We believe the Lord's words when He gave this
scripture.
For the earth is full, and there is enough and to spare;
yea, I prepared all things, and have given unto the children of men to
be agents unto themselves.
Doctrine and Covenants Section 104:17
There aremany situations where people are starving. That
does not change the fact that the earth is full and enough to spare. The
problem is that man has changed the situation and gone against the
commandments of the Lord. When the Indian tribes in the U.S. were placed
on reservations where they could not resume their customs of providing
food for the tribe they became dependent on the government to provide
them food until they adapted themselves to their new environment and
learned to provide for themselves. The earth is full but we must work to
have it produce. As we travel through what used to be productive farms
and orchards we are sad to see them being replaced by housing complexes.
The cement and housing areas will not produce food or the necessities of
life.
The prophets of the Lord have counseled us to store up
food and other necessities for a time of emergency. When we obey this
council it gives us a good feeling of obedience and also of security.
Even though we may not be forced to live entirely from our food storage
we can feel secure in having it.
Many years ago I was riding along on a dim trail across a
beautiful mesa high in the Sierra Madre Mountains. The mesa was dotted
with beautiful pine trees with high grass beneath. I rode into a
beautiful little meadow where I could see an ancient dead pine tree near
the trail. I was curious to know why this old pine tree was still
standing stark and white from the storms and weather. The bark had long
since fallen off leaving it bare leaving its bare trunk and high
branches standing out among its live companions. As I approached I could
see that the tree trunk was completely covered with ingeniously stored
acrons. Each acorn was stored in a little hole in the tree especially
made for it. As sat looking at this rare sight I saw in my mind the
tedious work of making each little hole and then finding the acorn and
bringing it to pound it into the tight fitting hole.
The only thing that could have made those precise little
holes must have been a woodpecker. I can just see that wood pecker
working diligently season after season for many years to completely fill
that ancient tree trunk with perfectly stored acrons.
Even though the woodpecker had not used his acrons he had
continued to store them until his storage place was completely full. I
was surprised that there were no vacant holes in the tree trunk from top
to bottom. Nothing had disturbed this store house through the years.
Even the squirrels had respected this storehouse. They had probably
preferred to gather fresh acrons rather than work to extract the acrons
from the tiny holes. The work of storage had long been abandoned because
the acrons were weathered along with the trunk of the tree.
Naoma and I during our married life have worked each
season to bottle fruit and vegetables for our storage. Even though very
little of our storage was used through the winter we would continue each
season to store more bottled fruit and dried fruit and vegetables. Even
now in our store room there is some of our storage that is 25 or 30
years old. Was our effort wasted? The answer is no! Even though we did
not use all of our storage we had the satisfaction of storing good food
for the security of our family. We would even kill a nice fat young
heifer and bottle the meat which is still good after many years of
storage.
Many of natures storing insects and animals store much
more than they can use especially when food is plentiful. I have seen
hollow trees that were filled with stored nuts even after years of
abandonment.
Even the wild bees store up every available space with
honey that they can not possibly use.
Since Naoma and I have been married we have been very
conscious of storing food. We have tried to keep a two years supply of
food. About fifty years ago we got some fifty gallon drums and washed
them out very well and waited till they were dry. We used these drums to
store beans and wheat. We cured the beans by putting them in the deep
freeze for four or five days then we stored them in the fifty gallon
drum and sealed lids of the drums with hot wax. We sprinkled highlife
into the drums to keep the wheat from getting weevils in it. The
highlife gas was heavier than air so it would force all of the air and
oxygen out of the drums. I filled one drum with wheat and sealed it up
and was filling another. As the wheat filled up it forced highlife gas
out of the small opening of the drum. It got dark so I connected up an
electric light globe to continue to fill the drum. I placed the light
bulb on top of the drum near where I was pouring in the wheat. The heat
of the light globe ignited the escaping gas and it exploded with a
whoosh. Hot flames came out of the barrel and burned my face, hair, eye
brows and eye lashes. I went into have Naoma anoint the burns on my face
with Pricrato de Butesin, a yellow burn medicine. We finished filling
the barrel with the light globe at a distance. We stored those barrels
of wheat in the pump room for fifty years.
