It’s going to be another hot one. When it gets up in the 90′s, we shut the house up early in the morning and keep the kids inside. Goodness knows, I have plenty to keep me busy.
Today, the plan is make a tincture for the treatment of headaches. The recipe calls for 2/3 cups a cup of lemon balm and 1/3 cup of feverfew. This goes in a quart mason jar. The jar is then filled with vodka and left on a sunny windowsill for 6 weeks. It is then strained and kept in a dark bottle. You can take a couple of teaspoons every 1/2 hour until the headache goes away. I’m also going to can up some strawberry/lemon concentrate. The recipe calls for 6 cups of hulled strawberries, 4 cups of lemon juice and 6 cups of sugar. It’s all boiled together then water bathed canned. It makes 6 pints of a concentrate that is mixed with water or seltzer. If it goes well I’ll post pictures and the full directions later.
I found both these recipes on-line. Canning Homemade is a wonderful site as is the Foodie With Family site. Frugal Sustainability is also very good. On a day like this, when the garden has to wait until evening, I like to make good use of inside time to start canning and preserving. It will be my reward for cleaning my cluttered refrigerator.
One final thing. I dropped off some strawberries to an elderly neighbor yesterday. We visited for a bit and she told me about her memories of the Great Depression. She told me lots of things I didn’t know about life in my small New England village in the 20′s and 30′s. It was really interesting. There were traveling meat sellers and peddlers of all sorts. I remember the Fuller Brush man. I believe we bought clothes from him. I also remember a man who brought things like soap. Perhaps it was the same man. We lived quite far from town some of the time and my mother didn’t drive so traveling salesmen were the way we shopped. That and the Montgomery Ward catalog. My children would be astonished by the way we lived. I think they think of the history of 50 years ago as ancient. It seems like yesterday to me.
June 29, 2012 at 6:18 am
In some areas, these travelling salesmen still operate. An older Mennonite lady gave me a stain bar earlier this week. When I asked where she got them, she said, “A man comes around to the farms and sells soap and such.” (I ended up finding them at a bulk store for $1.99 and bought three!) AND the Mennonites still use mail order a lot. Did you know Fuller Brush is still operating? http://www.fuller.com/
June 29, 2012 at 10:07 am
I spent summers in the small western Minnesota towns of my grandparents. I remember the Fuller Brush man, and the Avon Lady (cosmetics, soap). As well, my grandmother made good use of the Wards catalog. Although the services iin these very small hamlets was far better than it is today, choice was limited. However, what astounds me was the breadth of small businesses – pharmacy, two grocery stores, three railroad lines, a coop which dispensed gas, butcher shop, a gas station that sold homemade ice cream pops, bank, movie theater in an old converted school house etc. These towns never boasted more than 500 citizens but drew on the surounding family farms that were plentiful at that time.
June 29, 2012 at 5:05 pm
I love the Frugal Sustainability site too. Lots of helpful information, graciously and credibly presented. I make her liquid laundry soap.
It’s 101 degrees here in Piedmont NC as I write in the late afternoon. We have also closed the drapes and hunkered down. It feels historic, sadly. Best wishes and stay cool!
July 1, 2012 at 5:05 pm
We lived in the country sixty years ago when I was a child. Our farm was three and a half miles from the town (4500 people) but there was a store in the neighborhood that sold all kinds of food, with the exception of fresh meat and milk and eggs which everyone provided for their own family, as well as feed and gasoline. Now to buy such things in the area one goes into the town which has shrunk to 3000 or into the nearest larger town (20,000). There is no longer any any walking to “the store”. The little store was where farmers congregated in bad weather to talk and play dominoes. Kids were sent there to get things that parents had forgotten. When it closed, the community lost its focus.
I can remember getting Fuller Brush products from a student at the Baptist Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas 35 years ago. I still have a brush for picking up crumbs from the table. It resembles a small carpet sweeper and works as well as ever. My daughter recently mourned that she couldn’t find anything similar.
July 2, 2012 at 12:40 am
One thing to keep in mind about lemon balm – I read recently on an herbal site that lemon balm is good for *hyper*-active thyroid, in that it prevents T-4 from converting to T-3. It would be problematic, therefore, for someone with *hypo*-active thyroid.
July 4, 2012 at 9:58 am
Kathy, why the sunny windowsill? As I understand it, temperature doesn’t make much of a difference in extraction by alcohol – it does in water, or in oil, but not in vodka – or so I was told. Curious.