Preparedness 21.0, Crazy Spring Weather, Happy St. Patrick's Day!

 
Photo from Wheat Rises to14 Year High

Preparedness 21.0/ Wheat Shortages-

If you've been watching the news you may have started seeing some pretty major shortages of wheat (and other grains) coming up. Fertilizer for farmers too. If you stop to think about how many products are made of wheat it gets pretty mind-boggling. It's not just bread/baked goods but things like pasta, cooking grains, etc. I decided to buy some extra wheat berries while the price was still pretty low and I encourage you to do the same. Manual grinders are not that expensive to grind your own flour and you can also grind other grains.  I should add that you can also freeze flour, if you see a good deal (and have freezer space) put in a well sealed plastic bag to keep the moisture out. You can use a vacuum sealer bags too and freeze for longer storage. I think right getting more prepared is really really urgent. I don't want to be gloom and doom, but the flip side is I don't want to be just another blog about arts & crafts saying how wonderful things are. I have some co-workers who were really concerned about being able to afford gas to get to their jobs. There's also massive droughts, predictions of more on the horizon and the climate issues will affect this as well. There are so many pieces of this puzzle that I've lost a little bit of sleep over it, but I'm getting past that now. Just do whatever you can NOW, buy extra canned goods, fuel, water filters and plant some food that you can eat. And don't let other people dissuade you from doing this because they will be the ones asking you later for help. Stand firm. Read this-  UN Says Food Prices Jump to Hit Record High in Feb  Walmart has recently put limits on how may items you can buy, with the registers stopping when you check out. I really think it's good to get news from various sources, and expand your knowledge base. 

My Nebraska grandparents and family during the depression

I think about what my grandparents in the depression, how they survived in a rural area being pretty self-sufficient, but also community sufficient. It does rather boggle the mind that a couple of generations from the 1930's that there are people who think that cooking is sticking something in a microwave. The good news on the flip side was the whole movement of people who started baking bread during lockdowns. People also planted gardens and tried things, hopefully that will not fade. I hope everyone is doing well out there and situated. Things going on here, and in other parts of the world, maybe much worse than being portrayed. Time will tell. 

Crazy Spring Weather-

We've gone from the twenties to the sixties and back again, sometimes I feel like I have whiplash! But the great news is the grass is starting to green up, flowers have come up, like our crocuses. Nice to have some days where it's actually warmer and we can open the windows! We had some much-needed rain with more on the way this weekend. Truly great in the high desert to get any kind of rain especially in the springtime, help sings green up.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

We celebrated early, as I love corned beef and veggies! I wasn't going to buy any beef, then found a great deal on corned beef at Costco. I simmered it for hours and made an apple pie for dessert-

cabbage and carrotts

The apples came from our tree last fall, just thawed. I made a "Stephenson's Kansas City " apple pie, just add the juice of one orange and 1 tsp. lemon zest to a standard recipe, delish! 

Trader Joe's also has amazing Irish Soda bread this time of year. Has raisins, buttermilk and caraway seeds. I bought a couple extra loaves to freeze. It tender and most, great for a snack and you can toast as well. 

The Other Side of Amazon Prime

Photo from Theverge.com

The Other Side of Amazon Prime-
To be honest we all like a good deal. And we all buy stuff. One of the things I try to look at more and more over time is what I'm buying, and WHY. With a recent big deal of Amazon Prime days, coupled with watching the news, here are a few ideas that the mainstream media does not promote. As we all know Amazon has put a lot of companies out of business and that's part of the supposedly free market system. And they are very, very convenient, which is great for people who don't want to think a whole lot about how they actually shop. So here's a few different things I thought of that I will list. In no particular order....

Why do you pay a fee to buy stuff? Prime membership always cracked me up.

How many things to buy on Amazon that you could probably find locally and support local businesses assuming that you need something new?

How many things could you buy used or recycled, through various venues, instead of buying something new on Amazon? Maybe get free on Craigslist? Or barter?

How many things could you restore/reuse instead of buying something new on Amazon? Like our wheelbarrow we re-painted and added new hardware to-

How many things could you find online through smaller companies, they have just as many deals and the same products, that you could support instead?

How much stuff do you really need? To me that's really the biggest question. Good ideas, and maybe some answers here-

And how much of your old stuff winds up in a landfill?

