My family never did without while growing up. Although we were poor money wise, we were well taken care off.
I had mentioned before in another post about living on the farm. This time I am going to talk about my siblings and I. We had a roof over our heads, and although it didn't have a main heating system, the only time we felt cold was when we jumped out of bed in those wintery shivering mornings. It sure woke us up in a hurray, but it also made us reluctant to climb out of our warm beds. We survived, we learned to dress warm whether we were outside, inside, in bed or even in the car.
Our house was heated with a heater in the living room and the wood stove in the kitchen. To this date, I still feel that warmth that is heated by wood is the warmest heat found. It's far better than oil, coal or even electric heating and I have had all four types of heating in my life time. Okay so electric heating is more constant, but it's still does not have that warm, comfortable, comforting heat that comes from using wood.
Food, a daily need was plentiful. Mother had huge gardens, the garden (called the far garden) usually contained the potatoes and some perennial vegetables mother had. Vegetables such as asparagus, that real hot white radish (don't know the name for it) and a fruit tree or two. In the middle garden were the strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries, plum and apple and crab-apple trees. The front garden or the one nearest the house, held all kinds of other vegetables. Mother used the soapy wash water for the cutworms in the garden along with the ashes from the stove. I learned how to grow vegetables and other things from her.
Every fall as the vegetables ripened, it took the whole family to harvest. Huge boxes, baskets and containers were used to gather the food. The children were then had the chore of shelling the mega amount of peas that were canned, taking ends off from the assortment of beans that were picked and then snapping them in pieces. Cleaning the assortment of berries that were gathered along with the Saskatoon's, pincherries, plums, chokecherries, strawberries, raspberries, blackcurrants, gooseberries, crab-apples and any other fruit that mother may have planted that year. The canned fruit, vegetables, meat and fish, lined the shelves in the basement.
Along with this, we enjoyed all kinds of fruit such as peaches, apricots, pears, and the different types of jam made were very varied.
When the wild berries were ripe, the whole family, except the small children, picked wild fruit. As the younger one grew up, they too had to go 'picking' fruit. With a syrup or peanut butter pail hanging from a belt we challenged each other to see who could pick the most berries. As usual though we also stuffed ourselves silly with all that sweet free fruit. We concluded that if we had to pick, then we would enjoy the fruit as well.
Now one must remember that when your in the bush picking fruit or whatever it was that mother was after, you had to watch where you went.
The terrain was not smooth, there was dips and dives. You could end up in a pool of water, in amongst some ant hills or maybe you ended up near a hornets nest. Don't think that one should be able to see where they are going in a bush, it's not that easy. We had to always call out to each other to make sure we had a sense of direction, it can get real easy to be turned around in a bushy area.
With all of the fruit and vegetables around us we never went hungry. Ate more fruit then than I do now.
