Thread: Buy Feed Corn: They’re about to stop making it…’

Well, I got my currants home and the one I thought was a red lake was another black, but no problem. I can always tuck a red lake somewhere, or else live with all black currents, plus one is a jostaberry. And I planted three grapes, valiant, concord, and catawba. I have my doubts about catawba here, but at the sale price it was worth a try. They were all well established in pots, and came very cheap this time of year.

I live on the high plains east of Denver. (zone 5 they say) and I also own a house up in the mountains (zone 4). But the zones don't tell the whole story. In the Great Basin people can have peach and apricot trees, but here they grow fine, it's just the erratic, unpredicable frosts, freezes, droughts, tornados, etc. that affect fruiting and make every growing season a turn of the roulette wheel. Not much does well reliably and it all needs to be watered like crazy at least for a bit.

One of my dreams is to grow the old Wolf River apple. Also I like the other heirloom apples and pears, but fire blight is endemic around here. Still, some apple trees in my neighborhood have held their own.

I have an impact grain mill, and bread from freshly ground grain tastes different. I've discovered the secret of making whole grain bread rise like white bread without adding white flour (which to me defeats the purpose). It involves 1-2 CUPS (you read that right) of pure wheat gluten to start building the dough.

I moved in mid summer, so I didn't get much of a garden in, but I've vowed that next year will be different.

Oh, I love to talk about gardening -

I don't know what has kept the prices up in Texas. They have been up for over a year now - more like a year and a half. All fresh veggies have been high and the quality is very low. Of course, if you have raised your own food, all the store quality is low. It is a mystery to me and no one has been able to explain it.

As I said, they can't say it's cause the farmers don't have all the illegals they want - because they do. Texas used to raise a lot of fruits an veggies in the Rio Grande Valley and of course, we are close enough to Mexico, we should be able to have imported veggies pretty cheap - but it isn't.

And don't even talk about Texas citrus (the best in the world). It has been hard to find for the last 2 years. Usually, in season, there are trucks set up along the highway selling it - I haven't seen that in at least 2 years.

It's hot and dry here, we are watering the okra and peas.

We have never planted much in the fall except turnips, and greens. This year we are going to try for green beans. They only take about 2 months and we have that much time - usually. Actually in this part of Texas, normally, there is only about 2 months that you couldn't be growing something - if you could cover it for those unusual times.

We have never grown onions from seeds, that may be something we try. We don't have a greenhouse, a hope of mine, but we are going to try some hotbeds. The people did that a lot when I was growing up. They started their own cabbage, onion, tomato, peppers, etc.

Oh, I would really like to have a grain mill - I do grind a little with my VitaMix blender, but I am slow at that.

We used to have our corn ground into cornmeal every year - and there is a world of difference in the taste.

I wouldn't mind if the farmers hired seasonal laborers from Mexico if they were really, really needed. What I mind is they don't want to do the paperwork and take the responsibility for them. They want the rest of us to subsidize and care for those workers - and their families - all year long.

Around here, illegals abound both in the country and the city. We know that many of them are illegal because they demonstrate and say so proudly. Yet, produce prices are high. I went to a farmer's market yesterday and got wonderful red potatoes at 79 cents per pound. Put a dollar in front of that price, and that's close to what I just saw them for in a store.

Likewise, car parts - they started outsourcing the manufacture of them recently, I was reading, yet prices for pretty much any car component around here have doubled or tripled. Apparently the global economy sees Americans as cash cows, and they will just milk us till it's all gone, never mind tomorrow.

Now on to a happy topic: heirloom vegetables. I want to learn how to save seed. My favorites: laxton's progres #9 green pea, Italian green beans, and I want to try growing the Brandywine tomato. Modern corn is too sweet for me, I want to grow an older, open polinated corn for fritters.

Anybody here make soap? I used to make it out of coconut oil. I'd add glycerine and superfat it with some nice oil. It was gentle on the skin and I knew every ingredient that had gone into it - everything but the lye was food grade.

