Wartime Farming & Rations. What was it like?

I’ve been taking notes my friends!!! Will something like that happen again? Learning what folks did to survive in the 1940s during WW2! Informative for sure!

Are you needing seeds?
Check our website out!
https://www.alvaradocommunityfarm.com

So you can see we put a big dent guys this weekend with our tomato sale good afternoon everybody Jill here with North Texas vegal gardening Canon recipes a little bit of everything thing yes I’m doing some planting today so been doing some uh watching and some reading and some studying and imagine

That you wake up one morning and you turn on your radio and uh they are telling you that every piece of extra land that you have um is going to have to go now for vegetable gardening you have to get ready of your flowers you have to get rid of your ornamentals

Because it is time to prepare for War and what um uh Church Hill said was that our Gardens we going to be the path to freedom and uh yeah that’s what it was like during World War II so you’re out there and you’re pulling all your ornamentals and you’re

Getting ready to plant your vegetables they had what they called land girls and land women and those were women who came in from the cities and believe it or not a lot of women and children from London now I’m telling you from England side because trying to find something

Out on the US side’s a little difficult but I suspect that the rations and a lot of what England did or uh was the same the U us did the same thing but uh so you had to take in folks from the city women and children would go to live

On farms Farms with folks that they didn’t know and they would have to learn how to farm and their children and uh these Farms would take in these folks and the older women would do the cooking and the canning and the younger women were often doing the gardening and working

Outside no TV nothing but the radio no computer everybody seemed to be much more healthy and a lot of things that were rationed was butter bacon pork meat um let’s see what else was there let’s see bacon oh and eggs imagine that guys eggs so for me I was trying to reconcile

In my mind why did they ration meat and it’s because it was better to put all their efforts into vegetable forming than trying to get enough feed to feed livestock for meef so that’s why those were rationed now some families would get a pig um I don’t know how many

Maybe five or six would get a pig together and they would have to save their scraps from their garden and scraps from their dinner and they’d all go in and take care of this pig until it was ready for you know what and um then they would split the pork and that’s how

People would get by a little bit there so in come the Victory Gardens because Victory Gardens were uh what they said would win the war because we needed to feed people here at home but the best stuff went to our troops who were fighting overseas and so they got the good

Stuff not to say that vegetables aren’t the good stuff but we could grow it here they could grow it over there in Europe and in England and uh that’s how a lot of people fed themselves um quite interesting on a lot of the recipes that they came up with because sugar was also

One of the rations and I watched one video where the woman made chocolate pudding and she used grated carrots for the sugar now another thing that they would do is Farmers that were um uh growing sugar beads for sugar they had figured out that they could cut the

Tops off of those and feed those to the livestock that was left but a lot of the livestock got cold off cold off during the war so I’ve had some difficulty in finding out what was rationed here in the States you can find a lot about what was

Rationed in England but again I have a feeling that the states followed suit um so for instance um one egg a week per person in your family or who was living with you on your farm and I think it was uh maybe four 2 to 4 ounces of butter 2

To 4 ooun of bacon a week um a little bit of lard and in fact the grease that uh people saved whether they were cooking uh their bacon or other meats they would turn back around and sell it to the government because they would use that to make

Petroleum bombs is that not incredible I’m not so sure I’d give up my bacon grease guys because that is a big flavor for us but uh yeah so growing their own food and food for the surrounding Community was huge um canning preserving these were all Necessities they weren’t

Something that we did um or they did as a hobby like we do um or as prepping like we do it was an absolute necessity for their survival could we do that again should we go to war would there be a need for rationing should we go to war Gosh guys

I don’t know but I do know that the Book of Proverbs says there’s nothing new Under the Sun and what has been will be again and so uh these are things for us to think about and to consider as we’re growing our own food and preserving and maybe taking advantage of sales and

Canning up Meats like chicken and um and beef just in case but um another thing that people did I think they said there were like several million if not 10 million households that by the end of the war had chickens backyard chickens um for their eggs but you want to think about