Where are you going to store all your store when you run of of room?

It's been on and off in the news for quite a while about how dangerous, and punitive it is, working for Amazon. Not drinking water on the job, because then your count goes down when you use the bathroom. (See the article at the for more information). When I started seeing their trucks around town on the weekends I just sort of shook my head. They're catering to people who want instant gratification, all the time, for everything. This country has no patience and no deep thinking sometimes. How about simplify?

Homesteading to me harkens back to older times, when we were more self-sufficient and made do with a lot less. I had to laugh when I watched the movie Red Sparrow. There was a section in the beginning when a Russian teacher is instructing her class of spies-in-the making, that Americans are addicted to their shopping and their social media. I almost burst out laughing the theater. How true, how true. But I think it really hit the nail on the head for me for how the country is moving. I see that speed shopping encourages people to become so lazy that they don't want to drive anywhere, to buy anything, and or even get out of the car. Some people simply want to press some buttons on a device. It's mindless and it's promoting a scary future in this country... There is hope though, book stores are making a comeback!!! So here's some ideas-

From Lilywilliamsart.com

Would My Grandparents Be Happy?

Laura and Arminius

Would My Grandparents Be Happy?
Yesterday Dave and I were talking at breakfast, eating some of our wonderful eggs and an English muffin. I mentioned that my Grandmother Marguerite always told me to either use butter or jam, but not both, on my toast. I think she thought that was wasteful. I only grew up knowing one set of Grandparents, my Dad's, because the others passed away when I was very young. My Mom's parents met me after I was born, but I was very young when they died. I don't have any direct memories of them.

My mom had told me a lot about them, including the stories of the wonderful gardens they grew out in Nebraska. How grandma Laura raised Rhode Island Red chickens and preserved foods. They had their root cellar and they survived the depression. She also told me how they escaped tornado's by going into the wet, cellar full of toads. She told me about what a hard worker her mother was and that my grandmother was always a tough, but caring woman. I have two wonderful quilts of hers and think about what it must have been like for her to sit there and make those out in the middle of nowhere Nebraska, in the dark. I'm not sure when electricity went into the rural areas of Nebraska, in the 1930s? I visualize her using kerosene lamps or candles to sew by.

My grandfather Arminius was a mechanic who worked on trucks, tractors and cars and they would barter his repair services for things they didn't have. They would get roasting chickens, bread, fresh milk, etc., in exchange for his services. My mom said during the depression that she drank coffee instead of milk as a kid because they didn't always have that. I have great photos in my head of my grandparents and their girls in Nebraska in this house-

Nebraska home, I'd love to go there someday

Pete and Marguerite

The grandparents on my Dad's side I spent lots of time with. They also raised two children during the depression and my grandmother Marguerite was a wonderful cook, baker, seamstress, knitter, crocheter and made tatting. She sewed me wonderful clothes and knitted me lovely sweaters. When I was young they were living in southern California and that was a great climate to grow things in. While living in the city of Pomona, named after the goddess of plenty, they grew quite a bit of things on their city lot. Ironically they had a Little Homestead in Pomona of sorts. I remember the three-bedroom, one-and-a-half bath house very well. Lawn in the front, in back lots more! They had an avocado tree, a lemon and a lime tree, plum tree, a kumquat tree, trellises with concord grapes, and strawberries. I don't remember them ever growing any vegetables however. I remember my grandmother making homemade grape pies, canning home-grown grape juice, grape jam, and I think she made plum and Kumquat jams. I'm not quite sure whose idea it was to have all of the fruit trees because I don't know if those were there before they bought the house. I suspect on some level having fruit trees in the backyard was a nod to wanting to be more self-sufficient, having surviving the depression, but that is just a guess.

I know my grandfather Pete was an avid gardener and loved working in the yard. I think some of that may have been to avoid my grandmother, who is not the nicest person. As an adult I would jokingly call her the iron fist in the velvet glove without the glove!My grandfather Alva (he went by Pete) was the opposite, really a sweetheart. He jokingly used to call me microbe or peanut!

So... I think that they would be proud of me with what we're doing here, and if they were alive they would probably be doing something similar. I can see them having chickens, preserving foods, and fixing lots of things themselves. I hope they would be proud of me for the lifestyle I have. While I didn't do it for them I think that they would appreciate it. I hope so.

