those are great reminiscences! Thank you both for sharing them.
I feel sorry for kids today, first they are stuck inside most of the time, and are constantly supervised. And then any games or entertainment they have are completely planned for them. As in, they just pop in the video game or turn on the TV and just set there. They aren’t required or even allowed to use their imagination, to expand their horizons and learn what they are capable of. Nor do they get physically fit!
When things fall apart, I believe the worst part will be that the younger generation will be like deer in the headlights. They will just be stunned, have no clue what happened, and even less clue how to deal with it. They will just sit and wait for the FEMA trucks that never show up.
I’m planting my garden now, and I’m pretty overwhelmed thinking of all the work I have set out for myself - yet again! Give me another five years and this will become even harder. Physically I mean. If I had to depend on this garden just to survive, it will be scary going. My husband and I will definitely need some young people, healthy and energetic, to help out. The problem is, where would we find them?
Good post and you make a very good point that got me thinking.
Back in the day the kids in my family and most of the other kids we knew had some direct connection with some of the food we ate.
Most kids (and adults) today have no connection with their food, other than picking it off a store shelf.
Of course, that's a basic difference between city life versus rural and small town life and more people live in cities today.
It seems that in past generations more people hunted and fished and almost everyone had family gardens where the kids helped.
And families went picking strawberries, blackberries, mulberries, cherries, apples, pears and other fruits.
Or they were purchased in bulk from the farm.
As kids we loved to go berry picking and stuffed ourselves while picking.
We knew that the fruits and berries we helped pick would end up on the table as good stuff to eat all through the winter.
Moms put us to work, boys and girls alike, prepping the produce - husking corn and shelling peas and beans to can.
And many of us learned to can produce by helping our moms as kids.
I'm not saying we were always eager to do the work or that we always did a good job.
But we were motivated to some extent by knowing our work would be paid back by having good things to eat through the year.
I remember as a kid helping mom stack the canned produce on the shelves in the basement and how the sight of those shelves full of canned vegetables
and preserved jams and jellies that we had helped with was comforting and rewarding.
If there is no garden or orchard on your home site, have any tried their local ‘Pick Your Own’? This is a great opportunity to pack the family in the car and travel to a garden, getting to know the food on your table.
http://www.pickyourown.org/
Young people - how to find them to help you in the garden.
A flyer on the BB perhaps:
- Church
- YMCA
- School
Payment: filling their heart with goodness and generosity, money, or a basket, sack of the fruits of your land.
Not only where would you find them-could you afford to pay them. My great grandchildren are now in their teens and recently one great granddaughter told me she is paid ten dollars an hour for baby sitting!!! Good grief!!! Earlier this spring, I mentioned trying to find a teen to help clean up debris along the river. This debris seems to float down river every storm and lodge its self on our banks where we love to sit but I guess the cost would be prohibitive. It will probably get removed a little at a time as we are able.
As a teenager, I picked strawberries for two cents a quart and felt rich if I managed to pick 25 quarts!!!
Canning days were hectic and messy at our house. How I hated helping can succotash. Shelling the shell beans, cutting corn from the cob, packing it in jars and filling the large wash boiler on the stove and having a hot fire to process the jars for hours on end and then cleaning up the mess in the kitchen. Making fruit cocktail was a similar messy, sticky job. Canning green beans, tomatoes and beets were not so bad, but the worse thing was being inside. All my life, I have been an outdoor lover and generally hate cooking and housework.
I tried to ping Iron Munroe to this post also, but alas, I must be doing something wrong as it said there was no such person.
bttt