Oh, you are talking my language - although I don't understand about open-pollinated, etc.

I do intend to order some heirloom seeds from Baker, I think that's the name, and start saving my own seeds.

My kids laugh at me, but on my son's place in NE Texas, I protect the polk salet, and lamb's quarter. I make them mow around it. Those things are dissappearing from the area and they are both very good food sources - and completely free. People have the idea they have to clear their fence rows, and there are so many 'improved' pastures, they spray with herbicides that get a lot of the natural plants.

I am going to try sassafrass jelly this fall.

Yes, I have made soap, not fine soap - just plain old lye soap with usually drippings or when we had calf butchered, I always made them save the tallow and rendered it.

My Mom used to make all kinds of soap - when I was younger, it was srictly utilitiarian soap - in later years, she began making wonderful finer soaps. The doctor in town used to buy my Mon's lie soap and his family used it for shampoo. He said it kept down dandruff and was better for your hair than shampoo.

If you like discussing gardening - check out the site 'Homesteading Today' - lots of gardenings and other interesting people on there.

Oh, boy, have gotten off the subject of illegal immigration - although I think the more self sufficient we make ourselves, the better we will fare while we are battling this.

You are right about us being better off through more self-sufficiency, because the entire concept of the global marketplace is that we rich Americans will stop making and doing things for ourselves and just buy from other countries. And now we can all see where that has led. Now that the dollar is falling against other currencies, the economic premise of globalism is changing, and we will start to see all this foreign stuff not be such a bargain (already happening with some things) and will need to take back a lot of what we were encouraged to give up.

How Americans used to live and cope with life, before cheap labor and cheap foreign goods flooded us.

Rich memories grew on farm
Author recounts the hard work, thrift, social customs and simple joys of growing up during the Depression

By MIKE KILEN
REGISTER STAFF WRITER


August 12, 2007
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Books about growing up on an Iowa farm when cows were hand-milked are written so frequently one could stack them head-high in a hay mow.

Often, these routine, nostalgic nuggets become self-published books written for the family.

Mildred Kalish, 85, began writing one with similar goals.

What happened next has been unbelievable, Kalish said.

In June, her book "Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Depression" ($22, Bantam) earned a glowing cover piece in the New York Times Book Review, the most coveted spot in publishing.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of "Eat, Pray, Love," wrote a review that described Kalish's entertaining stories of life on the farm near Garrison, just up the road from Cedar Rapids.

She wrote: "If all that 'Little Heathens' offered, then, were more such hard-times homilies, this would not be much of a book.

"But this memoir is richer than that, filled with fervency, urgency and one amazing twist, which surprised me to the point of a delighted, audible gasp: Mildred Armstrong Kalish absolutely loved her childhood."

Kalish and her editor literally cried with joy when they read it.

Radio show interviews, e-mails from adoring readers and book-signing appearances, including three in eastern Iowa in September, have filled her days since, Kalish said from home in a continuous-care community in Cupertino, Calif.

"I enjoy the e-mails the most," she said. "Here is one from a little old lady, like me. She wrote that there are only two books she has read twice. One is 'Little Heathens' and the other is the Bible."

Kalish gives out a hearty laugh. A grandmother of modest farm stock, it carries not a whiff of self-promotion.

"It's a nostalgia thing," she continued. "A man sent me a story about his mother-in-law. She had been out in the garden on a Sunday morning, sitting in a cart for elderly people, when the cart tipped over and she couldn't get up.

"They found her hours later and asked her, 'What have you been doing?'

"Weeding the strawberries," she said.

"It is so of my generation."

Kalish began collecting childhood stories more than 15 years ago when her son moved to California and she was enlisted to walk her granddaughter to kindergarten every day. She passed the time telling her stories about growing up on an Iowa farm.

They were stories of simple things - tending the livestock and planting potatoes, training the raccoons that showed up in the barnyard, swimming in the flooded creeks, hard work and the feel of warm soil on her bare feet while picking nuts.

