Activities of My Youth
Since I was a little girl I enjoyed being outdoors. I used to take long walks in the woods with the family dogs, a hound, a collie and a mixture of dalmatian and doberman, which belonged to me. We would hike along the PG&E trails which often ran parallel with irrigation ditches. These paths were banked with "Mountain Misery", a pungent smelling ground cover that in the Spring would blossom with tiny white flowers. If I wasn't out hiking with the dogs I would hop onto my bicycle and ride into the small town we lived near in the foothills of California.
By the time I took Home Economics in High School I had already been designing and sewing my own clothes. My parents were not well off so buying fabric at a fabric store was a seldom experienced luxury. Instead my mother would point me to an extra closet which had a lot of her old clothing from the 40's. She let me take them apart and redesign them into stylish clothing more suitable to my era, which by that time was the 1960's. I fashioned my clothing after then popular designer, Mary Quant, which were in vogue at that time. The handbag on the right is a recently completed project.
Gardening
I started my first garden of my own when I bought my first home. The purchase price at that time was $16,750.00! I can still hear my friends saying, "Are you crazy; how are you going to afford the payments?" The monthly payment was only $148.00 but that was a lot of money in that decade. The house was quite small, only two bedrooms, a living room/dining room, a kitchen, a back porch and one bathroom. However the yard was huge! The side yards were not that large but the front and back yards were splendid!
Out of a complete sense of naivety I purchased an entire flat of tomatoes to plant in my garden the first Spring in my first home. Needless to say I had more tomatoes than I could possibly eat (or give away for that matter) and that is how I ended up learning to can food from my garden.