Natural Pain Remedies For Injured Chickens, 'Prepper's Survival Retreats' Book Giveaway!

Natural Pain Remedies For Injured Chickens-
Poor Gwynne, she gets picked on, gets sick, and now appears to have either a fractured pelvis or hip issue. This week I saw her in the garden run limping terribly. I picked her up and checked her. No wounds that I could see, bleeding, etc. Dave said a night or so ago he saw her fall off the coop perch, probably pushed off by another hen.  I left her outside for another day, then realized how much pain she was in. She would walk around a little, then collapse on the cold, damp ground. With 32 in the forecast I brought her in. She was hungry and thirsty. I think she hadn't been going in the coop much to eat or drink. She warmed up and rested in the kitchen chicken hospital, large laundry basket-

She can stand up pretty comfortably but starts breathing hard when she sits down. I think she may have a fractured hip or pelvis? Best guess. After doing some research I bought some Boiron Arnica pellets-

                                                               

Very small-

 After doing some research it appeared I could give her a "dose", so I decided to just start with one pellet. I also put her in a larger space to observe, a tarp under our chick outdoor enclosure (thrifted) in the kitchen-

I dosed her twice with no seeming effect. She appears to be really hurting laying down, breathing hard. More comfortable standing up. So I mashed up a full dose of 5 pellets into applesauce, but she wouldn't eat it. I use the small amount of water in a cup and put in 10 pellets, a double dose. After dissolved I added a pinch of sugar and loaded that into a small pet's oral syringe. Dave had to hold her and I gave her 1 dose. Waiting to see how it goes, time will tell. I didn't see much effect, so gave  her a 2nd dose tonight. Here are some good resources to start with if interested in more chicken treatment ideas-   Arnica and Calendula For Poultry    Pain Meds for Chickens  Petremedycharts.com
Chat.allotment-garden.org  If you have any other suggestions, please post a comment! Sadly can't do a Vet visit.

Prepper's Survival Retreats Book Giveaway-
When I was approached by Molly at Ulysses's Press to review a book I was excited! What kind of info would it have? The title certainly sounded interesting. She sent me a copy and it's really pretty fascinating! One of the things I've learned about the Depression in the last century the people survived reasonably comfortably because they were prepared and have a certain skill set. They also had a home/property that was set up to grow, preserve foods and be more self-sufficient. I don't know, however, if those people were also concerned about security issues? I gave the book a look , lots of great info, and here are the chapter titles, in order-

A brief history of collapse, What do you need to survive, The big questions, Purchasing an existing home, Can you make it here? Building or renovating your survival retreat, Survival groups and your new retreat relocation, Whittling down a short list of properties. 

There are some graphics and photos scattered throughout the book and lots of interesting questions like- timing is everything, how soon do you want to make this happen? So if you're interested in winning this book all you need to do is leave a comment below and follow me on Facebook. It's that simple! I will do the drawing at the end of this next week, post the winner and then ask you to email me your shipping info. I've already seen lots of other great reviews, what I've seen so far I really like, is very relevant and very practical.

Grandma's Quilts

Grandma's Quilts-
I was thinking recently about my materal Grandma's quilts. She made these during the Depression out of flour sacks and scrap fabric. What a beautiful job she did, all by hand. She created a work of art to keep her children warm and would probably be surprised it is hanging on my wall as a piece of art-

Vintage Kitchen Chicken Wire Window Display, Change in The Weather

Vintage Kitchen Chicken Wire Window Display-

Dave and I went up for the afternoon to Idaho City to our favorite little lunch place. We have tried for years to go into a little junk shop, but it was always closed. Not today! The photo above is the cute kitchen tools on chicken wire display on top of a vintage window frame. They stripped it down to bare wood, not my thing. I like chippy paint!!! I have been wanting to re-display my vintage green wood handled kitchen tools. I wanted something bigger to make more impact, rather than having them scattered all around the kitchen. Most of them are from the 1920's/30's. On the way home I found a similar sized old window for $7.00 at a Habitat-like store. We broke and disposed of the glass, and Dave got out out spare chicken wire. I'll be making the same thing, but will leave the chippy paint on the window. Watch the upcoming redo! Earlier today I found a like-new small bathroom wall storage cabinet for $5.00 at the Habitat Store, for my small bathroom. It needs a little something! So today was my day of great ideas! Ironically I didn't buy anything in the store I'd been waiting years to shop at, but at least I got a good display idea....