Soon her granddaughter was asking for more. "Grandma, tell me a farm story."

"And that," said Kalish, "was the working title."

She began writing the stories down with recipes and explanations of how to perform simple tasks any farm girl would know, such as how to fry a turtle and dress a wound with a spider web.

She wrote stories about extreme thrift, making orange marmalade with only one orange (the rest was filled in with carrots) and clever tricks to "extend the life of socks."

It was the Depression. She was living with grandparents, mother and siblings after her father had abandoned the family, as some did when they couldn't find jobs to support them.

When the oldest kid wore holes in the toe-end of his socks, the ends were cut off and sewn together for a younger child.

When the socks developed more holes, they were cut again and passed down to a smaller child.

Was the sock finished upon further disintegration?

"Not on your tintype!" which is what her grandmother would say before cutting off the ribbed ends and sewing them to sleeves of winter coats for extra warmth.

"Bringing back thrift as a virtue is high on my list of things I want," Kalish said in an interview. "There was so much of that in our lives.

"During the wintertime, my grandmother would sit at the sewing machine and cut up raggedy shirts and aprons and dresses into strips.

"She would sew the ends together and make them into balls. She sent them off and they would come back as a rug that we put on the floor."

The Iowa farm folks practiced recycling before environmentalism was a thought.

Of course, it was cast in the language of the day.

A wasteful farm wife was described this way: "She can throw out more in a teaspoon than she can bring in with a shovel."

Lazy children were not tolerated - with another saying:

"What you don't have in your head, you have in your heels."

In other words, if you forget something, say a book you need for school, you better start walking and get it yourself.

"So much of what we have lost we can bring back, including some of the value of hard work," said Kalish, who went on to become an English professor after moving from Iowa early in her career.

"Kids don't want to work anymore. They don't prize delayed gratification. They charge things. We saved the money.

"My brothers all put their earnings in a cigar box to buy a $500 Ford."



By today's standards, the hardscrabble life on a farm filled with chores by day and ice-cold bedrooms by night ("one-dog" or "two-dog" nights were designations for the number of family pets needed in bed to keep warm) would be miserable.

Kalish thought of them as the time of her life. They shaped her decades thereafter.

She became a teacher and gourmet cook, born of the farm kitchen and recipes for homemade marshmallows, wilted lettuce and succotash.

The children, it seems, were fueled by the sweetest corn and strawberries on the planet and seasoned with saved bacon fat, cooked into just about anything.

Kalish may lecture a tad in an interview but not much in the book.

She simply wanted to pass on information to a new generation on how to do things yourself.

To this day, her kids often call, neck-deep in a recipe.

"'I made your pie crust, but how do I get it into the pie pan?' they ask.

She replies: "You roll it gently onto the pin and ..."

Kids also learned how to survive on their own when childhood was to "be ignored for the most part and remedied as quickly as possible."

Vinegar, salt, peroxide and baking soda became the medicine cabinet of the day, and a wild romp in a nearby flooded creek was simply a day of childhood delight, not a reason to call protective services for child neglect.

"We've lost the ability of kids to experiment and learn on their own," Kalish said. "You just can't do that anymore. It's just not safe.

"The skill of entertaining oneself needs to be brought back."

The Iowa farm kid of the day lived among the animals, both wild and domesticated. They deeply cared about bugs and birds and barnyard critters.

"You would walk out and these were all your friends. Here is the snapping bug and the squirrel. You knew the silver maples and the butternuts. You were walking in a friendly place," she said.

"One thing you couldn't afford was to be sentimental. That chicken you hatched and grew and watched lay eggs, you may need for Sunday dinner when the minister was coming. So you grab it, chop off its head and eat it."



Kalish said her upbringing led to an unsentimental approach for the book. She mentions her father's disappearance only briefly, when it would have been ripe material for entire chapters in a modern memoir.

