Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

market-farming - Re: Zambia Re: One-upmanship

market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Market Farming

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "Jeffery Blake" <echoecho AT bedford.heartland.net>
  • To: "Market Farming" <market-farming AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: Zambia Re: One-upmanship
  • Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 13:23:38 -0500

I'm only 33 and grew up in middle America.  I don't remember Kennedy.  But we were poor and from a long line of backwoods type people.  We ate mostly from the garden and the barn and the woods. 
 
Mom canned vegetables all summer long.  We stored rows and rows of quart jars of corn, beans, peas, tomatos and other vegetables in the storm cellar.  I rember digging big burlap 'gunney' sacks full of potatoes and onion. 
 
We ususally butchered a cow one year and a hog the next.  Dad cut them up on the kitchen table and ground all the hamburg and ground pork on a hand crank meat grinder. 
 
During some lean years in the early seventies we couldn't afford to butcher.  Dad ran a trap line and we ate deer, squirrel and pheasant almost exclusively. 
 
Mom picked raspberries and eldererries inthe summer and made jam. 
 
Me and my brother used to take a bath in the sink or a wash tub.  I remember during warm summer rains taking showers under the eave spouts. 
 
We only had an outhouse until I was 10.  Everyone in the family remebered sayings and jokes they had heard and wrote them on the outhouse walls with a stub of a pencil we kept there. 
 
We had a succesion of used black and white TV's until about 1980 when we got a new color TV.  We live far from any broadcast stations.  So reception was poor though and we didn't watch that much TV. 
 
We had a party line phone and the neighbors all had a habit of listen to everyones converstations.  I still had a party line phone after I got married in 1990 when they put in the last of the private lines around here.
 
We milked Holsteins and the milk truck would come pick up our milk which we stored in the old cream cans in a water cooler.
 
I imagine a lot of people would have looked down their noses at us, but I've lived in the city for much of my adult life and couldn't wait to get back to the backwards, rural life I knew as a kid. 
 
Today I'm on the farm--pretty darn poor--I do without a lot of things--work pretty hard, and am happier than I have ever been.


  • Zambia Re: One-upmanship, Mmneedham, 07/07/2001
    • <Possible follow-up(s)>
    • Re: Zambia Re: One-upmanship, Jeffery Blake, 07/07/2001

Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page