Change in The Weather-

I'm sitting here listening to 45+ mph winds, always a bit nerve-racking. I always worry about a huge branch coming down from our beloved backyard maple tree. So far, so good. I know the storm was coming, and we could see the clouds accumulating on our way home from the mountains. I LOVE the rain, and right now is blowing sideways across the street. Rain baby, bring it on! Chickens are all safley tucked in for the night, and I prepped the yard. I'll check my rain barrel in the morning :) It's starting to feel  bit like Fall with the cooler weather, shorter days, and storms starting to blow thru. I love the fall weather when it's a nice 65-75 degrees and sunny, then colder at night. Perfect outside weather for me... What's it doing where you live???

Flour Sack Dresses & Aprons, Rural Life in The 30's and 40's

Flour Sack Dresses & Aprons-
I've been reading up on more vintage style aprons. I knew that old flour sacks were saved before and after the Depression and used for clothing. It explained why some clothes were cut the way they were. They didn't buy yardage, so they had to piece things together. Great photos and info here Angelpig.org and vintage-style new patterns for sale Candleonthehill.

Child's dress

All matchy matchy :)

New Depression Era style from Countryliving

Feed the chickens!

Rural Life in The 30's and 40's-

What a great find here!!! The photographs are in amazing condition, really fascinating look at the past. Easy to read and broken up into sections- Freepages.history.rootsweb.ancestry.com

Cooking on a wood burning cook stove

Making something good, with junior under the table! Looks like a pressure canner on the right of the table

making clothes

growing food

Fire Season Has Started, Vintage Farm Fashion, Cute Retro Aprons!

This morning, taken with my cell camera

Fire Season Has Started-

Sadly I knew this was coming. Every year we have forest fires, but it varies in the severity. This winter was pretty dry, never good for fire season. I hope for a really heavy snow pack every year. I noticed smoke last night, and woke up to more. The top photos was taken down the street towards our foothills, which you can barely see. There are fires in Oregon, with smoke drifting here too. Quite a few are now burning in the local Boise National Forest. I hope they get contained quickly. Droughts make for a very tough summer of fire fighting...

from Idahostatesman

Farm dresses from The Country Farm Home

Vintage Farm Fashion-

I stumbled on to this great site Vintage Farm Fashion  I grew up with a Grandma who wore house dresses and/or aprons constantly. Not the frilly retro 50's/60's ones you see now, but the real thing- longer, simple, for actual cooking, baking and wiping of hands. Most were homemade sewn. Great stuff on that site! Another nice photo of some vintage aprons below. It gets me itching to get some patterns and sew some! Very similar to what my Grandma wore...

Cute Retro Aprons!-

And now for something modern! I went to a little farmer's market out in Eagle, not too far from Boise. I found this cute little stand that sells aprons! They have great designs! Their website is here Apronsbybella  Now if they sold some 1920-30's style I might buy one :)

She's got her apron on too!

Inspiring Depression Era Book- "We Had Everything But Money"

Inspiring Depression Era Book-

I stumbled on to this book,  We Had Everything But Money so I might order it! Here's a little snippet from the book:

 One Sunday we wanted to take our new baby to see her grandma, but we didn't have the 25¢ needed to buy a gallon of gas.

We did have hens, though, and 11 eggs. At that time, eggs sold for 25¢ a dozen. So we all got dressed up, and then we sat and waited for one of the hens to lay an egg! Finally one of then cackled, my husband put that egg with the 11 others, we took them to the store and exchanged them for a gallon of gas. Off we went to see Grandma!
How great is that!

