1st May 1954

The "Rand Daily Mail" goes in search of smallholders.  The Rand Daily Mail seeks a family of smallholders, for smallholders are in the news.  In the last few years patliament has "discovered" them, and the Minister of Agriculture, Mr. S P le Roux, has recently promised an inquiry to see how their lives may be improved.

It has been estimated that there are 29,000 smallholdings in the Union, varying in size from 1 to 15 morgan and housing about 100,000 people. From among the many smallholdings within reasonable distance from Johannesburg the "Rand Daily Mail" hopes to find a representative family, whose experience and daily adventures it will relate for the benefit of readers, especially those who may be toying with the idea of trying life out of town.

The smallholding family that the "Rand Dailt Mail" has in mind will inlcude children of school age, and at least one member who goes to town every day. By living with the family and writing about it, the "Rand Daily Mail" hopes to answer questions like these

Is It Worth a Try?

What does life and smallholding cost compared to living in town? Is it worth trying? or are there too many drawbacks?  How do the smallholding families find schools, churches, roads, transport, light, water?  How does the bread-winner get to town and back? How does the housekeeper get the gorceries? Is it worthwhile trying to grow one's own vegetables - to produce some of the food which the town family buys?  How do town and country budgets compare?  How does the family set about building a house? What is the cost, and what are the difficulties, or advantages compared to building a house in town?

The smallholding family which the "Rand Daily Mail" proposes to "adopt " for about a month may be living on 5 acres or on 20.  It will probably keep a cow - is it worth keeping one? - and try to supplement the income earned in town by keeping poultry or bees or growing fruit trees - do they pay?  Not the well-to-do family, but the one of average means - which like the country life despite the drawbacks - can best give all the answers.

5th May 1954

The Problems of the Small Holder

Mr. and Mrs. James G Mann, and their family of four, have six acres of land in Walkerville, between Johannesburg and Vereeniging.  They keep turkeys, fowls, rabbits and a cow.  They have 600 fruit trees but they had no crop from them this season because hail stripped the trees.  The Manns have been chosen by the “Rand Daily Mail” as typical smallholders of the Transvaal.  The story of their struggle to make a smallholding pay is to be told in a series of illustrated articles, the first of which will appear in the “Mail” tomorrow.  The Mann family’s problems, their triumphs and their failures, are those of all South Africa’s 100,000 smallholders.

9th May 1954

Meet the Mann family - typical smallholders.  The time - before seven o'clock.  Where - Walkerville, almost exactly half-way between Johannesburg and Vereeniging on the main road.

For the next month the "Rand Daily Mail" will drescribe and illustrate the life of the Manns, who have been selected from among the smallholders around Johannesburg as one of the most typical smallholder families.  On approximately 6 acres the Manns have 600 fruit trees, a cow and poultry which pay for themselves by providing milk and butter and eggs for the family, leaving a surplus for sale at a small profit; turkeys and table birds for sale occasionally; a heifer and Jersey calf; and for most of the year all the vegetables they need for themselves and sometimes a surplus for sale.

"Does it pay?" Mr. Mann was asked.  "Well" he said, "we are quite solvent, and we are quite happy though we would like to do much more if we had the capital.  We are a fairly large family living on a small enough income.  As I said when you told me that the "Rand Daily Mail" was looking for a family of smallholders to write about, we can't tell you how to make a fortune on a smallholding, but perhaps we can tell people who are interested how not to lose money"

Mr. Mann moved off to join the bus – he works in Johannesburg – accompanied by is elder daughter Sylvia, who this year left school and now also works in town.  A few minutes later his younger daughter, Roma, joined a bus going in the opposite direction – to the General Smuts Girls high School in Vereeniging.

The boys played while they waited for the school bus (their school is at Hartzenbergfontein, about four miles towards Johannesburg) and Mrs. Mann went to see if the cow had been milked and fed, the poultry property fed and watered, before she tackled the rest of her morning’s household duties.

A representative of the “Rand Daily Mail” will join them for a few days to get a townsman’s impressions of life on a smallholding.  His first article on the Mann’s will appear on Monday.

