During the Great Depression of the 1930’s it became commonplace – and eventually necessary for most family’s survival – to produce their own food. Both of my paternal grandparents were teenagers through the Great Depression, living in rural north-central Texas where their families maintained sprawling gardens and kept livestock on small family farms. I’ll share their experiences and more first-hand accounts of why backyard food production became such a vital skill. Here is my collection of family Great Depression farming skills and stories:
Great Depression Farm Stories
My Grandmother Evelyn grew up in rural Dicey community, Parker County, Texas. She was 9 years old when the stock market crashed in 1929. Her family owned a 10 acre farm that happened to be right next door to the community’s only school house. They raised chickens, maintained a huge garden, and had an orchard with apricot, pears, peaches, plums, persimmons, and other fruit trees alongside a half dozen pecan trees. My grandmother helped tend the garden rows where her family grew corn, beets, peas, tomatoes, watermelon, cantaloupe, carrots, onions, yellow squash, cucumbers, green beans, okra, and numerous other vegetables. This is what kept their family fed.
The Kitchen Garden
The fenced vegetable garden produced what my grandmother’s family ate. It did not include the orchard nor the fields where some crops, like watermelon and cantaloupe, were grown. When my father was growing up on his parent’s farm, their garden was 30 yards long x 10 yards wide (90 x 30 feet). Their 2,700 square feet of garden space was smaller than the 50 foot x 100 foot garden (5,000 square feet) my grandmother’s family maintained during the Great Depression to keep everyone fed.
Seed Time & Harvest
Growing most of your own food means that you must work with the seasons – planting time and harvest time – in order to have something to eat. Droughts, like what hit many central US states in the 1930’s (creating the Dust Bowl) were devastating to farmers. Without rainfall crops will not grow well, if at all. Having a crop fail not only meant losing the future harvest but you also lost the seed that went into the ground. It was always a double loss. Most seed was home-saved year after year. Purchasing seed could be expensive.
Great Depression Chicken Keeping
My grandmother’s mother (Great-Grandma Arva) kept a hearty flock of White Leghorns. The robust Mediterranean breed did well in the scorching hot Texas summers, laying an abundance of bright white eggs. She felt the White Leghorns tasted better than other breeds of chickens, even though they are not bred for meat. Unwanted roosters were harvested and processed by the family for roasting and frying. Some kitchen scraps and garden weeds were tossed to the chickens, who otherwise free ranged over the family’s 10 acre farm to feed themselves.
Great Depression Family Finances
My grandmother’s father (my great-grandfather) owned a grocery store when she was a child, which he sold shortly before the Great Depression began. He took a government job as a rural mail carrier, which kept him employed with benefits through the Depression. The family felt very fortunate because of this. My grandmother’s mother had 3 spare rooms in the farmhouse where she boarded female school teachers who taught the area’s 30 children next door at the school house. But this meant that the garden would also need to feed the boarders the family had that school year. My great-grandmother did the laundry, house cleaning, cooking, baking and maintained the garden.
Times of Scarcity
My grandmother was only one of five or six children among the school of 30 who was able to remain wearing shoes through the Great Depression. Most of the boys went barefoot. Bolts of fabric were pricey and it was common in the community for everyone to sew their own clothing. Flour came in 25 pound fabric sacks and the white fabric was washed to remove as much of the printing ink as possible then used to make underwear.
Self-Sufficiency in the Great Depression
Everyone in my grandmother’s family was very industrious and hard working. In the 1930’s a person might have a little bit of money but there were not always things available to buy. If something was available, it was usually expensive. People all over the community were mostly eating out of their back gardens and family farms. They were self-sufficient because they had to be.
What Did They Eat from the Garden?
When you are having to produce much of your own food, you tend to eat very seasonally. Texas gardens would have begun producing leafy greens and cool weather crops, like some sugar snap peas or radish in March and April. Short day onions planted during the winter could be harvested in April and May. February planted potatoes would have also been ready for harvest in May. Tomatoes, cucumbers, green beans, and summer squash would ripen in late May, followed by peppers in June. Cantaloupe and watermelon would have been enjoyed in July, just after sweet corn ripened in late June through July.
What Did they Eat from the Orchard?
In Parker County, the fruit trees seem to ripen all at once in July. This is fruit canning season when you must put up as much of the sweet fruit as you can as jams, preserves and pie fillings. These will be enjoyed later in the season on warm biscuits or as tasty winter pies. My Great-Grandmother Arva made a relish from the pears that came from her trees. Pecans were shelled by hand and saved to be used in baked goods all winter.
Keeping Chickens Was Very Helpful!