Inspiring Depression Era Stories & Where We Are

Photo Taken Between 1935/1942 via the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information 

More Photos Here

Inspiring Depression Era Stories & Where We Are-

Today I read Ohiofarmgirls blog profiling Ohio's Great Depression Story Project What a wonderful project that state did! While I haven't gotten thru all of them, there are some that really stood on for me. Many brought tears to my eyes and reminded me of my Mom's stories of the Depression in rural Nebraska- drinking coffee a child, since there was little milk. Not being able to eat chicken or eggs as an adult, since they raised their own and that's almost all they ate meat-wise. Walking two miles to school in the winter with frostbite, having their hands shoved under the cold water spigot in the one room school house, and hearing their knuckles crack as they thawed. Being the youngest and rarely having anything new, including clothes. There were good stories too- of her Dad bartering his mechanic's services for food they couldn't grow or afford. My Mom said Grandma raised chickens, had a very large garden, canned, baked, sewed, knitted and made quilts. All that NORMAL STUFF. It's sad that I never knew her, since she died when I was a baby. I bought a Rhode Island Red chick (one of my first) as a little tribute to her since she has some back then. She sounded like quite a woman! She always looked old in her photos, even when she was younger. That kind of life would surley do that to you, raising four girls in tough times.

It really put things into perspective about where we are now- how spoiled and self-centered many of us are in America. Many families survived only due to the ongoing help of family and friends, and ingenuity too! Many in this country simply have no interest in learning those skills. That's sad...

I listed these by category-



CLOTHING- "I was in the third grade when the Depression came. I remember it well. There were nine of us. I had no shoes, so my dad made a pair out of cardboard and glued it together. When we ran out of glue and had no money to buy more, we used rubber bands and a paste made with flour and water. When it rained, I was soaked. I had no umbrella, no rubbers and no raincoat, and stayed in school the whole day in wet clothes until I went home." - Gladys Saba Wright, age 89, Richmond Heights

"I remember that my mother took down the white cotton curtains from the back windows of our house in order to make blouses for our school uniforms. She did not have enough spare cash to spend on either the blouses or the material to make them." - Geraldine Stevens, age 85, Worthington

"Our family had a mantra, which was: 'Use it up, wear it out; Make it do, or do without.' We did this with everything. My mother and grandmother were seamstresses, and my mother made nearly all of my clothes, including suits and coats, throughout my college years. My after-school play clothes were frequently made from feed sacks, the patterned, cotton bags that contained the chicken feed my grandparents fed to their chickens. The cloth was durable, quite colorful and survived many washings. I never had to worry that I would find someone else wearing the same clothes I had! My grandmother went a bit farther. Ladies' clothes in those days had long, full skirts (no such things as slacks or pants for women). Once a dress was worn out, the still-good material would be made into a blouse. When the blouse was no longer wearable, it became an apron. When the apron finally was not usable, what was left became a dust rag. My great aunt and many of the women in the small town where they all lived were quilters, and every scrap of material left from the original garment was hand sewed into beautiful patchwork quilts, then quilted during the evening hours when the work of the day had been finished. These, of course, were our winter blankets." - Mary Lou Pollak, age 78, Fairview Park

Anyone know what breed these are???     

FOOD- "My earliest memories of the Great Depression go back to people coming to our door, selling big red delicious apples for five cents each. My father was a minister and five cents was hard to come by. Once in a great while, there would be a spare five cents to purchase one of those delectable apples. It was carefully cut into five pieces and distributed. As a seven-year-old, I wondered if the time would come when I could have a whole apple to myself." - Elinor M. Brown, age 85, Napoleon

"When my husband was about eight or nine years old, his mother sent him to the store to get some soup beans to cook for their supper. He had to walk down a hill that was a little over a mile long. On his way home, the bag in which the beans were broke and the beans spilled onto the ground. When he got home and told his mother what happened, she gave him another container and told him to go back and pick up the beans, so he went back and picked up every bean. Another time, he sat down at the table to eat breakfast and his mother said to him 'I don't know what you are going to eat because we only have some homemade bread and milk.' So she broke up some bread in a bowl with some milk, and that was his breakfast." - Irene Burkhart, about her husband, Lawrence, age 86, Shadyside

"On a normal weekday, they would eat vegetable soup that included pretty much whatever they could scrounge up from the leftover food. They grew their own garden in their back yard, full of green beans, carrots, peas, sweet potatoes and regular potatoes. If they were lucky, they would eat chicken as a specialty on Sundays. Their family owned their own chickens and rabbits. The local grocery would call Grandma's house when the meat came in; that way they could get to the store before it was all gone. Everyone used stamps as the form of money, due to the fact that food and gas were rationed. These stamps bought most of their food for the month. They never went out to eat. Every night, when the boys arrived back home, they would eat with each other at the dinner table." - Meg Denman, sophomore at Madison Comprehensive High School, about her grandmother, Marcella Denman, age 92, Mansfield

