Self-Sufficiency Tips from the Great Depression | What My Grandparents Raised

hey guys so today I want to share with you some tips on self-sufficiency and things that we can learn from the Great Depression now this might sound a little bit funny coming from me but my dad was actually raised through the Great Depression and really their way of life didn't change much after the Great Depression ended they had to be self-sufficient and pretty much if they didn't raise it themselves on most things then they simply wouldn't eat you know going to the store and buying things there was no unemployment back then there weren't a lot of the programs that we have now and life was definitely different but in my dad's words it was a hard life but it was a good life and so I'm gonna share a lot of the tips that I would have been raised with and that he practiced when I was growing up things that we practice here on the homestead and while you might not be able to do everything that's on this list most of us can do at least a few things and begin to put more into practice so the first step on my list and by the way if you want to hear this live interview that I did with my dad I tried to get him to come on video and he just he wasn't comfortable with that which is totally fine but if you want to hear the interview with him actually telling the stories and the live account from someone who lived through it I will have the link below and you can go on the website to the blog and you can actually listen into it or you can read the transcript it's really fun but I'm gonna kind of encapsulate and share a lot of things that we're doing here from those tips already on our homestead so first up behind me can you hear them they're pretty noisy this morning is chickens so having some type of livestock obviously it's gonna be really good and one of the best is chickens the reason for chickens is because you get some type of food for them almost every day now in the winter months we don't use a heat lamp we don't force our chickens to lay through the winter so I don't get a lot of eggs but I'm actually able to pretty much preserve the eggs I get during the glut time right now so that I still have eggs in the winter months when they're not laying and I don't have to buy any from the store but the reason I say chickens is the first type of livestock is because you're getting that daily source for most of the year of food from them in the form of protein and fat which is obviously in your egg and then if need be you kion butchers some of your flock if you actually mean that the you know the actual meat from the chicken though I don't do that with my laying hens we have our meat chickens for our meat birds but having that daily source of eggs and we can use that in so many other things I think is a really key thing so we actually used a chicken tractor so I pull this all around the field so they help to fertilize the field and they get fresh grass every day but I don't free-range because we have way too many predators and it'll wipe the flock out and now it's time to get my daily reward which is the eggs [Music] so here is my bounty so aside from the chickens for of course our bounty of eggs and then also as a meat source the other thing that my dad said was really essential for them and he came from a pretty big family there was quite a few kids of course he's second to the oldest so obviously the older he got the more kids they had but I was having a milk cow because if you've got a milk cow you obviously have milk but that's not just a milk I mean milk is great but it's kind of all the other things that you get when you have milk so you've got your butter you've got your cream hallelujah the cream and the butter of my favorite parts but then you can turn that into your yogurt and your sour cream and then of course all of your cheeses so oh my goodness we won't even list out all of the cheese's but obviously there's a time that you can make so we my husband actually gave me the okay and the go ahead we are making plans to get a milk cow now I have no idea how fast that's gonna happen we have to get a dairy cow we don't have a dairy cow we have beef cattle which having your own B source be it meat chickens or pigs or cattle is great because you really don't get a ton of fat off of chickens so if you have pigs which we are picking up our pigs in another week then when you butcher you get lard so that's great because we need fat sources and during the Great Depression they weren't going and buying their coconut oil like I do now or my avocado oil or even my butter from the store you pretty much had to raise it yourself or you weren't going to get any at least the way that my dad was raised and they grow up so they had the lard from the pigs and then of course from the cattle you get the tallow but you can use somewhat in cooking but usually that's more for soap making your largest really your your cooking fat that's the best and you can use in baking and does it have a strong flavor like you get with the tallow and the beef so there's that but I'm so excited about getting the dairy cow you guys I can't even hardly put it in two words and contain it so having livestock with fat sources of course in the eggs was definitely a must and a dairy cow was really big for them and then self-sufficiency we got to talk about the garden the garden was really what fed them the most through the winter months and pretty much all of us no matter where you live there's some type of food that you can be growing yourself even if it's on a patio even if it's in containers if it's just in a back porch a small portion of your yard well you might not be able to grow enough food to take you through an entire year which you can watch my garden tour and I show you everything that we grow I just did that spring garden tour that was just a week ago so make sure to link link to that so you can catch it but I'm out in our main vegetable garden right now and then I've got the high tunnel the other ones behind me but there's a lot that you can raise yourself but the crops that my dad and then used the most width and this is what really fed them through the winter months was their beans so right here are my little baby pull beans that just sprouted this past week and we're going to be trellising on this year on these panels really excited to try that method and you can see more about the construction and the size of that in that garden tour video but beans where one of their really big staple crops and the reason for that is because here in the Pacific Northwest where it might be migrated from North Carolina when my dad was little and raised their family beans grow really well in this cool and wet climate we don't typically have summers that are super hot for a very long extended period of time so the beans will flower and set fruit all summer long which means you're getting your beans so both a green bean and then they also did a shell bean and one of the reasons is