Here in the Sensible Survivalist’s family, we love learning from others and improving what we do. I think the person who taught me the most, especially about homesteading, was my wonderful late grandmother.

She was a young woman in England during the Second World War. It was a difficult time for everyone, especially families. Food and resources were limited, and morale had to be kept up. She and her friends learned so many new skills in order to cope, and managed to make it through in one piece.

My grandmother passed on some of her homesteading skills to me, which has been invaluable for our own experience. Along with those skills, she taught me to be resourceful, resilient, imaginative and tough, and I’ll always be grateful to her for that.

In this post, I want to pass my grandmother’s wartime beginner homesteading skills on to you.

I think there’s something wonderful about taking the painful lessons that our parents and grandparents learnt during difficult times, and then learning and growing from them. I sometimes wish I could go back in time. I would go and speak to my grandmother, aged 17, trying to get a coop of stubborn chickens to lay eggs, and I would tell her that generations and decades into the future, her granddaughter would be applying those lessons to her own homesteading life. I think she’d be happy about that.

To put together this post, I’ve gone back through our family archives, my grandmother’s old notebooks and a few Internet sites to collects facts, pictures and lessons we can learn from today. I’ve found the old WWII posters that my grandmother will have seen at the time, and will share those with you.

I’m pleased with what I’ve put together, but I’m sure there’s so much more to say. If you have any suggestions and ideas for other lessons we can learn from Second World War homesteaders, please put them in the comments. I’d love to hear them!

Part One: Dig for Victory and Grow your Own

During the war, almost all items were at a premium, from clothes and tools to food and education.

This was for a few reasons.

One of the reasons was that importing goods to England, where my grandmother lived, was incredibly difficult. It’s hard to get a shipment of produce through when there are enemy submarines trying to sink the ship.

Another reason was a lack of labour. So many young men in Britain went to war that there was barely anybody left to work on the fields and in the factories. Woman like my grandmother had to step in and take over those jobs, or learn to do without the produce of the farms and factories.

So the British government encouraged everybody to grow their own food and keep their own livestock.

Everybody with a garden was supposed to try and grow some vegetables or keep some chickens. People started pig clubs, where a group of friends would chip in to pay for a pig and to feed it, and then share the meat when the pig was slaughtered.

Here are some of the Growing Your Own lessons and skills that my grandmother taught me.

Know What Works

My grandmother had never gardened before the war, let alone kept chickens. She was a city gal, and she had spent her teenage years shopping in 1930s London and going to the pictures, not digging in soil.

Her father knew a little bit about gardening, but he got called up to go to war, so he couldn’t help.

When my grandmother’s family decided they were going to have to try and garden, the first thing my grandmother did was visit everybody she knew with a vegetable garden, and ask them what sort of vegetables were easiest to grow. She decided to grow carrots, potatoes, beans, lettuces and a few other veggies, and asked her friends for help in learning to look after them.

She didn’t do so well in the first year, because rabbits ate all her crops. In the second year, she made rabbit traps. Now she had a garden full of crops, as well as rabbits for pie!

In our own homesteading lives, we make it a habit to ask more experienced gardeners what works for them. Sure, we can try absolutely everything out, but it just makes sense to learn from the mistakes of others as well. My grandmother taught me to thoroughly research new skills and endeavours, and it has stood me well.

Use Your Space

Before the war, my grandmother’s family were convinced they didn’t have enough space for a vegetable garden. They lived in a tiny terraced house on the outskirts of London, with a post-stamp lawn out the back with barely enough space for the kids to play. My great-grandfather loved that lawn – he would spend hours every week weeding it and tending to it. It was his pride and joy.

During the war, though, they tore up that lawn. They put an air raid shelter in, and then grew veggies on top of the shelter. Because there wasn’t much space in terms of square yards of garden, they used vertical space, and planted veggies and herbs on shelves of huge pots. My grandmother would go out every day and tend those veggies with love and care.

The first year, she was very disappointed, because they barely managed to grow anything. The next year, though, she had learned more about fertilising the ground and protecting your crops from pests, and they grew enough to feed the whole family for months.

I wrote a blog post recently on how to use even tiny amounts of space to grow food – you can read it here if you are interested. That’s a skill my grandmother taught me!

Keeping Animals

When my grandmother’s friend’s chickens produced little chicks, my grandmother turned her tiny patio out the back into a chicken coop and took on a handful of scrappy little chickens. She also joined a pig club with her friends, which meant they got sausages for Christmas in return for potato scraps over the year.

Now my grandmother was definitely not a born chicken mama. At first, she absolutely hated looking after her hens. Remember, this was a girl who was more used to shopping than mucking chicken dirt out of a freezing cold coop early in the morning. Her chickens ruined her hair and her makeup, which were otherwise always immaculate, and would mess up her clothes.

But she knew she had to keep going so her brothers and sisters wouldn’t go hungry.

She used to tell me how frustrated she would get when her chickens misbehaved, or escaped, or wouldn’t lay eggs. I always feel just that bit closer to her when the same thing keeps happening to us with our own chickens!

But she persevered and stuck with it, and absolutely loved her chickens by the end of the war. It wasn’t easy for her, but she made it work.

Foraging

Before the war, my grandmother never ate foraged food, except maybe blackberries. During the war, she learned about all kinds of edible plants. She found wild fruit trees in the neighbourhood and learned to make soups out of stinging nettles.

She also learned how to trap and eat animals such as rabbits. Her family had a little terrier that would bring rabbits back for them now and again.

Basically, my grandmother went into the war as a bit of a diva, and came out of the war a grow-your-own boss. How’s that for homesteading inspiration?

Part Two: Making Things Last

In times of plenty, it’s no big deal if your fresh food goes bad: you can always buy more. In times of hardship, it’s a huge problem when food goes to waste.

