BRIGG BLOG SCRATCHES AROUND FOR MEMORIES OF FREE FOOD & ITCHING POWDER

Brigg hedgerows, bushes and trees offer free food for the table at this time of year (mid-September). Although not exactly Fruits of the Forest, there are brambles, apples and pairs about.
Some households with fruit-bearing trees in their gardens still share the surplus with family members and neighbours to make pies, crumbles, jam and even crab apple jelly.
But this is not as common as it was decades ago when free food for the table was eagerly awaited at a time when there was less money about than today.
Our Gran, who lived on Hawthorn Avenue, tended strawberry plants and bushes of redcurrants, blackcurrants and gooseberries in her back garden, to be eaten at the height of summer - washed down with a cold glass of Brigg-made LAWS or White's pop. That was back in the 1960s.
One of our pictures, taken this week, shows rosehips, packed with Vitamin C, on an area of public open space in the town.
In the late 1960s, some Brigg youngsters liked to extract the 'insides' and shove the contents down the back of other kids' shirts and blouses. This prank involved what was known as Itching Powder. The rosehip hairs were the active ingredient and proved unpleasant when they touched the skin. Don't try this today, folks!
All the cereal grain has now been harvested from local fields without the stubble burning which once followed - a practice halted many years ago but still remembered by many of us.
Thoughts will soon turn to potatoes, for which Lincolnshire is renowned. Machines harvest them today, but in the 1960s and 1970s teams of women and children with baskets still hand-picked 'spuds' in return for some welcome money from local farmers. It was hard work but there were many takers.
PICTURED: Rosehips and fruit growing in Brigg, mid-September 2020.