<Begin Segment 9>

JA: Can you describe what the farm looked like during the summer months?

MH: During the summer month it was a beautiful farm because we had... I don't know, they all learned to raise lots and lots of strawberries. It's a strawberry area because of the soil that we had that was a strawberry field. The greater percentage was strawberries that we planted. We had strawberry you can harvest at two year. You plant it one year and you harvest the second and third year. And then we were ready to plant another bunch of beginners again in another part of the field again, so that way we would have, continuously have strawberries for years and years that way. Then we also planted lettuce in the early spring. We planted that in about April and then we harvested in early June is what we did with lettuce. Tomato we planted out there in, in about May and then we plant those, harvest those in about August. And so we were very busy with all that type of thing. Later we planted zucchinis, and cauliflower, and cabbage and all those things started to come up and kept us busy every day before we went to school.

JA: How were these farm products marketed?

MH: Well, the way we did, as far as, our family did -- and the neighbor next door and the family beyond that -- they had young boys so they were able to haul it in town on their trucks. But we as, didn't have any truck and we were younger, so we hired a truck driver from the Bellevue, they lived near Yarrow Point. He came over and picked 'em up every night, our shipment that was ready to go into Seattle. We had them all packed ready to go, and so he delivered them to the commission houses in Seattle for us first thing in the evening, then they were ready for the market in the morning there.

JA: Were there other... did you have farm animals?

MH: Yes. Well, that's my dad. He loves animals, so he had a big fat pig for us. He loves pigs so he had a piggy. And then we had a cat, of course, and then we had a dog. My dad loved dog, so that was the end. Of course, we bought a horse when we first -- I didn't tell you, but we bought a horse when we first came home, because all the work had to be done by horse. And so we bought a horse and we bought some equipment, so we can clear that ground of ours because it was such a mess and so that's what we did.

JA: And did you have a family garden?

MH: Not exactly. I think we ate out of the field, everything we had out in the field, and we shared some things with the neighbors. The neighbor may have some little Japanese plant or something like fuki and things like that. Well, they, we shared with each other with that type of food.

JA: And what kind water source did you have?

MH: Our water was, for the farm we had to get water from the Bellevue lake, Lake Sturtevant, they called that at that time. So we ran pipes from there and we had a big pump there that pumped the water to all our farms, is what it was, so we need that for irrigation.

JA: And for drinking water?

MH: Drinking water is only the individual wells that we had right next to our building that we had dug.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.