Did you know that in the US, between a third and half of ALL our food gets wasted? During the war, Britain just couldn’t sustain waste like that. It was so difficult to supply the whole population with the basic calories everyone needed that even tiny amounts of food waste were hugely problematic.

There were campaigns about making everything last, from bread to vegetables. Rationing helped, because people tried very hard to make food last when they knew they couldn’t get any more until they got new ration coupons.

Here’s the skills my grandmother used to reduce wastefulness.

Canning

It’s all very well to be able to grow your own food, but how do you make it last the winter? One answer, of course, is canning. My grandmother learned how to can at meetings of the local Women’s Institute, and canned up tons of the food she grew in her back yard.

I love canning. It’s strangely satisfying to do, and I love the feeling of looking at the rows and rows of shiny jars in our store room and knowing that whatever befalls our family, we will be fed for years even if we have to bug in and can’t get food from outside for a long time.

So many veggies can be canned. You should absolutely give it a go!

Keep fresh food fresh

So much food goes bad because we leave it out in the warm air, or don’t pack it up properly.

Just a few simple methods can keep food fresh for longer. For instance, if you keep the end piece of a loaf of bread and place it back against the bit you have cut, bread won’t go stale so quickly. If you keep food in a cool cellar rather than a warm kitchen, it lasts longer. Make sure packets are always tightly closed, and use up jars and cans before moving on to the next.

And if your bread does go stale, you can always make some delicious bread and butter pudding to use it up!

Use food scraps to make more food

What do you do with food scraps? Most American households just throw their food scraps away, plain and simple. But you can nearly always turn food scraps into more food.

In my grandmother’s wartime home, there was a clear plan for all scraps.

Basic greenery scraps, like weeds and carrot tops, went straight out to the chickens. If she was feeling lazy, my grandmother would just open the kitchen window and throw the scraps right out to them.

Food offcuts like potato and carrot peelings or the ends of turnips went into the pig bucket. This was a bucket that my grandmother kept in the kitchen. Every few days, or whenever the bucket was full, my grandma would take the bucket to the end of the road, where her friend kept their pig club pig, and she would feed the scraps to the pig.

Anything else went onto a compost heap to be dug into the ground to grow more vegetables.

If you’ve not got much food in the house, you cannot let any go to waste. If you’re interested, I found Second World War recipes for reducing food waste in this book on Amazon, and some of them are pretty much exactly the recipes my grandmother used!

Part Three: Make Do And Mend

My grandmother only very rarely bought new clothes, even long after the war. This was because she had learned to do with very few clothes during the war, and to buy more seemed extravagant to her.

Material, fabrics and labour were at a premium in wartime Britain, because so many resources had to go towards the war effort. Clothes were rationed like food, so my grandmother and her friends had to resort to all sorts of creative tactics.

Mending

One thing my grandmother did that I still do was to mend absolutely everything. People are often surprised when I mend a sweater or winter coat that I have torn, because it’s gotten so normal to just go buy more. But if you do it carefully and practice enough, mended clothes often look as good as new and go on to last for years!

I can’t say I’m nearly as frugal about mending as my grandmother was, but I do try.

Upcycling

Another thing my grandmother and her friends did was to make their own clothes.

She used to tell me that there would be crazes for a new type of clothing every few months, and everybody would have to go make it at home. Once it was these particular sweaters that everybody was knitting. Another time it was pretty little collars for dresses that everybody sewed. She and her circle of girlfriends would collect up patterns and share them around.

One time she had all her friends round for a knitting session. There was an air-raid warning, and they all climbed into the shelter together and had a fabulous time knitting and chatting in the dark!

I don’t make all of our clothes, but I do knit scarves and jumpers, sometimes even from our own sheeps’ wool. They don’t look very professional, I have to admit, but there’s love in them and they keep the family warm.

I do like to ‘upcyle’ old clothes by changing the neckline or the hemline now and again to make them look new. I find it fun to try and spot whether my friends think it’s a new item of clothing.

Fixing anything and everything

My grandmother also had to become a bit of a handy-man and learn to fix things when they broke. She could put up a bit of fencing in minutes, and knew how to turn just about anything into a knitting needle. We used to joke that she could probably build a house if you gave her a pile of old wood and enough time.

She also learned how to turn just about anything into makeup. She even used to chew on berries to make her lips look red.

Now I’m not nearly as resourceful as my wonderful grandmother was, but I do have some DIY knowledge to add to my homesteading skills toolbox. For instance, I do know how to change a tyre, how to fix most of our implements and how to get the generator going again when it won’t work.

I’d highly recommend learning some DIY homesteading skills to help you through.

Finally, here’s a bonus homesteading skill that doesn’t really fit into the above categories but which I still think is really important: community living.

My grandmother couldn’t have survived the war without her friends, family and local community.

They helped each other through and shared what they had. My grandmother knew nothing about homesteading before the war. Her friends gave her seeds and chicks, her neighbours gave her advice, her local women’s group gave her skills like canning and they all shared what they had, like the pig club.

Community is what made it all work.

And that’s something my family try to incorporate into our own homesteading.

We learn from our neighbours and friends and share with them. If I provide my neighbour with a few spare eggs now and again, I know that next autumn I’ll be getting baskets of glorious, juicy pears from her trees. I taught my friend what I know about canning, and she taught me how to replace a tyre. What goes around comes around, and that really does go for homesteading as well!

The basic homesteading skills my grandmother learned during World War Two have helped me through good times and bad on my own homestead. Here’s hoping that one day, they will help you too!

Let me know what homesteading skills or inspirations you have learned from others, whether they were learned in a war or not. I’d really love to hear from you!

And, Grandma: thank you so much for everything.

Love,

Annie

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