10th May 1954

A Family of Six on a Six-Acre Smallholding

It was another of those misty morning; everything very still as if waiting for the sun to warm up the chilly Sunday morning.  From the Mann’s gate, cold and wet to the touch, it was easy to look the sun straight in the eye.  Mr. James Man came striding along the drive armed with fork.  He’d been intending to turn over a compost heap, for this is the compost-making time of the year, but he invited us to take a look around his six acres, “if you don’t mind the wet grass and a few blackjacks where we haven’t yet cleaned up among the trees.”  But before taking a look at the smallholding, let’s meet the Mann’s, whose life on their six acres the “Rand Daily Mail” will describe in the next few weeks.

Sunday School

Just as the sun dispelled the mist, the two younger Mann's faces shining and hair nicely brushed, went off to Sunday school in a neighbours car.  Sunday school is five or six miles away at De Deur further towards Vereeniging.  Jimmy, 11 next month, and Frankie, nine next August, were born on this smallholding, for the Mann's came here 14 years ago, and they are quite evidently at home on it.

Until the beginning of the second term a few weeks ago the boys were attending day school at De Deur years ago.  Mrs. Mann recalls, the Mann's were invited to find four other families and make six so that the school bus could come and fetch them – and now they have been transferred to the school at Hartzenbergfontein, four miles away which takes both English and Afrikaans speaking children.  The Mann's, incidentally, are a bilingual family.  Their home language is English, but Mr. and Mrs. Mann both have Afrikaners among the forebears.  Just before the boys were whisked away, Roma Mann and a neighbour’s son had started off for Sunday school on bicycles.

Commercial Course

Roma, now 14, went to a convent in Johannesburg with her sister Sylvia until last year.  Since Sylvia completed her commercial course and started to work as a typist in town, Roma has been going to school in Vereeniging, also taking a commercial course – shorthand, typing and so on.  Sylvia was helping her mother in the kitchen when we had done out tour and came in for morning tea.  She was icing cakes now that the morning’s rush was over.  Sylvia will be 17 in August.  “She was just over two when we came here to Walkerville”, Mrs. Mann told me over tea, “to almost a bare piece of veld.  Those big pine trees were so high then – they’d been planted less than two years.  Roma was two and a half months old”.

I looked past the pine trees to the windmill, which had just begun turning in a light breeze.

“Yes”, said Mrs. Mann, “we bored for water when Jimmy was a year old”
“And before that?”
“We fetched water from the sluit that runs across the corner of the plot up at the main road there, where the trees are so thick”.
“Did you walk round that way?”
“It was lovely clear water then, but oh, my, it was a job fetching water for ourselves and the stock – drums of water on barrows – especially when we had no labour”.

Was Nursing

Mrs. Mann is small, slightly build; and let us complete the introductions, she was born in Uitenhage, did her J.C. in Paarl, then a commercial course and while she waited for a suitable typist’s job in Pretoria, was nursing when she met Mr. Mann.  Not a farmer’s daughter, not you would say the kind of woman cut out for life on a smallholding.  But she has reared a family of four on this smallholding – and supervised and done a lot of work on it while the rest of the family has been away at work or school for most of the day. And Mr. Mann is not a farmer’s son, though sometimes the family teases him about the ambition he always had when he was a small boy – to own a very large farm one day.  In fact, he was a police recruit of abut 21 – still in the depot at Pretoria – when he and his wife to be first met.  That was in 1932.  On the wall of a rondavel which was once a bedroom and is now a store room hangs a photograph of J.G. Mann as a member of the Aliwal North rugby fifteen in 1931 – he played No. 8 – and between that photograph and one of the 1928 Springbok side is J. Mann among the Aliwal North cricketers.  He was with the police for eight years, in Pretoria and Johannesburg, and is now store man with an engineering firm.  From the rondavel after tea Mr. Mann and I watched the cars whizzing over the tarmac, up hill and away to a day’s golf.

No Golf

“No”, said Jimmy Mann, “a smallholder hasn’t much time for golf.  As a matter of fact, what I really must complete this weekend is that flock house – it was our kitchen for a time – because this week we are getting the first of our day-old chicks.  Of course, there’s really not much to do outside at this time of the year – just cleaning up.”  But he looked, I thought with something of the longing of the gardener, through the trees, yellowing apricot trees, beautiful in the warm sun.  “Nice season, now . . .  or even in a few weeks’ time when the young chickens are in the run, and the trees have to be sprayed and pruned . . . plenty of work then”.

