In 1968, deep in the woods near Rumford, Maine, my father, Alfred E. Marin Jr, wrote:
People going back to the sticks should not try to live completely off game and fish. Raise vegetables, have goats or sheep, some chickens, bantams preferred, maybe some ducks. Also depend on wild greens and herbs with some fish and game.
Store parking lots have many fewer cars than usual for this time of year and customers are bringing out fewer packages. Some just look around, but don’t buy anything. Grocery carts don’t look as full as they used to when they get to the checkout stands.
I do try to save as many of my own seeds as possible but the season wasn’t very good last year and most vegetables didn’t mature enough for seeds to form.
I have tomatoes starting indoors now and they are up. As you know we believe in organic gardening with no poisons either.
I didn’t have any livestock this year so I will have to haul manure from other places. There are 3 or 4 places that keep riding horses or ponies and a big chicken farm all within a radius of 3 miles and they just pile the manure up and just let it rot and just don’t bother with it so I can just get all I can haul for free.
I have been busy here berry picking, gardening, canning, digging a well by hand, and have started an addition to the camp.
I have harvested most of my garden now. We have 333 glass jars of food put up, also 8 bushels of potatoes, some pumpkins, 50 buttercup squash, and 8 gallons of sauerkraut, which I put up according to an old recipe.
I still have some cabbage, rutabaga, and turnips in the garden. I will harvest them in October, just before the ground freezes.
I am going to.rig up a little greenhouse...for giving squash, cuke, and melon plants a real head start for spring setting out. I did get some started that way last spring but didn’t have enough flats or place to put them to start as many as I would have liked. This spring I will try for tomato plants too, and maybe some peppers and celery plants.
I also want to pick some elderberries and get some apples from trees on the old abandoned farms around here to put up some jelly.
I had my garden on land belonging to a neighbor, and expect to next year unless I can clear more stumps off my land.
I have only had time to clear off a small space and promptly set the place in strawberries. I also rooted out enough stumps to plant 9 dozen tomato plants, a row of lettuce, a row of turnips and 100 gladiolus bulbs.
We bought some more canning jars and boxes of lids the other day. The storekeeper said he had never sold so many cases of jars in his many years at the store. He said he thought every housewife in the county must have been canning like mad this year!
Two young friends of ours, both teachers, called the other evening to get advice on canning. They’d gardened this year and canned what they could. Both plan to plant much bigger gardens next year and do everything possible from them.
Well I am thankful we began to ‘dig in’ in ‘65! It was none too soon!
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