El had a great post the other day about her family food history and her mother’s perspective on her butchering the meat birds. It got me thinking about the fact that while so many of us are coming together online and talking about sustainability, local food, growing our own and raising meat, that we’re all starting from vastly different places.
It got me thinking about the fact that while our move to the country and big garden and chickens seem exotic to some, to us, and me in particular, they’re not such big leaps. And that’s due to the fact that my family food history is pretty close to the source. I grew up with both meat and egg chickens, sheep, horses, ducks, geese, goats and my grandfather’s acres of gardens. So indulge me for a moment or two and I’ll tell you a bit more about how I grew up and the gifts that my parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles gave to me.
I didn’t grow up as a farm girl in the strictest sense. My family lives about 15 miles west of downtown Minneapolis in a small town named Wayzata. My maternal grandparents bought acreage almost 50 years ago and raised their six children on a “hobby” farm just outside the suburbs. My grandfather worked in the insurance industry by day, but by night and weekend they lived the farm lifestyle.
Just before I turned four my parents built a house on an acre and a half on the corner of my grandparents land (almost 30 acres) and we moved in. By the time I was in school it was no longer farm land around us. The suburbs had moved in and I was pretty much the only “farm” kid in my elementary, junior high and high school classes. Both of my parents had day jobs but my grandparents were long retired. The farm was a family affair with all my aunts and uncles pitching in to keep gardens weeded and harvested, eggs gathered, lambs castrated and chickens/ducks/geese butchered. One of my chores was to help my grandpa with barn chores almost every day after school - a task I resented at the time, but now look back on with great fondness.
We were the odd balls in the area. Year round we had a flock of 20 ewes or so, laying hens, a half dozen horses and ponies and a seasonal assortment of lambs, meat chickens, domesticated ducks and geese and rabbits. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know that chicken came from and actual chicken, that eggs came from hens, that raspberries grew on canes, that you could make crab apples into wine, that raccoons like to raid the sweet corn, that turkeys are “ugly” and that it takes a lot of work and heart to grow and raise food.
I’m the least squeamish person you’ll meet when it comes to talking about how to kill a chicken, or pluck down from a goose or salt a sheep skin. I’m not afraid to contemplate raising my own meat birds, just worried that I won’t remember how to gut or how to pluck. I deeply understand both the rewards and the risks of planting a big garden, even though my job and experience as a kid was mostly on the harvesting side and rarely on the planting or raising side.
By the time I was in highschool I wanted to be like the other kids I knew, not the kid that had to do barn chores when I got home. Not the kid that had to miss the Friday night football games in September because we were killing chickens, ducks, geese and turkeys. Not the kid that had to worry when she took friends out to see the horses that there might be chicken heads on the manure pile as an offering to the fox or a wheelbarrow full of sheep heads waiting to be cracked to cure hides. I didn’t understand at the time what a gift growing up with all of it was.
I don’t think I really understood that until a couple of years ago when I started to yearn to move out of the city not just for more space but for room to have animals, to plant a garden, to ride a horse, to build a compost pile. My extended family was a family in the old fashioned sense. We had brunch on Sundays, celebrated birthdays with big dinners, had 25 people at the table for Thanksgiving. We built fences together, we picked strawberries together, we canned tomatoes together. We worked together to raise and preserve a heck of a lot of the food that fed us every year.
And at the time we were definitely uncool. But now, now I’m really glad that I was an uncool kid. That my mom made me go do barn chores with grandpa after school. That my grandmother gave me the job of stuffing cukes in jars to make pickles. That I was paid $0.25 a box to pick raspberries and strawberries. That I was never allowed to believe that food came in boxes or cans or plastic bags.
So thanks mom, thanks dad, thanks Susie, Betsy, David, Kenny, Bruce, Mark, Gail, Peggy and Jo. Thank you to my grandparents who are no longer with us. Thank you to my two brothers that chased me with chicken heads and feet. Thank you for the memories that I’ll always cherish. Thank you for the skills I never thought I needed. And neener neener to the kids that teased me for knowing how to collect an egg, pick pin feathers and card wool - turns out that now I’m the cool one.
My grandparents
*****
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So, so jealous.
Until post-college my idea of cooking was combining the contents of cans and boxes. As kids, we got treated to fresh corn now and then each summer, and snap beans as a novelty maybe once or twice a year. Iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, celery, onions, and potatoes were ‘fresh’; everything else came from a 14-oz can or a frozen bag. My mother still doesn’t quite get what was wrong with that, and she seems faintly amused with my eccentric obsession with food and knowing where it comes from.