during great depression times and honestly when you're being self-sufficient you're not running to the store you're not having fresh vegetables year-round we do some winter growing here where I use microclimates and hoop houses so that I can grow things like lettuce and some those cool hardy things almost year-round but back then they didn't have greenhouse plastic right so let's let's be real weren't doing a lot of what we're even able to do now during these times back then they just simply didn't have the money to buy tow supplies or the supply system exists like they do now so they were not having fresh vegetables or fresh fruit except when it was in season and they could grow it themselves so during the spring in the summer and the fall months that was very variable as to obviously what was in season here having strawberries in the early part of summer and then you weren't gonna have them again until the next year unless you'd preserved them up so the expectancy during the Great Depression of what meals it looked like and what people were eating is very very different than it is today we're really spoilt and thinking we need to have specific fresh vegetables and fresh fruit and all of this stuff which is great from a you know a calorie and nutritional standpoint I get that but it's also a very realistic expectation and when you were going through the Great Depression or really hard times or wanting to live off of what you are able to produce on your land you're obviously most most climates are not going to be able to do that so the majority of what they ate was green beans that was their vegetable can't green beans that they put up for the winter months and then the shell beans and that could provide some protein as well as a lot of calories when it comes to vegetables so obviously there's the preserving the harvest and so my grandma did a ton of canning canning and dehydrating was the main way because they didn't have refrigeration and they didn't have freezers that they put up all of their food to take them through the winter months but then they also had to do that they didn't really buy a lot of feed so whatever they were feeding the livestock they were either growing grains themselves very little table scraps existed because they really didn't have a lot of access to eat and my grandma really cooked because they didn't have the means of refrigeration at least where they lived in the cabin they were growing up and there wasn't electricity so they didn't have a refrigerator and they didn't have you know a lot of the even the convenience things that we do so my grandma would buy in bulk cornmeal flour and sugar and salt and that was pretty much the majority of it and so she didn't even do a lot of bread baking because one that took a lot of extra time and when you providing for a family and you have all those farm animals and everything and you're relying on that for your survival she didn't even use the time to bake bread very often they did corn bread and biscuits because she can make up exactly enough biscuits that it would feed everybody at dinnertime or at breakfast I mean they were cooking all of their meals from scratch three squares a day there was really not much snacking that happened like we do now and the food was very basic so most the time it was beans with a side of either corn bread or biscuits as they shared very rarely was it bread a real treat was to do rice pudding which was something that my grandma did have to buy but most the time and this is another tip from the Great Depression people don't really have money but if you had you know your own livestock you had your eggs she had her dairy she had the butter I've got a lot of tomatoes that are growing in my high tunnel but if you had those types of things you could do bartering and so she would take and trade for things at the store she would give them fresh eggs they didn't necessarily have it and then they she could get some rice and so rice pudding was like a really special treat know how many of us today think that rice pudding is really something amazing and a special treat probably not a whole lot of us unless you just have a fondness for that particular food there was a lot of stews so hunting of course was one way and fishing so you could get fish from the river they lived near a river in a creek so there was fishing and then hunting when you're lucky enough to get venison and they had their beef cattle so they raised beef cattle the same as we do and that way if you didn't get lucky you know it's a scarce game year or whatever at least you had your cattle so you had your beef so they always had a type of meat but it was usually meat and they also raised pigs so there was pork but there was your meat which they did a lot of salt curing and when my dad was growing up there was actually three miles away there was a store that had refrigerated lockers and you could rent a part of that so they could keep some of their meat there but they didn't have means other than salt curing to keep it pork and canning which is why they did so much canning my grandma can most of things because of lack of refrigeration to make it last here in the Pacific Northwest our winters aren't typically cold enough to actually hang your meat like it is in some of the eastern states or the more northern states where they would butcher in the fall and then they had where they could you know or it would stay cold enough that actors like natural refrigeration we're too up and down here in the Pacific Northwest we do get some cold but a lot of it is well get cold and then we'll warm up we'll get cold and then world we're up so it's just not really consistent for us to store our meat that way which is why they used those lockers but the majority of their meals was some type of meat and then it was a bean like usually some of the the green beans or the shelled beans and then a cornbread and or a biscuit and a lot of times it was like soups and stews because you can really stretch plus you've got the broth which hopes to fill you up but you can really stretch our Auden and vegetables and smaller amounts of meat if you're doing a superest do to feed a large amount of people and so they had a lot of soup beans and a lot of cornbread and it was a lot of times the same food day in and day out so pickiness really wasn't gonna get you very far now as far as gardening you do have options shared this tunnel in my last video but I know a lot of people like why don't have the space and I really need to grow and of course they didn't have these towers or a lot of containers like this they're planted during the Great Depression but this can be a great way to grow a lot of food if you don't have a lot of in-ground space and you're trying to use just the space that you have in a patio or a deck because you can go five tiers high with a vertical planter like this and of course you can see I have got my herbs in here this is holy basil and then I've got my strawberries which