A few months ago we were cleaning out the pump room to
install a new water system. As we moved all of the things that had
accumulated we came to2 50 gallon drums full of wheat we had stored
there 50 long years ago. I was curious to examine the wheat to see if it
was good after being stored that long. We poured out a bucket full and
found that it was still good. On examining the wheat we found that we
had not cleaned it before putting it in the drums. We decided that we
would need to pick it over by hand and wash it thoroughly before it
could be ground in our Electric Whisper Mill. It had a lot of trash and
rocks in it. We decided if we cleaned it , it would be more work than
what it was worth. We decided to feed it a little at a time to the birds
during the winter months. We have finished one barrel over the months
and are feeding the birds out of the other one. When we started to feed
there were four doves that had been raised on our lot that were coming
morning and evening. Gradually the doves increased in number until now
more than fifty doves come to feed morning and evening. We love to watch
them congregate and fill the big Catalpa tree. They cautiously fly down
and fill their crops with wheat. They eagerly pick up a grain at a time,
moving along the line of wheat. Suddenly at some signal they will
explode away with the loud whistling of their wings. Most of them are
white winged doves. There are about a half a dozen Ringed neck doves in
the group. As we started to feed The small Sparrow like birds began to
collect a few more each day. Now large flocks fly down out of the near
by Forcythia bush. They only stay long enough for each of them to pick
up one grain of wheat at a time. Then with a loud flutter of wings they
fly back into the bush. One second later they are back in a big flock to
repeat the process. It is interesting to watch them flutter down only to
fly again into the bush. At first the Boat Tailed Grackles did not eat
the wheat but one at a time they began to come and eat a few grains. Now
bunches of ten or twelve will come together to eat. The males will sit
in the Catalpa tree and give their varied whistling calls. We often sit
in the front of the garage about l5 feet away from the wheat. It is
interesting to watch the different habits of the birds as they get brave
enough to come down to eat. We love to hear the cooing calls of the
Doves and the loud whistling of the Blackbirds. We even hear the song of
the Mocking bird and the warbling trill of the rose breasted House
Finch. All of these birds can consume a lot of wheat. I often wonder
where they will go to find their daily food when the wheat is gone. All
of the birds fly to find their food each day. They continually to search
all day long, day after day to find enough food.
The only birds that I have seen that think of storing
food are the Woodpecker that stored the acorns in the old pine tree, and
the Butcher Birds that I have seen impale grasshoppers and lizards on
the barbs of barb wired fences near their nests.
I suppose that the fowls of the air do not need to store
their food because they can fly great distances in search of their
food.
Some of the rewards of storing food are working together
as a family to produce food for the table and enough to store for future
use. Another reward is the actual preparing and preserving the food for
storage.
Naoma and I through the years have enjoyed working
together preserving and storing food the produce of our own garden. I
Remember the enjoyable feeling of pealing our tree ripened peaches and
putting them in bottles ready to steam and seal for our storage. We
bottled tomatoes and many quarts of tomato juice. We picked and shucked
the sweet corn and cut it off the cob and put it in pint bottles. We
picked the string beans and prepared them by cutting off the strings and
cutting them up for bottling. We made applesauce and apple butter, and
fig jam. and tomato preserves. Naoma was very good at making jams and
jellies using our fruit. We picked many buckets of apples from our trees
and sometimes from the trees in the mountains. We made many quarts of
apple juice. We made some applesauce and apple butter, We pealed and
dried the rest. We supplied Aunt Clara with dried apples which she loved
to munch on.
We would go to the ranch and drive around in the van and
find a nice fat yearling heifer. I would shoot her in the forehead and
she would drop to the ground. I would step out quickly and go and cut
her juggler vein to bleed her. We would then skin her out and carefully
quarter her and cut her up in large pieces. We would place the meat on a
clean plastic in back of the van saving the liver. We would usually give
the rest to the cowboy including the head and a shoulder. At home we
would hang up the meat in a cool place until the next day.
After we would carefully cut up all of the meat removing
the tallow for greasing the latigos of all the saddles and the pack
outfits. We used it also to preserve the leather bridle reigns and make
them pliable. Only the good meat would go into the bottles. We would put
in a tsp. of salt in the bottle of meat and seal it up by cooking it in
the pressure cooker for an hour. It is always gratifying to open a
bottle of that delicious meat for a family dinner.
When we had pigs we would fatten them by putting them
each in a small pen. The pen at the head had two cement compartments.
One we kept full of clean water and the other was used for the food. We
would mix a half of 50 gallon drum of ground corn with water. We would
put in a teaspoon of lie and mix it thoroughly and place it near the pig
pens, It would quickly ferment giving it a good flavor for the pigs.
Every hour during the day we would hose down the pig in the pen and give
the pig a scoop full of corn mash. In this way the pig would fatten
quickly and in six weeks would be ready to butcher.
We would kill the pig and scrape off the hair by dipping
the pig a couple of times in boiling water. We would quickly scrape off
the hair. We would open up the pig and clean out the entrails. We would
hang the pig in a cool place over night. Then came the process of
removing the outer layer of fat and cutting it up in small squares and
putting them in the rendering vat. We would enjoy the hot chicharonies .
Usually each big pig would render out filling five 5 gallon cans full of
good white pig lard. This lard stored well in a cool store room and
would last over the year for our use. The pig lard makes the best pie
crusts and is very delicious for frying any kind of food.
The hams and the shoulders we cured for ham. The rest was
ground and made into sausage. When some of the side meat was lean enough
we would cure it into bacon. In later years we stopped raising pigs and
changed over to vegetable oil for cooking and beef for meat.
All of this work of preserving and storing was a labor of
love that we did joyfully for our family. It was part of our joy in
living. One of the great joys of our work was in producing our own food
as far as possible. We always thanked our Heavenly Father for the
bounties of the earth and His help in producing it. We were never rich
in money, but we felt very rich in the bounties and the good things of
the earth.
We wanted to record in this little history some of the
things that we did that gave us joy and satisfaction and help unite our
family.