I have decided to make this Peek Week as I have done off and on here on my blog a few times through the years. I do a post each day for week to get caught up on things.
Since this is Tuesday (when making this post) here in the U.S., I will start off with Monday and Tuesday today.
I have been away for awhile because frankly, I have lost my motivation to post anything with the constant upsets in our country. Charles and I have had to stay to ourselves to sort through our feelings of what is going on.
I have been pouring myself into gardening, Charles has been helping me with all the changes to make gardening easier due to our age. This seems to be an important thing we can do to make a difference. It has been very difficult to find the right words, but now I have given myself time to get on with what my blog is all about.
I will use Peek Week Monday and Tuesday to kick this off doing a post each day and end up on Monday next week.
If you are new to my blog, my husband Charles and I study history and we have done many history studies by living for a year like they did during the year that we are studying. We have mostly covered 1930 and 1940s.
I also blog on everyday things we are doing and share stories from the good old days. We are parents, grandparents and great grand parents. Our youngest great grand is three months old and growing so very fast as it seems they all do.
Charles and I lived what we call a better time because we miss how things were when we were younger to now in this extremely confusing time. We are both thankful that we are old enough to have lived in the time that we did and to have our grandparents and great grandparents in our life that were born before 1900.
We have mostly focused on the 1940s, I have tried twice to do the 1930s studies but each time something has interfered with the study and we have to stop the study. I really was looking forward to learning more about the great depression era and that small part of that study is still here on my blog. The last time I tried was the beginning of 2023.
To study these years of the great depression and world war 2, we have to dip far back in time somewhere around 1850's to understand our generations and what they have lived through to be adults in the 1930's.
I am concerned about doing a regular study of the 1930s the same way we have done the 1940s studies since something bad has happened the previous two tries, so I am going to try a different way of going about this. Charles says that maybe the third time is the charm to do a great depression era study. Possibly we were supposed to wait until now, Charles believes that when we are delayed with something there is a reason. Sometimes in traffic, when we get delayed he will say this is a patience thing and that maybe it could be preventing us from being in an accident further down the road.
So maybe we were supposed to wait until now, in my last post I talked about if we cannot fix the new problems of today then we need to find a new old way.
I have given this a lot of thought as well.
For us to understand how our generations before us made it through this difficult time in the 1930s. The Great Depression was truly a very hard time for a great number of people. However many of the rich became richer because they bought up many of the homes and some businesses that people had to walk away from.
While people were literally starving, down to tattered clothing, and homeless, others were getting richer. Many families had to move in with each other and there were several generations living in the same house.
Some that were not rich pulled through because they lived on a farm and some of my relatives said that they did not know the difference because they were always poor but they always had food during the great depression. They just kept doing what they always did and grew their own food and feed for their farm animals.
Some had always lived frugal because of previous difficult times such as the great war of world war 1 and the Spanish flu and a recession after the war and flu so these people knew what to do by living frugal.
But here is something to think about comparing the Great Depression in the 1930s and say one in 2025. There is much less small farming today.
The saying the bigger they are the harder they fall. If we think about this, there is this invisible point of great wealth and what would consider someone being rich. The most wealthy can withstand hard hits and long durations and can continue to get richer as I said above because they bought up property from those that lost what they had and waited it out until the economy improved and then sold it for great profits. Same could happen today.
Then there are those that I would consider rich and live in very nice homes with all the things of today but many of them have great debt and too much money flow going out to keep up with their lifestyle. They might could get through a short recession or depression but they also could fall very hard and lose everything. We saw that in 2008 with the housing bubble collapse.
So my thinking here is with all of our history research, there have been many recessions, wars and difficult times and we would think that people would not make the same mistakes or at least learn that it can happen again.
I feel that due to our studies and learning from my sensible Great Grandparents and Grandparents and my own mother that described a very difficult time in the 1930s that very often all she had to eat was a cold biscuit (here in the U.S. biscuit). Her mother would wrap a biscuit in a cloth and send her to school with that biscuit for her food that day.
My Grandmother knew to make turtle soup. People from all around her area remembered her turtle soup and talked about how there was only a certain way to safely make that soup and they could not make it. She must have known it well because she lived into her mid 90's,
I think about today how many people do not even know how to catch and clean and gut a fish. Most people do not know how to recognize vegetation that grows wild that can be eaten. We are in serious trouble because it could be other things than a Great Depression that could cause some serious problems today.
I feel that what helped the adults in the 1930s the most would be their skills from living during their previous years. This is something we are absolutely lacking today.
Just a few of the notebooks shown above that I filled with information from our studies.
If we take the year of 1930, and find an adult age 20 then that twenty year old would have been born in 1910.