look at those you guys whoa first strawberries I'm super excited coming on quick if you're interested in this I have a link I'm an affiliate for them and you can get a coupon code to get that off and you can check out those and I'll put that in the video description below so they sure during the Great Depression the biggest forms of food preservation that they used was canning and dehydration at least for my family so one of the things is they would hand up I have venison here venison and beef and the great thing is is it makes this natural broth I do a raw pack which is totally safe to do when pressure canning only but you cube the meat you put it in raw you do not liquid and to you pressure can up for the specified amount of time for your altitude and that the food insight this is in this case it's venison and we pretty much anytime we get venison except for the back strap I can all of my venison I don't even put it into the freezer we just can it up the great thing is is it makes this wonderful broth and so I can just dump this into a pan heat it up add a little bit of thickener at the time to make a quick gravy because you don't want to can with flour or cornstarch or those other thickeners they're not approved for canning it can cause safety issues and then just make a quick side of biscuits and throw in a jar not in the same pan but heat up a different pan or pot of green beans and we have a full meal there so that is really great on busy nights when you're busy and you still want home cooked but this was also those are the majority of the meals that my in fact my dad's favorite things still to this day is candy fork and venison he loves the texture and the flavor it's very tender so that's a great thing one of the other things that my grandma used is of course during the Great Depression and even further back she would can a lot of their fruit into jams and jellies and usually jam because to do jelly you have to extract the juice from the fruit and that's another step and more work and so I rarely make jelly most of the time I'm doing jams this is strawberry jam and during the Great Depression and actually for my grandma's entire life you don't use store-bought pectin store-bought pectin wasn't something that was readily available and if it was available was an expense that they just didn't have the money to spend on it so all of the ways that my grandma can't her jams and I do as well is without store-bought pectin so strawberry and apples those are Biggie's blackberries around here and blueberries and so if they would kion up their jam no and if you want the recipes on how to still safely can you don't have to have it's not a safety issue when you're using pectin it just helps to get it to set but if you want to get the recipes that only use fruit and are low sugar they do have some sugar it's really hard to get to a gelling point if you don't use any sugar so I do use some sugar but it's a lot lower when using pectin sources and not store-bought you don't have to use as much sugar in order to reach that gelling point which is fabulous I've got this particular low sugar north so ripe pectin strawberry jam recipe I'll link to it below and it got a lot of other ones now the other form that they use besides canning was dehydrating and of course my grandma didn't have a electric dehydrator like a lot of us do in our homes now and so she wouldn't have to spread things out on screens or out on porches and sunny hot areas and be able to get them to dry but this is dehydrated blueberries from our blueberry plants and so I do do some dehydrating after I've canned up my fruits I like to do a lot of other canning feel like here I've got so this is our jump pears and I do the same thing with peaches and this is oh my goodness guys pears are one of my absolute favorites I might like them even more than apples but I am a happy camper just to sit and eat pears like that's not I do a really really light syrup I don't do just water because a small amount of sugar is going to help preserve the color and it just keeps them looking better on the shelf but I use a very small tiny amount and if you want to learn more about canning I have got a free pressure canning series so if you're looking to do vegetables and meats you definitely want to go through that it's four part video series I'll link to it below I also have a full canning course that has over 65 of the recipes that I use to can at over 400 jars of food a year for increasing that this year doing a lot more pickling and tomatoes and all of the wonderful ways that we can safely can up our food and I also have a home fruit candy course which shows you how to do fruit to jar without using those store-bought pectin and doing low sugar from things like your pie filling so I have got some blackberry pie filling right here to your fruit butters to your jams to your jellies and of course just canning your fruit half-door hole where it's just the fruit the dark as well as syrup I've got some blueberry syrup down here a small amount left from last year so really looking forward to all of the harvest coming on to replenish our shelves one of the other things that my dad talked about during the Great Depression is entertainment so they didn't have money for entertainment there were movies of course and stuff back there but they didn't have the money for gas and the travel or to buy the entertainment and they didn't have electricity but they had cards a few board games and the radio so they loved to listen to the radio and the radio shows and it would all be really really quiet and listen to the shows when they came on and those were pretty much the only forms of entertainment that they had other than just playing you know with one another when you had a large family so if listening to things like the radio definitely check out the pioneering today podcast and specifically the episode where I actually interview my dad and you can hear more about his life account of growing up and going through the Great Depression and what that was like including outhouse and no indoor plumbing and different ways that they that they used to do like mock refrigeration without having a refrigerator for some of the different foods so I highly encourage you to check out that I would love to help you get started with your canning as well and beneath the video is the links to all the different things that I talked about including my biscuit recipe because I don't know about you but after listing out and walking through all of this I am suddenly very very hungry and ready to go whip up some food [Music]

Channel: Melissa K. Norris - Modern Homesteading

Views: 854,296

Rating: 4.934967 out of 5

Keywords: great depression food, great depression cooking, great depression meals, great depression survival tips, food security, self sufficiency, home grown veg, great depression era food, food during the great depression

Id: eDZYnnbPuYg

Length: 20min 23sec (1223 seconds)

Published: Wed May 27 2020