It is evening and lamps are lit, no electricity here and I leave the Mann's sitting round the radio listening to the Sunday evening service while I send this little piece to an office which already, pardon my cliché, seems delightfully far away.  I am staying hereabouts for a few days.  Tomorrow, today to you, I must get down some hard work on the farm. Ahem.

11th May 1954

Morning Fun on the Farm

In far longer time than it takes to write this I was up and dressed and asking for my second cup of coffee (writes a correspondent of the “Rand Daily Mail” who is studying the smallholders’ life at Walkerville).  I had intended to get up earlier and take a look round the countryside, but having slept badly in the middle night, I awoke late.  The middle night was disturbed, not by noise, but by noises which I could not describe; and once or twice by the furious barking of dogs, which made me think, half asleep, that there must be fowl thieves about, we had been talking about fowl thieves the evening before.

I did take one peep.  A reddish young moon was dropping down behind a kopje and there were no thieves visible and it was chilly.  I hopped back into bed and in next to no time the cow and heifer and calf were lowing for their breakfast and the sun was up and Shaka, one of the dogs, was making a fuss of the two young Mann boys; and if there were any chickens missing nobody had noticed it.

The Mann's seemed to have been fully awake for a long time.  Especially Mrs. Mann.  She has to see five people on their way, dressed and fed, and she starts the day at 5.40 a.m.
You would think that five people getting out of a small house in the morning would cause something of a commotion, but the Mann's are not fussy people.  By the time I had seen the native man milk and feed the cow, Mr. Mann, Sylvia and Roma were walking leisurely up to the bus stop.

I had meant to feed the animals myself, but although there are not many of them at the moment I got the rations muddled up.  For cows and chickens the meal and mealies are measured out in tins.  However, while the native was putting out the cow and the heifer to graze on a neighbours place, for the Mann's limited grazing is thin today, I assured Mrs. Mann that, in conformity with my resolution to see something of the life of a smallholding at first hand, I would attend to the Rhode Island Reds personally.

I must say it was a pleasure to serve them.  Fetching water and cleaning the drinking vessels is a bit of a bind.  (Note for Mr. Mann: Why not water laid on?)  But the welcome these girls give one amply makes up for any little ache in the arms.  I had never noticed before that poultry can make such pleasant noises.  If this is all that there is to poultry keeping, why all the fuss about it?

True, there are only 50 layers at the moment.  (Layers by the way, have one quaint habit – although they have half a dozen or more laying places to choose from, they all crowd together round two).  Perhaps it would be more noticeably like work when there are 500 to 1,000 to look after.  But on the whole I was satisfied with my first little job.

I made only two major blunders on my first day on the smallholding.  (I) Apparently II should have let the chickens have as much laying meal as they wanted and not a much mealies, for too much mealies makes them fat and they won’t lay.  (II) I let the calf loose and she did some damage to the young trees.

It was when the photographer arrived in the latish afternoon to take a beautiful picture of quite rural life.  I was absolutely convinced that this calf – they call her Buttercup – was my slave.  Had she not licked the meal off my hands, and exhibited the utmost affection for me?  And suddenly she was transformed into a wild little beastie, of remarkable stamina, strength and stubbornness, defying the efforts of two grown-ups and three children to lead her back to the nice photographer.  At six months!  Luckily, when the native man brought in the cow and heifer, she stopped her nonsense as suddenly as she started it, and trotted up to them like a frightened lamb.

12th May 1954

Fruit Promised to be a “Bonus” – Until the Hail Came

It is time to tell you something of what the Mann's do, have done and hope to do on their six-acre smallholding eighteen miles from Johannesburg (and the same distance from Vereeniging).  Their main activities are raising poultry and growing fruit.  Let us look today at the orchard:

Their 600 fruit trees occupy more than three and a half acres at 12 feet apart, and they are mostly peach of four or five different varieties.

The experts, I believe, prefer you to plant peach trees at least 20 feet apart, but the fact remains that the Mann's trees, some now planted for six years, are doing all right, have given fruit and made money.  The trees were a year old when they came from the nursery.  You expect them to begin bearing, but not fully, when they are three or four years planted.

