They use javex now for bleaching. We used to have a big iron boiler on the stove and we used lye, little flakes of powerful stuff. Shake some of that in your water and you would scald your clothes. You would wash in it, and scald it, and rinse it.

If we didn't have any of this canned lye we used to save our wood ashes from the wood stove. We would put the ashes into a boiler and steep it on the stove, and then we would take it off to cool. That's just as good as the canned lye. It'd be right clear.

When you killed your animals in the fall they would have a lot of fat on them. You'd trim all that off and save it. You'd boil that on the stove and put this canned lye into it. After it boiled for so long, there would be nothing left. The fat would be all boiled out. We dipped out any lumps and let the rest set in the pot. Then we'd cut it out in junks and put it away. It would dry right hard to make beautiful soap.

We used to use only the animal fat, but now, a lot of people, like father and others, they also made it from a little seal fat. It had a terrible smell. And there's fat in the cod oil. We used to make soap out of that, but it was terrible. You'd rinse the clothes a lot, but the smell wouldn't come off.

But the fat from your meats didn't smell so bad.

We put in potatoes, turnip, cabbage, beets and carrot, parsnips and grew pumpkins and zucchinis. I grew some very big pumpkins. Not that long ago, I think it was '88, I planted my garden, and then I went to Ontario. When I came back it was still July and there were only four plants. The rest didn't come.

By the last part of September I had four large pumpkins. I had a forty-five pound one, a fifty, a fifty-five and a sixty. They were the biggest ones I ever grew. The rest of the time I only had small ones. Ten or fifteen pounds would be the biggest.

We would grow cucumbers and cauliflower too and make up our own pickles. Bread and butter pickles, and mustard pickles. We'd make a nice bit of that. After we got a deep freeze, we would boil down our turnip tops. We grew our own onions too, you know.