"I chose to do that because he was never a part of my life," she said. "It was a totally closed subject in our house; it was strictly forbidden. Iowans don't like unpleasant subjects."

She has discussed it with her husband, Harry, and sons, Doug and Greg.

"I tried to keep the book not about me but about the background. How we talked, the Methodist hymns. The things we were required to do and our behavior. So it's not my story. It's the story of the time."

"Little Heathens" may not be sentimental, but it doesn't lack eloquent sentiment.

Kalish's rich descriptions of burying her nose in the fur of a dog that has been napping in the sun, the tingling sensation of running naked as jaybirds while hosing off after a hard summer day's work, the feel of the warm earth on her feet and the smell of climbing into bedsheets dried by fresh Iowa air don't feel sentimental because they're not overwritten.

The book catches you unaware, with a yearning for such simple pleasures, enjoyed with family.

Picnics, picking flowers and nuts, and tending graves in the family burial ground in Yankee Grove are still with Kalish as she drifts off to sleep every night.

Those long-gone relatives - she is the last of her immediate family alive after an aunt died in 2005 - had a tough life. The cemetery is filled with babies.

But the pleasure of the shade from the big elm tree in the cemetery and the nuts from the hazel bushes are what she remembers now.

Kalish returned to Garrison in 1988, bringing her husband. They found the elm standing and the bushes producing.

She will return in September with her grown children and grandchildren for the bookstore appearances. She will take them to the cemetery.

Like many of the old friends and relatives of her days during the Depression, she fears the hazel bushes are gone.

"It haunts me a little," she said.

Readers, too.

"I had a grown man come up to me at a reading with tears in his eyes," she said.

This is what he said:

"I've never heard anyone describe hay the way you did."

Reporter Mike Kilen can be reached at (515) 284-8361 or mkilen@dmreg.com


http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/p ... 301&lead=1

Ah, yes, my Mother always used everything 3 ways before it became a dishrag or was put on the rag mop. I have got to find one of those.

Also one of my Granny's sayings was 'She can throw more out the back door than her husband can bring in the front door.' I know a lot of people that way today -

Just go garage saling and see junk and geegaws that people have for sale and realize how much they paid for this trash and how little use or worth it is now.

I have walked up to garage sales and realized there must be $10K worth of pure junk out there on tables - that might bring back $50. Why? It beats me.

We raised our kids in the country and we raised almost everything we ate. WE all ate anything we wanted and as much and not an ounce of fat on any of us. Since we left the farm, we are all 'battling the bulge'.

My kids used to enjoy sitting down at a holiday table and one would always say, 'WE raised everything on this table'.

My daughter lives in NYC - it is a dream she has had since she was 10. Much of the time, she loves the city, but lately she has been saying she didn't realize how attached she was to the earth. She said sometimes I just have to have the feel of my feet in the dirt and picking my own food.

And, in spite of us paving over so much, much of the land is still there to be loved. My daughter went to college in central Kansas and we took the youngest son out there to see her once. Leaving Denver, the hip-hop station finally faded for good around Box Elder creek. He is very urban, and was antsy in the country. "Bumpkin town" was what he called Lindsborg. My daugher was driving us to a restaurant in Salina, along a back country road, trying to explain to him what a grange was, and then, 'look, see what's growing in that field? That's milo." and his only reaction was, "Wow, I'd love to get mom's bronco and go tearing through that!" It's a good thing America's food supply is so far from our urban youth.

Unfortunately, in Texas, a lot of land is not only being paved over, it is being dug up and destroyed in the search for coal. That bothers me, and yes, the attitude of the young man about the field is so telling and so frightening.

Fortunately he's matured since then. Here in the city he got in trouble with the law and had a deferred felony charge hanging over him for about three years, but he has satisfied the law and the charge was finally dismissed. He will graduate with an engineering degree and has stayed out of trouble since. But for a while there he was a little gangsta, at least insofar as his outlook on life. His family banded together and pulled him back from that precipice and now he's a decent young man.