Even after three years, the Mann's sold about £80 worth of fruit, and after four years the fruit helped to pay for a second hand car.  The Mann's sold £200 worth that year and were hoping to expand their sales of fruit and other produce – hence the car.

But the next year they had just sold £25 worth of peaches, Early Dawn, a popular variety, when the hail came; and they sold no more fruit that year.  The fruit growers in Walkerville with whom I have chatted all tell the same sad tale.  That was “Tornado Year” on the Witwatersrand.

Last year a sever frost killed more than half the fruit blossom.  Hail finished off what fruit there was left.  The Mann's sold exactly nothing.  Their fruit growing neighbours had the same experience.  One of them, who cultivates with a tractor, hastily planted potatoes.  It is too early yet to say how this will pan out.

On their fruit growing so far the Mann's have been out of pocket, as a summary of their budget shows.  They estimate that about half the time of a regular native employee was sent on the trees, a conservative estimate, and there was some additional labour, aft first on “skoffling” and then, as this was not getting results, on light ploughing, which is being done at the moment.  Then there was manure before they began keeping a cow or two and making their own compost, of which they still have not enough.
Making no allowance for their own time (no part-time smallholder ever does) in pruning and spraying, packing fruit and selling it, or the cost of packing cases and carriers, or of petrol when they delivered the fruit, their orchard budget reads:

		£	s.	d.
	600 Trees at 2s. each .. .. .. .. ..	60	0	0
	Regular labour (part wages) .. ..	180	0	0
	Weeding and ploughing .. .. .. ..	30	0	0
	Manure .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..	60	0	0
	Spraying .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..	30	0	0
	Total .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ... .. ..	362	0	0

So on capital outlay and running costs they are so far approximately £57.10s behind.

The Mann's are not grumbling. In fact, they seem mildly surprised that they have so far done not too badly.  They look on their orchard as a “bonus” which is paid some years and some not.  You cannot depend on it, but, while there is life in the trees, there is hope.

13th May 1954

Some Hard Facts about Keeping Poultry: The Mann's Start Again From Scratch

If they wanted to try to make as much on poultry keeping as they earn in town, the Mann's would have to buy at least four times as many day-old chicks as they have ordered for this winter, perhaps more.  Poultry keeping is one of the few business like propositions which can be attempted on a smallholding the size of theirs – six acres on which you obviously cannot grow enough to make a living unless you raise a super luxury crop.  And when I asked Mrs. Sue Mann today what had really brought them 18 miles out of town along the Vereeniging road, to tame a bare piece of veld, she promptly said, “Because Jimmy”, her husband, “was so keen on poultry”.

The answer is one that so many smallholders give, when town’s people ask them why they do not go in for this or that and make their fortune.  It is a brief “no capital”.  And the wise ones know that, given the capital, they would not necessarily make a fortune.
The Mann’s came out to Walkerville 14 years ago with a few hundred fowls, three small incubators, two or three brooders – and plenty of enthusiasm.

After a promising start they had setbacks.  For several years they had to abandon all dreams of being poultry farmers on even a moderate scale, and settle down to rearing a family and keeping only enough poultry to supply their own needs and leave a small surplus.  Last year they started to build up their flocks again, on the firm principle that the poultry must pay its way as they went along.

At the moment, the Mann's tell you the earlier history of their poultry keeping.  Let us look today at their modest plans for the coming crop.  These may be extended, but that will only happen this year if they have a large slice of luck.

At the moment, the Mann's, having sold the rest of last year’s breed – turkeys and chickens as table birds and for breeding – have just 50 layers.  Rhode Island Red hens, and a small breeding stock.  Today or tomorrow Mr. Mann will nip down to the railway station at the lunch hour and collect a box of a hundred day old chicks.

At probably the same time several other smallholders in different parts of the country will be on similar errands, for this is the time of the year when poultry keepers start to stock up for the spring and summer, and for next year’s eggs.

Mr. Mann will get three lots of day old cockerels I the next three months, 300 at a cost of ten guineas, and in August he will get 200 mixed chicks, cost £14.  Mixed chicks are “unsexed”, they are a mixture of cockerels and hens.  About half will be table birds and the rest next year’s layers. If you want chicks guaranteed to turn out pullets you pay more.  By the time the mixed chicks arrive in August the Mann's will have begun selling their first cockerels as dressed table poultry.  Usually the cockerels are slaughtered after about three months, when they should weigh three pounds, and last season’s price was 3s. to 3s. 6d. a pound.

