Our garden was a primary source of food for the family. Allen used the horses or mules to pull tree stumps from the cleared fields and to plow the ground for a garden, a potato patch and to plant a little plot of corn for cow and pig feed. When the garden surrendered its harvest, Virginia canned as much food as possible.
After we got electricity and a deep freeze she also froze vegetables. Although we didn’t have fruit trees of our own, when the peaches ripened they were so plentiful around Stratford that we bought them and Virginia packed the freezer full of frozen peaches in sugar syrup. Our favorite after school treat was frozen peaches.
Allen was a trader and eventually through some series of trades he traded those mules for a tractor. Portia learned to drive on that tractor by driving it around and around the high meadow to plow it for maize that Allen planted to feed the cows.
In addition to growing our own vegetables we also grew our own meat, milk and eggs. We had pigs that were butchered in the fall to cure into ham, bacon, salt pork and sausage. The skin was rendered into lard and cracklin’s, which we munched on for snacks. We sometimes killed hogs with Uncle Fulton, and we remember Granny making lye soap out of the fat from the hogs in a huge black kettle on an outdoor fire. That soap could clean any grease the men got into and could take the skin right off of a kid. We had fresh cows’ milk for drinking and cooking. We skimmed off the cream and saved it until we had enough to churn a jar of butter. We let some of the milk sit out so that it would form clabber and whey which we ate with cornbread. On very special occasions Virginia made cottage cheese from the clabber by hanging it to dry in a dish towel on the clothesline. Portia so loved that cottage cheese that once on her birthday she asked her mother to make cottage cheese for her instead of a birthday cake. In the early days of the farm chickens roamed freely. We found their nests and stole the eggs. We let some of the eggs hatch into baby chickens, some of which we ate as fryers and some of which we let grow into layers to produce more eggs. At times we also raised rabbits to eat. We had a little shed about 8 feet square in which the rabbits lived. We put a wire mesh in it about 2 feet off the board floor to allow the rabbit droppings to drop to the floor so that they could be scraped out.
© 1997, 1998, 1999, 2003 Portia Isaacson Bass and Veta Leigh. All rights reserved.