"Dad had built a Fruit Cellar in our basement and it was all concrete. This is where the jelly and canned goods were stored. There was always a large sack of flour and a bucket of lard, and my mother would make wonderful bread and rolls, and pies from the apple orchard and the berries we picked. Her pies would have won prizes. Because of my parents ingenuity I don't recall going hungry. Mother was a great cook, and what ever she made was delicious. Bacon was bought in a slab that you would slice off. Somehow, we always had real butter, but it was about 19 cents a pound. Mother made very good salad dressing with a bit of bacon grease, vinegar and a dash of sugar and salt in a skillet. This was poured over leaf lettuce from the garden or dandelions. Lots of people came to our home and ask for apples from our orchard. Mom would always give them some." - Martha Rosella McCabe, age 88, Saint Clairsville

"Mom canned as many things as she could, such as tomatoes, green beans and fruits of various kinds. But the mainstay of our diet during the lean years was a combination of dried beans, cornbread, onions and potatoes of one kind or another. Mom would cut dandelion greens for some added nutrition and cook them in bacon fat with a little vinegar on them." - Wanda Stubbart, age 78, Columbus, Vic Thomas, age 83, Middletown and Kathleen Lambert, age 80, Middletown

   


RECREATION- "Toys were at a premium. We used to find a bushel basket, knock the bottom out of it, nail it up on some garage and that was our basketball net. To play football, we could not afford equipment, so we just played without it." - Raymond J. Mock, age 85, Centerville

"A sled was a sheet of cardboard and McKinley Monument was the best hill. The park to play in was Water Works Park. In the summer, it was Myers Lake Park for the grocery store picnic. Ice cream from Islays was an extra treat once or twice a year in the summer - my Grandmother always bought. The ice man gave us all chunks of ice from his truck. We also had a milk man and a bread man, when we could afford them. We took rides in the car on Sunday afternoon and walked to church every Sunday morning. Watching movies a couple times a year at Dueber Theater was an extra special treat. We played, kick the can, hide and seek, tag, hop scotch, red rover, jump rope, etc. There were a lot of fun times, as everybody shared the same hard times. We kids really didn't know we were poor." - Doris Portmann, age 76, Navarre

"Dad made us some toys and we would spend time at night before bed time playing games. Mom would sit by the kerosene lamp and read letters or stories out of a book for us. They loved us so much. At bed time, she would get bricks out of the oven on cold nights and wrap them in towels and put them in our beds to warm up the bed and keep us warm. There was no heat in our bedroom or insulation in the ceiling, walls or floor, so it got very cold." - Carl Reed, age 76, Malvern

"We entertained ourselves, playing board games, outdoor hide-and-seek type of games, roller skating as fast as we could around the block or listening to radio serials such as 'Don Winslow of the Navy' or 'Jack Armstrong.' We read a lot of books from the library. We learned about the outside world from LIFE magazine, a large glossy format that was a veritable history of memorable photographs. The swimming pool season ticket was $2. Going to a movie cost a dime. There was no air conditioning, but the Ohio Theater was comfortably 'air cooled' with fans blowing across blocks of ice. Broughton's Ice Cream had sodas and sundaes for 12 cents, while an ice cream cone was a nickel. S. S. Kresge was full of wondrous items you could buy for a nickel or dime, many of them now collector's items." - Esther G. Schwartz, age 77, Columbus

"There was an ice house on the corner of Nevada and Parker, and we kids would go there to get free chunks of ice. Sometimes in the summer, we went there and got chips of ice to make our own ice cream. We all took turns grinding it until done, but what a treat it was for us! Our toys were mostly handmade. My brothers made their scooters out of orange crates and wheels, when they could find them. We girls made our own dancing dolls out of hollyhocks. What imaginations! For adult entertainment, Friday nights was usually Pinochle night with the neighbors, at their house or ours. We never had a sitter, so when it was at the neighbors, my brothers watched me. We played games such as hide and seek with a candle lit to find each other - it's a wonder we never started any fires! Also, my brothers made a basketball net over their bedroom door from a box and, having no ball, they used my favorite muff - I hated that!" - Mary Johnson Shank, age 77, Toledo                      
                                                 

Anyone know what breed these are???