Just so you understand my way of thinking I have to take a step back to when I was still a child. I spent a lot of time at my grandmother's house as a child. She grew up during the depression and she saved everything and when I say everything, I am being literal. After supper if there were a spoonful of peas left, you saved it. I remember summers of having to eat mint jelly with my peanut butter sandwiches. No one liked mint jelly especially with peanut butter and wonder bread. But she wasn't going to let that mint go to waste; it grew in abundance and no sense mowing it down. If she bought something like cottage cheese it had to sit in her refrigerator until it was close to the spoil date, then you had to eat it until it is gone. Why couldn't we eat a little bit until it's gone, Noooo.... That way you would appreciate it more.
But she was like that with old clothes, you used them as rags. Your thinking, hey that makes sense, what's wrong with that. Well I will tell you what's wrong with that; I wasn't all that comfortable dusting with my grandparent's underwear. Her attic was stuffed with all sorts of things and every nook and cranny throughout the house. So I am a pack rat not to the extreme that my grandmother is but I hold on to things a little too long.
My grandfather on the other hand had a completely different outlook on saving and surplus. Since he had polio and a phobia about leaving the house; it was his job to make supper every night. My grandmother had a job at the local shoe shop plus taught ceramics at night at the house. My grandfather made the ceramic molds and cooked the family meal. Between the two of them neither was a very good cook. My grandmother could burn the cake black on the top but not the bottom. My grandfather was just confused how to cook. So his first attempt was spaghetti. Back then there used to be a nifty chart on the back to measure by how many people to how much pasta you needed. Seems simple since it was the two of them but his downfall was it didn't look like enough. In goes the entire box of noodles. The sauce was tricky since he knew it had to be a tomato sauce with meat. So he fried a pound of hamburger and he doesn't drain the fat because that is wasting and then one can of Campbell's tomato soup and mix that in with the cooked noodles. Oh how dry and tasteless that was. But since he had plenty of leftovers, we would have to eat that for lunch. There weren't microwaves then and you learned to either eat leftovers cold or figure out some way to heat it back up. Gramps way was frying it in a lot of butter and serving this whole mess with bread and butter pickles. I'm not sure if that or peanut butter with mint jelly or fried bologna sandwiches with ketchup was worse. You learned to eat very little and search for berries in the woods after lunch.
My mother on the other hand had her own version of saving, not as much as her parents but strange just the same. She was obsessed with elastics; we never had enough in the junk drawer. She started saving the elastics on the vegetables; we had broccoli, asparagus, and other such elastics in the drawer which had the name of the vegetable on each one. When we ran out of elastics we were either forced to skip putting your hair in a pony tail or suffer the embarrassment of wearing "broccoli" elastic to which you are unmercifully teased at school. Her other obsessions in saving was electricity, garden produce, and heat. My mother in the dead of winter would wade through three feet of snow to hang out laundry. We had a dryer but that costs money to run. Why we had one I will never know. Summer I think was worse because we would get weeks of rain and there is all your clothes hanging on the line soaking wet. My sister and I started working in the summer and we were allotted 2 uniforms each. We literally had to beg our mother to let us use the dryer because we had no clothes to go to work.
Her other obsession was heating the house. The thermostat was always on 55 degrees and you were not allowed to turn it up past that number. Oil costs money. We had a woodstove but it really had to be going good in order to heat the house. So you learned to put on a lot of layers of clothing in order to stay warm. We did try to turn the heat up to 68 degrees once and turned it back down before she got home from work. She said she knew we used the furnace. And followed with the tirade about how much oil costs and we should have thrown on a sweater. Pretty bad when you have a turtleneck, t shirt, sweater, and a sweatshirt on and you're still cold.
Garden produce was another touchy area. My mother before leaving for work would leave my sister & me a long list of things to do during the day while she was at work. Some days we just couldn't get through the list for various reasons. My mother would stress that you had to pick all the peas. Some naturally just weren't ready for picking and when she checked the vines when she got home she would be so mad and whatever your excuse was she wasn't going to listen. The next morning we got up to another list and it was time to pick the green beans. The list said to pick all the beans and she counted them all before she went to work and would know if we picked them all. Our thinking was if she was out there at 5am counting how many string beans on the vines, why didn't she pick them? We had to cut them up for canning, how would she know if we picked them all? It would really boggle the mind if you thought about it and her way of thinking.
Well there are certain things I like to save like the smallest sized jeans I could fit into 20 years ago, shoes I no longer can fit but were really nice and special outfits I bought for the kids. I am a bit stingy with the heat but not to the extreme my mother was, the woodstove heats the house and yes oil is expensive but I do use it on an occasion. Running the farm I started to notice I had the opposite problem, instead of not enough I had a surplus of everything. It was once to the point I had over 50 dozen eggs in the fridge along with 8 gallons of milk. What was I going to do? I couldn't let this go to waste because that went against everything I was taught.
A surplus of items that I couldn't save forever. I was taught not to waste a thing unless it couldn't be fixed again, period.
But what to do with 40 dozen eggs, 16 gallons of milk, or your herd of 8 sheep turned to 17 after lambing? Well I will tell you, you have to be creative. That doesn't cost anything. I remembered back as a child we had pickled eggs a lot especially during the summer. While making pickles during the summer I noticed I would have surplus brining solutions, so I made different flavors of pickled eggs. Fine that takes care of the egg overflow but what about the milk? Well that was a little tricky, I have made goat milk soap before, well that could use up a bit but still I was getting two gallons a day, what then? I did use some of the milk to wean a calf and bottle baby lambs but I still had a lot left. Thinking about my options, there were few besides making puddings and anything else that I could use milk with but what would use a lot of milk... cheese. I bought a few books and learned to make cheese. What a scary thought that was, cheese seemed like a delicate process and a lot of things could go wrong. So I started with the basics of cottage cheese, ricotta, feta and mozzarella. I even made buttermilk. Well that didn't seem so bad and in my second year I tried blue cheese and yogurt as well. So now I sell homemade cheese.
Do you see how I made that problem disappear? At first I was really worried of wasting a surplus of items, I wasn't raised to waste. Most of the things I do here on my farm I really think about what else I could use something for. Well meaning people drop things off that they don't use any more and I either could take it to the dump or reuse it. Baling string can be used for many things like in the garden supporting plants, as a quick collar for a loose animal, or as the friendly dog catcher uses them as a belt. I think it is how we look at an item; I reuse milk jugs and egg cartons. It makes sense since I need them for my production and if I don't have to buy them then good for me.
So I guess I learned something from my grandparents from over 30 years ago, don't waste, use everything until it is gone and appreciate the things you have even mint jelly. Cher King.
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