My husband would plow the land. We used the horse in the garden. He would be busy at the fishing but he would help me to make the drills. I would have to do the planting, and as soon as the children were big enough, at six or seven, they would help to drop the potato seed.

Both of us did the weeding. That was the killer, when the weeds got out of hand. In the gardens we used stable manure, sheep manure. We also used herring. We set our potato seeds so that they were a herring-length apart. Later years we could buy fertilizer.

We would dig the potatoes, dry them and put them in bags and put them in the cellar for the winter. My husband did the lifting. After the potatoes were in the cellar, he would be cutting wood for the winter. When the snow came, he would haul the wood out with the horse.

We wouldn't have enough wood to do us all year round, because we had to keep our fire on for heating the pots of water, every day.

We used to have our own vinegar, too. We'd have our own vinegar plant growing in a bottle of water. The plant is a velum, almost like a jellyfish. You add sugar and the plant turns it into vinegar.

You could make your own cough medicine out of white spruce. You took the bark off the tree and inside that was kind of a white velum. You boiled that on the stove. You put a bit of sugar with it and made your own cough medicine. I haven't made any for a long time now: I used to put something else in it, a bit of vinegar and sugar. Probably molasses. That would stop your cough a bit, especially if you had a real bad one.

You never heard tell of turkey much for Christmas. You would have a goose. You'd save that goose grease and you'd rub that on the children's chests and on their backs. You'd give them cod oil to drink for their cold.

You'd give the children cod oil all the time. A teaspoon in the morning. Some of them liked it, more of them didn't. One of my children, I'm not sure which one it was, loved it! I had to keep the bottle hidden from her. There were some more then who weren't too happy about having to take it.