Thank god that my dad loved it when I followed him around the house as he tackled his honey-do chores. He taught me how to be handy, to repair instead of replacing, and to not be intimidated by tools or cars or gadgets (or men, for that matter), and I am forever grateful. It doesn’t keep me fed, but at least I didn’t start adult life utterly useless!
Those chickens your grandma(?) is butchering look fabulous. they’re making me drool.
Lovely post, Laura! And I will bet you WERE the only folks in Wayzata to do such a thing, knowing what I do about that town. (BTW: I was one of the architects who did the city hall/library complex there a few years back!) Like I said, you were given a great gift with your background, and I am so glad to learn more about how you’ve come to be not-so-Urban!
What a lovely post and what an awesome gift! What a treasure trove of skills. Such a rich history!
Great post Laura!! I thoroughly enjoyed reading your food history, and find some of it completely relatable (especially being the strange kid in school.)
Both of my parents grew up on a farm, and as soon as they were old enough, they both “escaped” the farm. They talk about fond memories of growing up, but they NEVER, and I mean, never tried to have a garden (not even a flower garden, and even the lawn was dry and barren) or animals when I was growing up. The closest we came were the two pet rabbits, and we only had them for a couple of months before my parents decided they were too much trouble.
My journey is very different from yours, as I haven’t the foggiest clue what I’m doing. It’s all trial and error every day, and most of the time, I’m kind of waiting and seeing what happens, which is why, ultimately, I decided the suburban “homestead” was best for me. That way, there’s less messing up I can do :).
I think your history sounds amazing, and good for you keeping those traditions alive.
Very nice tribute to your family, too :).
Hindsight is indeed 20/20 isn’t it? This was a great read Laura, you were so blessed to have been raised like that. I’ve really toiled over how much to “make” my kids participate in my gardening and chicken raising. I want them to learn about it, but am afraid of making them hate it. It’s hard to tell isn’t it.
Thanks for sharing with us.
P~
What a super post, I really enjoyed reading about your early relationship with home-produced food and your family. I also feel lucky to have learned so much from my parents and grandparents — I now wish my mom had taught me how she butchered the chickens and ducks!
Ali in Maine
I just dropped in from the “Chicken Meetup”
I have nothing but respect for folks who live on farms and ranches. It’s honest hard work-and I have some past experience so I understand.
I would love to live on a farm again one day, and I just might make it happen yet. In the meantime, I’m happy with my gardens and my chickens. Thanks for the link.
Love your blog!
Laura, I almost could’ve written your post, except that for us it was hogs, not ewes. Definitely chickens and chores, though. It’s funny how we come around, isn’t it? Good luck with your gorgeous garden this year! I love following your adventures.
Yes, you ARE cool!! Isn’t it interesting how our ideas about what is cool change so much? And we end up in the shoes of our parents.
I am envious of your experiences on the farm; that life is becoming fewer and farther between. I want to share those experiences with my own children, and learn them for myself. And what community you had as you grew up! Thanks for telling us about it.
Laura, I’m the other person on the chicken meet-up who objected to the notion that eating your farm stock means you’re not an “animal lover.” Thanks for writing so beautifully about the cycle of life. In the early 80’s my husband and I set out to do something similar to what you’re doing now. (His early death changed everything but that’s another story.)
Laura, thank you. I am one of those aunts that remembers
you as that kid who didn’t care much for the farm, and I still
ponder sometimes how you grew to love it, and how that
happened. This blog was a wonderful tribute to our family and
the heritage that we all grew up with. I am proud of you,
for where you have come to be. And I wish we were closer,
so we could cherish each other at those large family gatherings!
Thanks for the memories.
Wow, what great memories! You are so fortunate to have had these experiences ~ and more fortunate to appreciate them.
I just came across your blog, and I am thrilled to have found you! I’ll definitely be back. Thanks for sharing your story!
Jen in TN
My childhood was totally opposite of yours. I live in the suburbs, my mom worked, dinner was usually frozen meals. No one had a garden, we never even visited a farm. My whole family thinks I’m crazy that I want to move to a small farm and raise food. None of them think I can do it. So it is a steep learning curve for me.
Thank you for sharing this! Wonderful to read and the pictures are great.
Laura, what a lovely post. Lucky you. My family had what we called a farm when I was a kid, but we only lived there during the summer. We had chickens at least one summer and goats for several years, which we boarded near our “winter home”. One thing I’d forgotten about was being embarrassed to have goats - that just seemed weird to me, especially in middle school. But I really treasure the memories of that place, and even still dream about it, although I haven’t been there in over 20 years.
Amen! Excellent post that moved me! There are a couple good counterpoints in the comments about folks who left the farm and never looked back, but I think many more agree with you wholeheartedly. We can’t have only 1% of the people knowing how to do all those things…we need to keep this knowledge alive.