Dust Bowl Days in Oklahoma

Reader Contribution by The Mother Earth News Editors
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This story is from Doris Zicafoose, submitted as part of our Wisdom From Our Elders collection of self-sufficient tales from yesteryear.

As I look across my 88 years, I realize it has been quite an adventurous life, growing up in the Dust Bowl days in Oklahoma with a father who thought trading horses was a profitable profession. With tractors replacing horses for farm work and the Great Depression at its onset, horse trading proved to be a poor choice of occupation. What little money Dad made was never enough to keep body and soul together.

We lived on the Old Home Place, a 60-acre worn-out farm. It couldn’t grow enough crops to support a family but it was a wonderful place for children to grow up. Dad always had a cow, and we always had a garden, except in the driest years of the 1930s. Those were the hardest. I remember when mom and dad planted the garden and there was no rain, so they carried buckets of water to try to get the seeds to sprout. It must have worked because I don’t remember ever going hungry, but that spring we ate a lot of poke greens; they were a nutritious weed that grew along the fence rows and tasted somewhat like spinach.

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