Mother's Down-home Country Lore

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Now Mrs. Amanti has several of the cans buried ...she keeps dried beans and grains in one, and fruits and vegetables in the others!

The garden work may finally be subsiding, but there are always plenty of other chores to do when autumn rolls around. And one of the most obvious of those tasks presents itself every time you walk outdoors ...past that painfully small woodpile. So here are a few bits of lore which, we hope, will inspire you to get your chopping done ...with as few annoyances as possible.

Gary Albring reports that—in the past—he went to considerable effort trying to clean the remaining wood out of the head every time his maul handle broke off (an all-too-frequent occurrence). Now, the Curran, Michigan resident simply places the handleless head in his woodstove fire overnight. In the morning (after the head has cooled), the splittin' iron is ready for a new handle.

Don't bother to buy expensive tarps to keep your woodpile dry this winter. Instead, make a custom-fitted cover from some clear, heavy plastic such as polyethylene, suggests Jack Goulet of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

Jack measures his woodpile's length and width, and doubles the width figure when cutting the plastic to size. He then folds the material over and staples the ends together. Next, he secures a piece of scrap lumber along the entire length of each side, and hangs his self-made tarpaulin over the woodpile so that the 2 X 4's (or what have you) act as weights to keep the plastic in place.

Many woodstoves feature temperature-tolerant glass windows ...which tend to soot up quickly. The need to clean that glass constantly was Dave Johnson's pet peeve in life ...until the Coloma, Wisconsin resident discovered a surefire trick to do the job.

Use a rag or a paper napkin to scoop up the stove's ashes and use them to clean the window. They're alkaline and, Dave says, just abrasive enough to loosen sooty deposits without scratching the glass.

In most parts of North America, apples are coming in pretty hot and heavy during this time of the year, and Gladys Carpenter has a good tip for storing the sweet fruit. Gladys—who resides in Millers Falls, Massachusetts—packs surplus apples in her grain storage bin, alternating layers of the grain with those of the fruit, and thus helps to keep both edibles in fine condition for many months. (For those of you who don't store large amounts of grain, Mrs. Carpenter suggests trying the same method using fine, dry sand.)

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