AT On... Green Living Skills Your Grandparents Mastered

When we talk about sustainable living and urban homesteading here, a lot of the skills involved are ones that we have to learn from scratch. They aren't things our mothers or fathers taught us (although some ... like mine ... might have tried).

Over on Plant Green, I recently noticed an article titled: "5 Essential Green Living Skills Our Grandparents Knew." I got a kick out of it because it's so true.

All five of the skills are things I'm either just learning to do or aspire to learn: organic gardening, food preservation, seed saving, cooking from scratch, and sewing. And all five of them are definitely things my grandparents knew how to do. In fact, in my case, my mom does all of these things on a regular basis ... except maybe the seed saving.

I know that plenty of people in our generation learned how to do these things along the way. But, when I think of my friends, very few know how to do any of it. So why do you think the value of these skills were lost? Why didn't they get passed down more carefully?

(Image: Flickr member amiefedora licensed for use under Creative Commons)

Comments (4)

My grandmothers never knew how to can foods in the first place. They all had full-time jobs and several kids to take care of. One specialized in Stouffer's and Sanka, the other in hot dogs rolled in mayo and corn flakes.

Convenience and time is why! But it is fun to reclaim these lost arts. The only one I haven't tackled is seed saving, but I hope to.

I think a lot of people tend to think of these things as things that poor people have to do to survive, so they stop doing them as soon as they have the means. They signal poverty to people and poverty is seen as shameful.

My mother has had an organic garden for my whole life, and she taught me to sew, but she's never been a great cook and she's never canned. Apparently, her mother canned food in a pressure canner and there was an incident where the top was blown off the canner--since then, there's been no convincing my mother that canning isn't a death-defying feat.

My grandmother lives on ready meals and gets a kick out of throwing practically new things away. She associates a lot of the stuff I do with her mother, and poverty, and post-war rationing.