Page 79 - Ninety Miles From Nowhere

The whole family reveled in the wonderful fresh produce, but the hardest work began with the preparation of the food for winter. Most of the vegetables were canned but some of it could be dried such as peas, beans, and onions. One of the most satisfactory methods of preserving the food was just plain storage. Many vegetables placed in a trench and covered with dirt, put underneath the hay, or in a small cave were still fresh and green all during the winter. Cabbage, pumpkins, beets, turnips, and potatoes remained fresh and sweet if protected from freezing.
They planted a very large patch of corn, and while the ears were young and tender, the family enjoyed plenty of “corn on the cob”. Ida canned it as creamed corn, whole grain corn, corn relish. After it matured, the dried ears were stored for winter feed for the stock and the stalks were piled high for roughage in the animals’ diet.
During the summer everything on the ranch thrived as it foraged for itself. The hens found plenty of insects and weed seeds, and helped hold down the insect population in the garden. The stock - the two work horses, the milch cow, and the Hereford calves - had plentiful grass, and the pigs grew fat on the pinon nuts that fell to the ground. They also had scraps from the table, milk, and roughage from the garden (outside cabbage and lettuce leaves; turnip, beet, onion, and carrot tops; hulls from peas and beans; and husks from the fresh corn).
With milk, butter, buttermilk, cream, and cottage cheese provided by the cow; plenty of fresh eggs, and chicken when desired; all the fresh garden produce they could possibly eat; and their own pork, there was
very little in the way of groceries the family needed to purchase - only sugar, coffee, flour, meal, etc.
At the end of the summer, several changes took place. Imogene had found employment as a teacher at a small school in Catron county in the community called Plains. (The following year she taught in Datil and lived in Ray Morley’s old Navajo Lodge.)
Later in the fall the pigs - hogs by now - were butchered and the McClures feasted for a time on fresh pork. Most of the meat was cured for winter usage in the form of ham, bacon, sausage, souse, and salt port, but everybody enjoyed the fresh ribs, backbone, and pork steak.
Also in the fall the Hereford steers were sold for cash and the entire amount applied to the debt. The heifers were saved back to start building up a herd for the McClures.
The purchase of the hens was the smartest deal Jim McClure ever made. I’m sure, since he was such a good business man, he knew just exactly what he was doing. The only ways he had of making cash were from the sale of the steers (which all went to pay off the debt), and from the sale of eggs. Those hens paid for all the expenses of that family.
With one hundred hens to start with, and keeping them well culled, Ida gathered about ninety eggs a day. This meant that she could sell about fifty dozen eggs a week (and leave two and a half dozen for family use), or two hundred dozen a month. In most places, on account of the depression, eggs were selling for about ten cents a