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Early
Farming Methods
Though they lived in a rural part of Sicily The four Busa
brothers really did not have experience in farming as a business. My
father said that when they started he did not even know how to seed beans. His
plan was to come to America , work for a few years and make enough money to go
back home and buy a cow. Things change. When they bought the farm in 1919, the
land had to be cleared and prepared for farming.
They had little machinery so the land clearing and plowing was done by hand
and with horses. They had to cut down pear trees in the fields and move many
rocks and boulders .None of the boys had much education but they were all
clever and hard working. They picked up the art rather quickly and soon added their
own techniques and ideas to cope with the fickle weather and climate of New
England.
In order to get a jump on the spring, to get their
crops to market early for the best prices, they used transplants
grown in "hot beds" and sash houses. To keep the young plants from freezing
, they seeded and transplanted in six foot
wide beds covered with heavy 3X6 foot glass frames they called sashes. It was called
a hot bed because they used several inches of horse manure under a few inches
of topsoil to help generate heat during the cold spring nights. On top of the sashes they laid
two-inch thick mats made of
woven straw that were taken off each day and rolled back at night.
A sash house was made by bolting and nailing sashes together to make a small
greenhouse they could work in. Each brother had hundreds of sashes and
they spent the winters repairing and painting them as well as
weaving the mats. Thousands of seedlings of lettuce, celery , beets, chicory
and greens were planted under the glass on 2X2 inch centers to be later
pulled up and transplanted into the fields in April. They built
greenhouses in the thirties but continued to use hot beds, for transplants and
later for annuals and bedding plants, into the nineties.
They did not buy tractors until after World War II, so
the plowing and harrowing was done with a horse, The planting and weeding and
picking were all done by hand and required a lot of labor and organization. All
of the children and wives worked as well as relatives and local kids during
the summer.
The layout and soil conditions of the land dictated
what could be planted where and when. It had high rocky parts and low moist areas. They
started planting and seeding on the dryer area in April and then moved into
the lower areas later in the spring. Celery grew best in the lower spots and
tomatoes squash and cucumbers better in the dryer areas. They had to
double and triple crop the land: when one crop was picked new plants or
seedings had to be ready to go into that spot as soon as possible; this required a lot of planning and experience. For example, you couldn't follow
cabbage with broccoli because of disease problems, or celery with celery because
the second crop would not make it before the frost. Between rows of squash or
tomatoes they would plant fast-growing crops like chicory and lettuce while
those more tender plants were getting started under waxed-paper "hot-caps". They
varied the types of vegetables they would grow so they would have something to
pick and sell each week instead of waiting for one large field to mature. This
helped minimize the effects of the inconsistent New England weather. A hot dry
summer would be great for squash but not for lettuce or beets, but a late
spring or early fall frost would not hurt them. Also they avoided disease
and nutrition problems by this rotation and varied cropping.
The plowing
was done with a single
horse set-up until after World War Two . It was very hard work because the
soil was generally rocky and hilly even though there were patches of deep topsoil. Horse
, cow and chicken manure, much more plentiful than they are today, were the
main source of fertilizer, spread and plowed in. Limestone was spread
by hand to help activate the fertilizer and add the calcium necessary for celery and tomato crops
. After plowing, the ground was smoothed and
groomed with harrows and rakes and shallow trenches dug for the rows to plant
tomatoes and celery or lines marked out on top of beds with string and a wheel
marker to keep a uniform distance between the smaller plants of lettuce and
beets. Seeding of lettuce and beets was done with a single row hand pushed
seed drill and spaced fifteen inches apart.
After the ground was prepared and plants were in came the difficult part of tending to them. Weeding was constant
and done by hand and with small tools like hand-hooks, hoes , shove-hoes and
hand pushed wheel cultivators. A shove hoe or scuffle-hoe, hard to find today,
was a twelve-inch-wide bracket attached to a long pole to cultivate the soil
and bury small weeds as they first emerge, taking some strain off the back. The
plants were side-dressed with nitrate fertilizers either thrown between rows
and cultivated in or applied with a one-row fertilizer hopper . The fields were
watered with Skinner pipes,
also not in use and hard to find today.
These were one-inch diameter pipes threaded together the length of the field. They
had holes with aerators spread three feet apart in a single line the length of
the pipe. The water would shoot up twenty feet and come down in a fine mist
allowing for deeper penetration of the soil without compacting it and avoiding
run-off. Since they only sprayed in one direction though , they had to be
turned every hour or so to cover the whole field and had to be mounted on
posts and disassembled and moved from crop to crop.
Getting crops to market was also a challenge. Since
there were many more farms in the area in the twenties and thirties, and into
the sixties, quality and timeliness was very important. The earlier in the
season you got your produce to market the higher the price usually, as long as
you also had the best offerings. Vegetables had to be the proper size and
weight ,blemish free ,uniform , clean and packaged properly. Celery had to be
cut clean above the roots, light green, free of black-heart and rust disease, sprayed
and washed of all dirt, bunched in paper wrappers, packed in wooden crates and
top-iced .Tomatoes had to be sorted and graded for size and quality, crack and
spot free, with color breaking( between green and light red), packed in woven
wooden baskets ,top layer facing up with stems indicating freshness,
cellophaned and stacked on racks .Beets and radishes had to be the proper
diameter ,hand tied in bunches sprayed clean of dirt and packed showing color
and iced. Lettuce, squash and cucumbers also had to meet certain standards. The
hard work in the spring and summer would pay off later in the market place.
In the twenties they brought their own produce to
market which was in the Fanueil Hall
area in Boston. They packed their produce
on a horse-drawn wagon in the evening ,spent a few hours in a hotel (
and a few in Scolley Square) to be up at four a.m. to sell their goods and
return home by mid-morning. Later on they would leave their produce at a
brokerage house in the evening who would sell it for them and take a percentage. Market
days were Monday to Friday so they delivered Sundays through Thursdays. They
could catch up on the weeding and planting on Fridays and Saturdays. Sundays
they worked half a day making a load for market in the morning and maybe
tending the water pipes in the afternoon then driving the truck in at night.
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