Wartime Farm

I'm not exactly sure how I found it, but I love love love love love this show.

From Amazon:

What if the most demanding battle of World War II wasn't on the front line but back home in Britain's countryside?  

When war broke out in 1939, 70% of Britain's food was imported. A German blockade would have meant disaster and Great Britain would have been starved into submission. Huge and rapid changes were required to reshape Britain's food production and this had enormous impact on both the agricultural and the domestic scenes.  

Wartime Farm sets these changes within a historical context and looks at the day-to-day life of that time. Following the footsteps of their World War II predecessors Peter, Ruth and Alex must move more land than ever under cultivation, switch from livestock to arable farming, get to grips with new-fangled machinery and look to Land Girls and other unfamiliar forms of labour to help them grow that crucial food.
Wartime Farm offers compelling insight into:

1. How agriculture was changed dramatically in order to produce more food

1. How people were mobilised, from Land Girls to POWs

1. Life in the wartime kitchen and garden, from digging for victory to making the most of rations

This fascinating chapter in Britain's recent history shows how our predecessors lived and thrived in difficult conditions with extreme frugality and ingenuity. From growing your own vegetables and keeping chickens in the back yard, to having to 'make do and mend', many of the challenges faced by wartime Britons have resonance today. Fascinating historical detail and atmospheric story-telling make this a truly compelling read.

So I guess it's easy to guess why I'd be into this show.  It is basically a reality-type show that is also a history lesson in day-to-day life for country people in England during WWII.  They had to be creative and industrious.  They had to double their crop production or England might have be starved out and the outcome of WWII may have played out differently.

I love learning about how they cooked and used everything - and nothing went to waste.  When you cooked up your chicken that you just plucked, you could also use the feathers to make "in a pinch" douvey-type bedding for evacuees that were (with only a day's notice) moved into your barns.  To not use as little cooking fuel as possible, they would use hayboxes.  Hayboxes are sort of like the old school version of a slow cooker.

I made my own version of a haybox today.  I was making some stew, brought the whole thing up to a boil, then placed it in a box (with the pot lid on) with woven placemats in many layers around the sides. Then I put additional towels around it around it, another placemat on top, then a pair of clean, folded up sweat pants on top of that, and a pan to weight it all down.

Later today, we'll pull the pot out of the box and bring it back to up to a boil (to avoid the risk of unwanted bacteria) and then tuck into din-din!