The Mann’s begin selling when their cockerels are just over two months, for they “turn over the stock” as rapidly as possible, even if it means getting less for a lighter bird.  They want to make sure of paying the feed bill.  The Mann's have accommodation at the moment for 500 poultry; most of them arranged in a cluster of ten small houses a relic of the breeding days.  There is one larger house to hold 100, and there are rondavels which can be used for packing eggs, raising chicks or storing food.

Two larger hen houses, awaiting completion, could take another 200.  And on paper the Mann's have plans for new houses which will accommodate two or three thousand.  Then the place will really begin to look like a poultry farm. “At the moment”, says Mrs. Mann, “we are just playing at poultry farming.  I mean, we take it seriously, and it pays, but it is on such a small scale!  Still if I have my way we’ll go slowly.  Five hundred will be enough this year on our capital.  Of course, we’ll have a few turkeys.  I have five dozen eggs to come from a neighbour to whom we sold turkeys this last season for breeding.”

She paused to look through the window at the poultry run, from which an unusually loud cackling had come.  Reassured, she turned back.  “Yes, it’s all small and my husband is itching to go faster.  But we have both learned our lesson – patience.  We have seen people start with the fine plans and pack up after a month or two.  For us, you can really say it’s starting from scratch.

14 May 1954

A Reservoir Would Solve Many Problems for the Mann's

From the highest point of your smallholding you look round your six acres (or 12 or 20) and make a mental note of the things which simply must be done.  Then you think of the things you would like to do.  When you close to a thousand pounds, unless you are better off financially than most smallholders, you give yourself a shake and decide that you had better go and fix that confounded fence.

That happens to most smallholders one a month to some once a week, and to a few nearly every day of their lives.  Today, a lovely sunny day, I stood on the highest point of the Mann’s smallholding and, putting myself in the position of Mr. and Mrs. Mann, thought of some improvements that should or could be made to their six acres.

The highest point, or approximately the highest, is marked by a stout iron pole, standing straight out of the ground five or six feet and standing firm.  It marks the spot where Mr. Mann would like to build a circular reservoir.  To the east of the pole (the sketch make this perfectly clear) is the windmill and the usual 1,000 gallon tank, which is not on an iron tank stand but on the roof of a small brick tool house, the roof having been suitably reinforced.

This supplies the house with water, and from a tap on the tank the Mann's can use a hose on their strawberries, planted between a few fruit trees, and on a vegetable patch which h supplies them and their chickens with green vitamins most of the year.  One can see that the few fruit trees near the tank stand are doing better than most of the other trees in the main orchard.  They get more water at the time of the year when they most need water – the dry spell before and sometimes after the trees blossom.  The main orchard can only be watered by carrying buckets or barrels of water on a wheelbarrow – a laborious, time and money wasting substitute for irrigation by furrows from a reservoir and a poor substitute for the trees.

Hence the plan to build a reservoir, without which no smallholding can really flourish.  (Nice for the young Mann's to dive into in summer, too).  From this spot, granted a good full reservoir, the Mans could probably irrigate all their trees.  From the top water in a full reservoir they could probably irrigate a nice little patch – not so small, really, on a six acre smallholding – running from the reservoir up to the main road, and one or two patches behind the old fowl houses in which they are now stabling their cows.  As it is, the 1,000-gallon tank often flows over from the outlet hole at the top – and then one of the young Mann's dashes over and turns off the windmill.  If a pipe could be run from the outlet hole to a reservoir, the Mann's could be sure of having enough water for the house and the overflow would go to the reservoir, always granted enough wind.

Or would it?  The tank looks a little low to me to give sufficient pressure up to the reservoir.  Raising it would be quite a job.  And I see from the advertisements that even a 6-ft. tank stand costs about £35.  But, of course, the water would come from almost the top of the tank, raising it almost six feet higher than the pipe ruining to the Mann's kitchen.

What about the cost of the piping from the tank to the reservoir?  I pace out the distance, roughly 160 feet. If inch and a half piping is good enough that would be, according to the advertisements, about £19 or say £20 for piping.  And what would the reservoir cost?  A neighbour of the Mann's told me yesterday that he had built a brick reservoir, reinforced with steel wire according to Government recommendations, for £150.  But that was 30 feet in diameter and 51/2 feet high.

