I’ve been looking at John Galbraith’s Diary from the Rural Diary Archive at U. Guelph. He farmed in Oxford Country, Ontario. I asked Claude AI to summarize the activities month by month for 1835. The result:
January 1835:
Received visitors and attended church services
Chopped firewood
Tended to household and agricultural tasksFebruary 1835:
Chopped and gathered firewood
Attended church and community meetingsMarch 1835:
Tapped maple trees and made maple sugar/syrup
Did orchard work like scraping and pruning treesApril 1835:
Continued orchard work like pruning and scraping trees
Planted and tended cropsMay 1835:
Pruned apple trees
Cut brush and did other orchard and farm maintenanceJune 1835:
Pruned and washed apple trees
Worked on road maintenance
Visited with neighbors and attended churchJuly 1835:
Haying and harvesting crops
Scraping and pruning apple trees
Attended church and community eventsAugust 1835:
Harvested apples and began drying/preserving them
Cleared brush and worked in the swamp
Attended agricultural exhibitionSeptember 1835:
Apple harvesting, peeling, and preserving
Fenced the orchard
Attended churchOctober 1835:
Continued apple harvesting and cider making
Repaired fences
Attended churchNovember 1835:
Finished apple picking
Chopped and gathered firewoodDecember 1835:
Chopped firewood
Hosted a community wood-cutting “bee”
Attended church and visited neighbors
It’s interesting to see the annual cycle of farm tasks, but what was the “scraping trees” that occupied him in March, April and July?
According to Google, “Scraping trees” refers to the act of a deer, usually a male during mating season, rubbing its antlers against the bark of a tree, often to remove the velvet covering on the antlers, mark territory, or attract mates, which can damage the tree’s bark and sometimes even girdle the trunk if done excessively; essentially, it’s a behaviour where the deer “scrapes” its antlers on the tree by rubbing them against it.
I doubt Galbraith had antlers. If you know what he might have been doing or can speculate, please post a comment.
From limited knowledge and research, it looks like scraping trees was done to remove blight, in particular fire blight, from trees. Blight could take hold in an orchard in times of high temperatures followed by wet spells and would reduce the crop significantly. Before any antibiotics or pestcides, the only way to keep it from destroying an orchard was by hand scraping the trees with specialized tools which remove the blight and allowed the tree to heal. See Wikipedia for a more detailed account.
Was he pruning the trees? Do you have a subscription to the OED, the definitive answer might be found there. Like a lot of people then and now, was he just scraping by?
The Rural Diaries Project by Drr. Cathy Wilson of Guelph U. is a terrific project for anyone who has Ontario rural routes. My own family Geddes Diaries were given to Cathy a decade ago and are in the collection. As an aside, my mother-in-law went to rural public school with Galbraith. So, some SWestern Ontario roots for sure.
I highly recommend anyone with agricultural/rural Ontario roots to look into the Rural Diaries project.
Gail B