If we use the scale of age 20 to age 80
Age 20 - was born in 1910, age 30 born was born in 1900, age 40 was born in 1890, age 50 was born in 1880, age 60 was born in 1870, age 70 was born in 1860, and age 80 was born in 1850 and the most wise 90 year old was born in 1840. If you know history, that covers some major events that they lived through.
When we look at these birth years above we see a lot of combined life experience and skills. During these early years, skills were passed down from generation to generation.
We also see clearly what we do not have today. Skills that would help us to get through seriously tough times.
Home knitted bandages. I have a post just on these hand knitted bandages that were made before 1900 and through the first world war and world war 2. I am sure they were being knitted during the 1930s for home use. They are 100 percent cotton thread and can be washed and boiled. I will post the link at the bottom of this post.
So why not learn all the skills that we can, no matter which way our economy goes, we empower ourselves and we share what we have learned by mentoring and that is what is missing today. We live in a different time, it is seriously scary too because we no longer have what our generations before us had and this is where we learn how to go back to basic and learn how we can do this today.
There can be an argument that we cannot live like they did in the past and believe me, I have given this a lot of thought out in my garden for the past few months, and I say that if we do not try now we might just regret that we did not do this.
Soap and soak before you wash.
Have less of today and have more of the past. This is probably the most difficult part because it requires letting go, working harder, doing without some of our comfort items but the results can be "very" rewarding.
Will have to ditch the use of that plastic wrap for this study and that will save money. A lot of things that will no longer be needed will save money.
So these are my thoughts about where the blog is going. Seems like a good time. I will be posting a Tuesday post soon to catch up. Each day this week I plan to have a new post.
I will post a few pictures of some changes to our garden.
We dug up and removed every bit of our front garden and planted grass where the garden was and moved all of the garden to the backyard so I can keep up on watering and everything where I need it. Well, I did plant beans on a section of the fence in the front yard. We even transplanted our fig tree, boy oh boy was that a big job. It stayed in the front yard but in a different location. We made a small fenced area for the doggies so they do not run out the front into the street.
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We cannot have a regular garden plot such as a tilled garden due to a lot of shade in our yard in the front and back. So we have had to be creative to be able to have a garden.
We are growing mostly in pots but the sections where the pots are will be eventually turned into small raised beds in the same area the pots are sitting.
We added all kinds of arbors, two new sections, a tomato and pepper garden and up by the camper we call the shabby cabby, we have expanded the garden up that way. The garden looks bigger in pictures, it also looks bigger because of the way we did the garden. It has been a lot of work and sore muscles and joints.
We have made a new curvy, squiggly walking trail that goes around the plants and trees and through the entire back yard so to be able to exercise by walking and the more laps we go the better it gets. We are going to measure how many laps around our odd shaped labyrinth trail we have to do to make a mile.
I love walking the paths, it feels right.
We have made fences, gates, and arbors all over the backyard and something is growing all along the paths. Different types of squash, beans, cucumbers, peppers, tomatoes, onions of all kinds, herbs, lettuce, cabbage, carrots and more. It is still early so they are in their small stage now but growing.
This is the pepper patch with the walking trail inside of this area, the trail is continuous so we do not have to get off of the trail. We even have a small section of corn and everything has a companion or two or three growing with it. Such as some plants have nasturtiums as a companion. Tomatoes have cilantro, some have petunias, beans have cauliflower and nasturtiums. It will be awhile before we will be getting summer vegetables because they are just baby plants.
We have been eating veggies that I planted early winter, snow peas, kale, onions, arugula, swiss chard and many herbs that grow through the winter.
Everything in the yard except for the petunias has been grown from seed or cuttings this year.
My new garden thing that I am doing is growing as many perennials that I can grow, asparagus, onions, certain arugulas, and learning how to save seed. We also planted fruit trees. We did not have these things, we planted them. When saving seed, make sure to plant heirlooms so you can save your seed. Seeds need to be saved in different ways, such as cold stratification, fermentation, tomato seeds germinate better if fermented when you save them.
We need to know how to preserve our food, canning, dehydrating.
We can grow things and barter with one another. The other thing is to learn who your neighbors are and be good to them so you can build relationships.
Kindness and respect for others is always important.
I will tell you about "Waxy" in one of my peek week post and will add more garden photos at the end of the posts.
I would love to know your thoughts up in the forum. Anything particularly you would like to share or questions to ask. Post it in the forum. I would love it if we could work on the old skills together, and share what we are doing in the forum. We do not have to change our home to learn new skills and study the past. We will learn that some things will simply not be needed and that is a good thing because it saves money. Sometimes just reading along, we learn.
We need to put on our thinking caps and identify the problem areas of living in this time that our older generations did not have and how we get around it.
Right now what Charles and I have been doing is we are using as little electricity as possible so we can run our heat and air conditioning when needed. This also saves money for gardening needs.
A link to the bandages. https://gdonna.com/living-like-the-past/bandages/
See you tomorrow, Grandma Donna