I see Mr. Mann had made excavations for a 20 foot diameter reservoir.  At the same height – in the same style – that would be £100.
And the valve?  Oh, say a fiver.  And irrigation piping?  Unless the Mann's use quite a good length of irrigation piping they are going to lose a considerable quantity of a rather limited supply of water – say ten or eleven thousand gallons when the reservoir is full.  At this estimate, it’s all going to be rather expensive.

I can see that this even one small job is going to be a matter for the experts – and a bank manager.  I abandon all ideas of overhead irrigation.  It would be lovely and much better than surface irrigation, but quite beyond the average smallholder.  Likewise I abandon, for the moment, the idea of the Mann's laying on water from their 1,000-gallon tank to their fowl runs.  As for building large new fowl houses – that when one runs up to the £1,000 mark . . .

Which reminds me that those day old chicks will be arriving tomorrow?

15th May 1954

There’s a Lot in Knowing How to Bring Up Chickens

An awful lot of people must be going in for poultry this season”, remarks Mrs. Sue Mann.  For there are two “crosses” among the hundred day-old Rhode Island reds which have just arrived from the poultry breeder at Potchefstroom, who writes t say he is sorry but he just has not got enough pure breds to fulfill all his orders this week, though he breeds thousands of Rhode Island Reds.  One large incubator may produce 17,000 of them.

The day olds arrived at the Johannesburg station yesterday in a large cardboard box reinforced and ventilated, and subdivided in to four cardboard nests.  Mr. Mann brought them home in the evening.  He judged it wise to leave the chickens in their box for the night – in the kitchen.  Apparently these day old chicks can go safely without water or food for as long as 48 hours, though ducklings need to drink sooner.

The box was opened this morning about 20 hours after it was dispatched, in a large fowl house which once served the Mann's as a temporary kitchen and this season will be the brooder house.

Though even the young Mann's have seen hundreds of day old chicks in their time, the family were all present and correct for the opening ceremony at 6.30 as the sun came over the koppie.  And, just as in any town where a family is seeing chicks for the first time, there cries of “Sweet”! “Aren’t they lovely”! and even “Shame”! – perhaps because they will one day be eaten – as the chicks were lifted out and put on the floor.
Actually there were a hundred and three (or four; Frankie and Jimmy Mann were not quite certain) for the generous breeder puts in a few over the hundred for luck.

Two were weaklings and were taken away.  Two were unmistakably lighter in colour than the Rhode Island Reds and will probably be adopted by the young Mann's – if they get half a chance – as pets.  A place had been prepared on the floor where the sun would strike through the window or the greater part of the day.  River sand and clean straw had been put down, surrounded by a course of bricks.

Grain had been scattered in the sand, and under the window was a canopy of tin under which stood an ordinary oil hurricane lamp – the simplest kind of brooder there is for a hundred or 150 chicks.  There was a tray of meal on the floor and an asbestos drinking vessel, and between them another oil lamp. 

While the young Mann's were coaxing the chicks to drink or peck at the crushed mealies, or guiding the chilly one under the canopy, Mr. and Mrs. Mann told me some of the essentials for bringing up chickens.  First, they must come from a reliable poultry breeder whose plant has recently been Government tested and certified free from fowl typhoid infection and a distressing disease known as B.W.D.  This B.W.D. can play the dickens with a flock of poultry.  The Mann's recall that in their earlier days they bought several hundred chicks from a breeder who had a good reputation but whose stock, it turned out later, had become neglected.

At that time they also were breeding and these were to supplement the orders of neighbours.  They dished out some hundreds of chicks and kept some hundreds themselves, and in two days their own were “dropping like flies”.  They had to dash round and tell their neighbours the alarming news, advise them to destroy the chicks, and disinfect their places immediately (apparently even fowls which recover from B.W.D. can continue to be carriers); and then, having destroyed their own, had to set to work breeding free chickens for their neighbours.

