipping every good climbing tree on the property with the trappings of a tree fort. We slung buckets attached to ropes over the branches, so that food and gear could be hoisted up to whichever of us was keeping watch from the treetops. We'd dig in the creek bed like pirates looking for treasure. We also had ground forts between the fig trees. The low branches with their huge leaves made the perfect cover, and luckily no fire ants ever built mounds there.
Every May, the dewberries would grow all along the fencelines of our property. Dewberries are like the best kept secret of our part of Texas (and wherever else they grow, I'm sure). Nobody with neatly groomed fencelines would ever discover them, and certainly nobody with a suburban lawn. They were left to the country neighborhoods like ours, with untamed grazing pastures sparsely fenced with barbed wire. Over time, the vines coil and loop their way up fenceposts and sprawl out along the wire. The tiny, spiny thorns are more wicked than any metal barbs, but it's worth scraping up your hands to get the berries waiting amongst them. After we finished stripping the berries from our own fencelines, we'd drive out in search of other fencelines where nobody had noticed the berries growing, and we'd pick those too. We usually had enough to make a few dewberry pies, add berries to our cereal, make dewberry ice cream for the church ice cream socials, and then still have enough to freeze a few gallon-sized bags.
For about ten years, my dad would plow the northwestern portion of the pasture (the part you had to drive past when you were entering the subdivision) for a garden, and we would grow corn, squash, cucumbers, tomatoes, cabbage, and I think I remember doing potatoes one year. When me and my brother Ben were young enough to be tricked into thinking that work was fun (this was before Josh was old enough to help), the whole family would work on the garden together, and we loved eating corn on the cob at the end of the summer. But as I got older, I got more and more irrationally terrified of bees and wasps (despite having never been stung), so I'd start weeding, but as soon as a bee or wasp wafted over, I would sprint back to the house in panic. Eventually, Ben and I were so resistant to working on the garden and Dad was so busy with his actual job that he gave up on it and fenced it off as extra pasture for the horses.
We got our first horse when I was about seven. He was a gorgeous mustang, and Dad named him Wiley (because he's wild) on my suggestion. A few years later, after we'd boarded a couple of other horses for a while, I wanted a horse of my own, and Dad found a gorgeous paint mare for sale. But instead of buying it, he made me work for it. Together, we mowed the lawn of the mare's owners for two years. At the end of the two years, I had Scoot (the mare) and Dad had Skip (her half-brother, a paint gelding). We trained them and rode them until I was seventeen, when we moved to the suburbs in Utah and couldn't keep them on our property anymore.
We also raised Barbados sheep (which look a lot like goats). These sheep are extremely cute for the first few months of their lives, but because they don't grow wool, they just end up looking kind of fat and lumpy as adults. Much less cute. We got two pregnant ewes, and when they gave birth, we made the mistake of playing with the new lambs too soon, so one of the ewes abandoned one of her lambs. I named him Little Buddy and bottle fed him until he was old enough to graze. He would bleat loud enough for me to hear him inside the house every morning. The plan with these sheep was to eventually slaughter and eat them, but that plan failed. Three of the lambs (including Little Buddy) died because they overate and there was some kind of toxicity thing with the bacteria in the grass, and then a neighbor's dog got into their pen and killed one of the ewes. In the end, we only slaughtered one, and let the last one run around with the horses until she thought she was a horse too.
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