Growing up on a farm had many benefits. One benefit for sure was we pretty much made, grew or raised what we needed to survive. We had a HUGE garden. I remember having rows assigned to us kids to weed. I also remember shelling peas, the lettuce with the yellow dressing, and Elena eating fresh tomato sandwiches. One time we even had a moose come down into our garden. This was the only time we saw a famous Maine moose up close and personal! Seeing Grandpa in the garden with this little pan brings back the memories!
My mom would can vegetables every summer and then they would be kept in the cellar to be used throughout the winter. I hated being sent to the cellar to bring up vegetables. The cellar had a mud floor with wooden planks on the ground, lots of spider webs (and therefore, probably lots of spiders!) and a little light bulb in the middle of the room that you had to turn on by pulling the attached chain. Although this provided ideal storage for vegetables, it also provided a great backdrop for an overactive imagination!
Besides the vegetables from the garden, we had eggs from the chickens, milk from the cows, meat from the chickens and the cows and my mom always made homemade bread for us every week. Sometimes we even had honey from having our own bees. (This picture of my grandparents was labeled 1957 and it appears that my grandfather is in a bee suit so apparently, my father learned how to work with bees from his father.) We didn't have fresh fruit although my father tried several times. He would put nets over the fruit trees but the birds still seemed to find a way. Before my time, my grandmother used to even make her own butter as well.
We didn't make our own ice cream but we were customers of the Schwann's ice cream truck and ice cream drumsticks, large containers of mint chocolate chip ice cream and chicken patties were frequently the purchases selected.
I'm sure we had to make trips to the grocery store from time to time but they had to be a lot less frequent than my weekly and often biweekly trips now! Those were the good old days!!!
i had forgotten about the white bee boxes out in the field by the play-house. that garden was something wasn't it? it was the size of most house lots these days (at least in my memory it was). it seemed to go on forever, row after row. i loved to hide in the rows of corn and i loved to eat the strawberries and enjoy fresh strawberry rheubarb pie!! and we wonder why our kids don't seem to know how to work-there's really not a whole lot they can do for chores (except housework-and most boys aren't too thrilled about that):)
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