Getting the urge for own garden

With all the news stories regarding the high cost of food, and seeing one family on the news tonight somewhere in N.S. doing a backto-the-land kind of method to making and/or growing all their own food, I was reminded of my childhood and where our food came from. We had a huge garden with fresh vegetables all summer long and our mother always made large amounts of preserves. We picked berries, that is strawberries, blueberries and blackberries from surrounding farms as well we were able to have a supply of apples from neighbours.

This was a time for sharing, and with our mother being a widow for several years, sharing with her and her six children made everyone feel good. At some point during our childhood our mother began raising her own chickens and did that until well into her 70s. But before that, I can remember a lot of the neighbour’s chickens ran free and eggs were laid everywhere.

But then if Mom needed eggs for breakfast, or for baking or whatever, she just asked one of us to “go get me some eggs” … and we did. We seemed to know the nesting areas along the ditches near farm fields and would scoop up three or four, or more, and dash back home. It was just an everyday part of life in the 1950s.

I told this story in brief to an older friend of mine and she suggested this letter and said, “Kathy you had your own food bank.” Life was easy and there were not the big gigantic supermarkets dictating what we can and cannot afford in our groceries. That family on the news tonight has me thinking that I really need to have a garden next summer. How about you? Kathy Birt, Mount Stewart