When I was either fourteen or fifteen years old, the group of boys my age took on a fun “welfare project”. Our advisors at the time were Uncle Cyril Porter and Marion Despain. To try to help us learn to work, have some fun, and grow something that could be used by the families of the town for food, they came up with the idea of our growing “Dry Pinto Beans” for the families in town on the church farm. The “Church Farm” was up Buckskin Canyon and had been the homestead of the Crandall family. Many people called it “Crandall’s Ranch”. It had an old home on it that was falling down but it was fun to explore around in and there was the land surrounding it. I would estimate that there was probably ten acres of land around the house that could be farmed. Growing near the house were also a number of currant bushes.
To make the farming experience more “real” for us, our advisors worked out a deal for us to use Jay Crandall’s work horse to do some of the farming. As I recall, the land was plowed with a tractor and the beans were planted using our planter. We had one of the few planters in town at the time. They may have used our tractor and plow as well but I can’t remember.
Since our advisors had to be to work at seven o’clock, we worked out a plan where those boys who were going to work on the project on a particular day would sleep at “The Rock House” the night before and then one of our leaders would pick us up about six o’clock and drive us up to the farm and we would work all day and walk home in the afternoon. There were a lot of weeds so we did a lot of hoeing. When the beans and the weeds got a little larger, we were ready to try the horse and cultivator approach to weed control. Our leader would drop a couple of us off at Jay Crandall’s and we would ride the old work horse from his house over to the church farm. We learned how to put the harness on and hook up the cultivator and we thought we were pretty smart until we tried to cultivate.
We didn’t have any experience with farming with a work horse so the horse sort of went where ever it wanted to go . We finally figured out that if someone rode the horse and guided it, it would stay more or less between the rows of beans. The next challenge was to get the cultivator to stay between the rows too. We had some serious problems with that. Even with a boy trying to guide it, the cultivator went where ever it wanted to go with the boy hanging on for dear life to the cultivator handles. I think we ended up “cultivating out” more beans than we saved from the weeds. We tried it just a few times with the horse and finally gave up and went back to the hoes.
The bean bushes got about six to eight inches tall. We didn’t get much rain that season so they didn’t grow very tall. I don’t remember ever harvesting the beans. I don’t know whether they never put on any beans or whether it snowed and covered them up before we could harvest them. I guess it didn’t matter. We had a lot of fun and we learned to work and I have fond memories of working on a welfare project even if nothing was ever harvested. We became a pretty close group of boys and had lots of fun thanks to our leaders.
While we were walking back and forth to the farm (about three miles from Heber) we discovered some very nice wild grape vines. Later in the year we picked wild grapes and Mom made them into grape jelly. We also got to eat some of the currants growing around the old house at the farm. I had never eaten currants before but they were pretty good. They were apparently quite common in the early days of Heber. They were orange or red in color and about the texture of a cherry tomato but smaller in diameter.