In all, a considerable loss of money and time, for it is important to begin raising the chickens just at the right time of the year.  Secondly, the chicks must be kept warm and out of draughts, but not too warm.  There are temperature guides, but the Mann's say that the best indication whether the chickens are feeling just right is the way they behave.  If they huddle together and overcrowding is bad they are cold.  If they are to hot they lie apart.

Apparently they may eat as much as they please, but more important than food is water.  By the time I had learned this – the mere rudiments of the rearing of poultry – the chicks were already learning to drink and were pecking quite happily.  I shall follow their progress with interest – and I bet so will the young Mann's.

17th May 1954

Weekend Jobs; and the Mann's Make Tentative Plans

There is one certain thing about a smallholding – be it never so small, it keeps the smallholder busy.  These days are short, so although it is the “dead” season there are plenty of small jobs to be done on the Mann's six acres at Walkerville during the weekend.

One small job which Mr. James Mann had to do on Saturday afternoon was mend the fence in the cow camp.  It is “absolutely nothing” to make a new fence, with new wire, poles, or on standards and droppers and good tools.  Or so I am told.  But mending an old fence with whatever comes handy can be recommended only an exercise for experienced sappers with the patience of Job, and tough hands.  I write from some little experience.

However, the fence is mended.  Other little jobs were whitewashing a fowl house and tarring the perches – just to use up the material which the native help had left over when he knocked off for Saturday afternoon – and in his spare time Mr. Mann finished off a fly screen window and mad a fly screen door, the frame being pieces of packing case and cut-offs of hardwood.

Mr. Mann admits that he is no carpenter – though the complete smallholder is carpenter, builder, painter, lumber, mechanic and all-round wizard – but he and I agreed that the door was a neat piece of work – neater than the first window frame he made.  “Would be nice to have a workshop of one’s own” we also agreed.  At the moment he is using one of the rondavels, which, suitably renovated, wall probably be required as an egg packing room one of these days. 

For the arrival of the first of the season’s day-old chicks (the important occasion which I reported on Saturday) has revived the poultry keeping enthusiasm of both Mr. Mann and his wife Sue.  They want more layers.

The day-olds (more cross-breds in them than we had first thought, but that doest not matter as they are intended as table poultry) are doing fine.  Two more weaklings have died, but that is not an excessive loss and the others looked healthy enough this morning as they darted about in the bright sunshine that streamed through the open window.  (Apparently there were only 102, leaving 98 now).  Their rations are now supplement by milk, which is a great disease prevented.  “But the milk must be quite clean”, Mrs. Mann admonishes. 

The Mann's have been talking it over, and they have agreed that they will get more day olds this season than they had planned.  They will get day old pullets towards the end of winter.  Mr. Mann knows a breeder who might be able to let them have an excellent strain of layer (originating room imported eggs before the import ban was imposed) and he discusses the merits of this breed with as much enthusiasm as he discusses Rugby football.  Mrs. Mann has agreed to look after them while he is working in town.

The whole Mann household is full of quiet enthusiasm this weekend as they make plans for the future.  The girls have ideas about gardening,  What’s more, they have been working – preparing flower beds.  The boys have the look of young men with a secret ambition.  I remind them that the strawberries can do with a bit cleaning.  Groans.

Cleaning the Orchard - this is cleaning up time.  At the weekend the ploughmen come – all three of them with their six donkeys – by arrangement with them and their employer.  They are cleaning up between the fruit trees, six rows a weekend at five shillings a row.  One man hold the plough, one leads the donkeys and third eggs them on.  It is a performance that would drive an efficiency expert to tears.

“What you need”, said a neighbour who dropped in on Saturday evening, “is one good horse”.

“What we all need” said a second neighbour, “is a handy little machine.  Look how quickly Mr. so and so gets through his orchard by machine”.

“What we all really need”, said a third, “is capital”.

I was told, though, that my estimate of the cost of building a reservoir is much too high and I am going to get another set of figures.

That reminds Mr. Mann.  He has been looking into the possibilities and cost of plastic pippin, and the cost of roofing materials.  :Thinking of expanding Jimmy”? they tease him.  Mr. Mann smiles enigmatically.

“Somebody was mentioning the little matter of capital” he remarks. 

But I can see that the Mann's are turning over plans.

Meanwhile things are getting done.  I can see that also, even after a week.  The donkeys may be slow, but the orchard is looking all the better for Saturday’s ploughing.

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