You just described my grandmother who I lived with til I was about 12. She always had a huge garden and canned everything. I spent hours and hours shucking corn etc. getting it ready for her. Every spare scrap of material was turned into quilts. All buttons and zippers were ripped off old clothing and saved. Absolutely nothing was discarded.
“You just described my grandmother who I lived with til I was about 12.”
I am old enough to remember not only my grandparents living that way, but MY MOTHER and FATHER living that way so that means I grew up that way. We did have electricity and the grandparents did not. A black woman came to our house once a week and she and my mother washed clothes in a big kettle in the back yard and my mom did make the soap. When electric washers came out, we got one but I don’t know how long they had been available before we had one. There were no dryers at that time.
My mother canned everything so that was most of the food we had in the winter. My father killed two pigs every fall and had a meat smoke house. We lived like that until years later, we bought bread and milk and Crisco at the grocery store. Until Crisco, everything at our house was fried in bacon grease.
There was no government help of any kind in those days and you grew your food and had animals or you didn’t have any unless you had money but there wasn’t much of a selection in stores then and not many stores. There were “poor farms” for poor people to live where they had gardens to till and grow food. There was a poor farm maybe 15 miles or less from our house. Adults would make fun about the poor farm, such as, “I might have to go to the poor farm!” And, everyone would laugh. There were homeless people who would come by the house and mother would give them food.
I remember when margarine came out and one had to crush a yellow coloring in the bag and squish it through the margarine to make it the color of butter.
My generation is dying out and soon there won’t be any left who remember when you had to grow your food instead of run to the grocery.
It was my generation who, when we left home, were able to move from that early kind of life to the grocery store. I am 80.