Hens, who lay eggs regularly in the spring and summer months (then cease laying during the autumn molt) provided plenty of eggs for both eating and hatching. Some hens naturally go broody in warm weather, sitting on eggs for 21 days until they hatch. The broody mother hen then teaches her chicks how to forage and feed themselves. Chickens instinctively desire to eat bugs, grass, and seeds of all types. They are omnivores so they’ll also eat lizards, mice, and kitchen scraps that may include meat trimmings or fat. Unwanted young roosters, called cockerels, only needed 20 weeks to reach a large enough size for harvesting. Young female chickens, called pullets, would begin laying eggs between 5 and 7 months old.
How Chickens Helped the Great Depression Garden
Chicken poop is high in nitrogen, which young growing plants need. Chicken poop takes around 3 months to compost into a usable form. Fresh chicken poop is so rich in nitrogen that it can actually burn young plants to death if applied straight. In a pinch, you can use a small amount of chicken poop in water (around 2 cups of droppings to every 5 gallons of water in a 5 gallon bucket) to create a weak nitrogen fertilizer solution. This diluted “manure tea” is poured around the base of nitrogen-hungry plants to help encourage early growth.
Manure As Garden Fertilizer
Commercial fertilizers were expensive and not widely available in the 1930’s. Small farms still employed traditional ways of dealing with animal waste, which was to use it to enrich garden soil. Manure would be spread over the just-harvested garden rows in the fall, where it would break down and compost in place over winter. When spring planting came around, the “hot”, nitrogen-rich manure had composted into organic matter that growing plants could benefit from without it burning their leaves. Some of the same methods of composting and manure tea are still used today.
Compost Piles and Chickens
Chickens are incredibly helpful when it comes to making compost. They naturally scratch and peck through any pile, turning over the dirt, straw, weeds, and waste looking for tiny bugs, seeds, grains and other appetizing tidbits. This kicking action, which mixes their droppings in to the pile along with everything else, helps green waste break down more quickly. This “dirt” from their chicken yard is rich in organic matter. It can be spread over the top of empty garden beds in the winter or early spring, where it can finish breaking down. This nourishes the microbial life already in the soil and provides a fertile foundation for strong spring growth. Chicken feathers, which are shed naturally, add to the nitrogen content when they break down in the soil.
Use it Up: Egg Shells
Did you know plants cannot directly take up the calcium in egg shells if you bury them? Egg shells are best fed back to chickens, so they keep producing thick-shelled, healthy eggs. The tiny shell pieces that end up in the compost are later broken down by soil microbes into a form plant roots can take up. The whole process to break down a little egg shell fragment takes at least 1 year! Most chicken keepers knew to feed the egg shells to the hens and that calcium would make its way back into the soil from some of the chicken waste.
What Else Did They Use Up in Clever Ways?
Women like my great-grandmother were careful not to let anything go to waste. Bits of raw onion, celery stalk pieces and leaves, the large ends of scrubbed carrots plus a handful of home-grown herbs were tossed into pots of water and boiled to make a basic vegetable stock. This stock could form the base of soups, to which other vegetables would be added the day the soup was made. Cooks were careful to keep vegetable, chicken or bone broth stocks pure and then can them for later use. The cook would then use up additional meat and veggies by adding them to the soup pot that day with equal parts broth and water. Why? Because some vegetables, when boiled for too long, impart a strange taste to stocks and broths. But spinach, broccoli, potato, corn, peas, and others could be added fresh to make a delicious soup!
Foraging Wild Foods
It was common during the Great Depression for families to go foraging as an outing. Mothers would send children with buckets and pails into the surrounding wooded areas to pick wild growing berries, like blackberries. These were turned into jams or preserves used to make wintertime berry cobblers. Hunting for mushrooms, berries, nuts, and other wild edibles was just one more way families provided for themselves.
The Family Farm Connection
In the 1930’s most Americans were either still living on a family farm or were only one generation removed from farm life. Many had grandparents, aunts, uncles or adult siblings still running small or even large farms and ranches. Grocery stores carried mostly staples, like basic ingredients necessary for baking, a selection of meats, plus some canned and dry goods. For many people living in cities, they traveled out to a relative’s farm to help with harvesting and brought home fresh or preserved foods. These rural connections helped keep families fed during the Great Depression.
Could We Do It Again?
If we were to face another Great Depression today, our current population of 336 million United States residents would find it more difficult than the 122 million alive in 1930. We are much more removed from agrarian life and few of us know how to keep livestock, sew, cook from scratch, or can home-grown garden produce. Foraging would not be a long-term option and nether would hunting, since over-hunting was a problem even in the 1930’s.
It is my hope that the Great Depression farm stories I share encourage readers to consider adding at least one “old-fashioned” hobby to joyfully enrich their lives and provide useful experience should the worst ever happen again. Keeping backyard Coturnix quail or learning to grow a bit of food in a container garden are skills that could generate some income if we faced another serious depression.
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