Gardens were a source of food and at times additional income for southern Alberta farming families. Below are some stories about gardens that were shared in the Oral History interviews done for this project. Cale Harris outlines how some of his early childhood jobs involved helping in the garden, and how produce from the garden enabled his family to barter for goods at the store that they were unable to grow themselves, such as sugar and flour. Virginia Smith describes how her family grew strawberries as a source of income and how that helped her family during the Great Depression prior to WWII.

Cale Harris:

“As I became old enough, I became my mother's helper in the house and around the house and in the yard. They had quite a large garden vegetable garden, and also grew strawberries and they had a plum tree and crabapple trees and raspberry bushes. And of course, we grew almost everything in the garden that we needed to grow up for our own food. They also shared their work and produce with a number of other friends that lived in the town of Coaldale and also in the city of Lethbridge. One of my jobs was out in the garden was to pull weeds which there always seemed to be an abundance of out of the rows of vegetables. And and then as I got a bit older and a little bit stronger and could handle a hoe, then I used a hoe to hoe the the rows of vegetables and the weeds and then I was trained and instructed as to how to irrigate the garden with flood irrigation and bringing water down each vegetable row and seeing that the vegetables got irrigated properly. And then I helped my mother in the house with her cooking and in the summertime, I would be instructed to "Cale go out and pull me some carrots out of the garden and clean them and wash them and take the tops off and bring them into the kitchen." Or it was "go pick some beans" or "pick some peas and shell the peas and get them ready to be cooked." And "dig some potatoes, bring the potatoes in cleaned." And then I would have to wash the potatoes and scrape or peel them and get them ready for cooking. And so yeah, I was kind of my mother's little helper.”

LaRae Smith:

“Was any of the produce from the garden sold for profit by your family or was that...”

Cale (Aaron) Harris  17:38

“um a number of things that we grew in the garden we had quite an abundance. And there were stores, small grocery stores and Coaldale that needed fresh produce to sell to residents of Coaldale that didn't have a garden. And my parents would frequently take in orders of possibly green peas or beans. Strawberries case of strawberries and they didn't sell them to the store. They used them as a barter. And they would trade the produce for possibly some bags of sugar. And also some bags of flour and different products that we normally would have to buy, we would trade our produce for the supplies from the store. And of course we always made sure that the quality of the produce was really good and there was a pretty good demand. It wasn't a business thing. But during the depression years, nobody had any money. And so you had to do what you had to do in order to you know survive and get flour for baking and making bread and rolls and stuff like that. And my mother used to bake bread all the time and she did a lot of baking. And she did a lot of preserving to canning of vegetables and fruit. And so then that's where we needed to have quite a bit of sugar for the canning and preserving process that she went through.”

Virginia Smith:

“Well, we had a big strawberry patch for just before the war broke out. And then after the war, we had trouble getting pickers for the strawberries. So we had to plow them up. But I don't know how many acres of strawberries that we had. But dad had an old truck and he would go into town about three times a week and he would go to a certain place and that's where he'd meet the pickers. Anybody that wanted to pick strawberries. Then he'd take them out to the farm, they'll stand up in the back of the truck, go out there and they would start picking and mother would be out there with their boxes and her little baskets. And she was sorting them as fast as they picked them. And so it's but they would probably have them all picked by noon. And so then they would load up and and mother would have the strawberries all in the crates, and they load them up in the truck and then dad take them to town, along with the pickers. And then he would drive the streets and Raymond trying to sell these strawberries. And so they made quite a bit of profit selling strawberries. So it was a very it was hard, but they had to plow them up. I remember waking up in the morning, just a little girl and and go out. Pick myself some strawberries and put it on some puffed wheat and that was my breakfast. I just love the strawberries they were so good.”