Um what did they feed them because feed was not readily available so a lot of kitchen scraps so your scraps were either going to the pigs or they were going to your chickens um so that you could get more than what your rations were and uh that’s what people did and

You know we got chickens I know a lot of you guys have chickens but evidently there was a great deal of difficulty finding any kind of livestock feed as the war went on we had talk here that there was going to be a fer fertilizer shortage because

The Ukraine thing and uh so composting was a huge thing that people did on their Farms too and they would make little squares um they would put their um they put like a some stra straw or hay and then they put their scraps on top and then they put more straw and hay

And they would build it up guys to about 3 to 4 feet tall and keep it watered down and that’s what they used for their compost in their Gardens because fertilizer was not available and I know we have spoken a lot on our Channel about wasting nothing and they literally wasted nothing every

Scrap went to feed um the animals the livestock um their vegetables as what they would eat they would even make um take the the head of the hog or the head of the pig they bow it down and they’d make like a loaf and they would eat that

There was all kinds of things that they got creative about um during the war and rations for us here in the states didn’t last nearly as long as they did in in England and over in Europe over there some rations did not end until I think

The mid to the late 50s that was a very long time and that included things like chocolate and sugar but here in the states we got kind of back to normal pretty quick and we were also sending a lot of uh those types of supplies over

To our troops over in England and guess what they hit the black market over there and they were being sold but uh that’s how rough things were will it be like that again so the world population is certainly a lot more than it was back in 1940 1941

1942 um a lot more Ms to feed that’s for sure so uh you know we have always gardened I’ve had a garden probably for 20 25 years whether it was small medium or large and we have really ramped it up over the last couple of years and uh of

Course you you guys see some of my videos on us preserving and canning and saving and uh I know a lot of you are doing the same but if you’re not if you’re not doing the same find you a little spot to start gardening because it could become a necessity you never

Know and if you don’t want to uh dig up the ground you can start some container gardening that was not a big deal a big thing back in in the war but one thing that was is they grew tomatoes on the table which was absolutely incredible

And they would use pot as as one of their fertilizers and one of their feeds with their tomatoes so lots of things that I have learned on watching these videos on wartime farms and wartime Gardens go check them out as a look around our vast space here of planting I really realize that

Without that back acre uh we probably could not feed ourselves for a year guys we would have to be very selective I know I see a lot of people that have backyard gardens that say they feed themselves for a year and kudos to you I’d sure like to have some more

Information from you on that so those of you who are growing a smaller type garden and feeding your family a four or five for a year I’d like to know how you do it because we are going to get busy on that back acre and we will be canning

Up of course every year but we are doing more and more and more food preservation and especially Meats when you see them on sale so they didn’t have the modern technology that we do today guys they did have tractors and they did have some tillers and some of those tillers were

Very large and bulky and hard to use and guys they’re ground a lot of it actually a lot of the ground over in England looked like our black gumbo here and man they had to work it they had to work it um from Sun up till sun down to make

Sure that they had food for themselves and food for the market and uh food for their community and that’s how things were done so we have all these conveniences um you know we’ve got our tractor with our Tiller that Greg’s going to be able to till that back acre

With um we don’t really have any kind of uh Machinery to plant the seeds for us Greg and I have to do that manually and we will do that I know that some of the bigger Farms have the Machinery to do the seeding for them but for small and mediumsized

Farms we’re thankful we have a tractor with a tiller on it but boy getting on our hands and knees out there in planting seed is going to be hard this year but we’re going to do it so this this is just a little brief video to kind of steer you toward uh the

Wartime garden and the wartime table the wartime kitchen so that you can kind of get an idea of what you might want to start doing what you might want to start preparing for and guys any of you that have any ideas let me know um because we are interested always in improving

Knowledge is power and the Lord says my people perish for lack of knowledge so uh thank you for watching this we love you all take care God bless and we will see you sometime this week