The Legacy of Gardening

When I was very young, my dad cordoned off the steeply-sloping back corner of our half-acre lot, built a long, high L-shaped wall of concrete block (about 40 feet each way) to make a level section, and told my mother that when she could fill it with dirt we would put in a garden.

That was a summer of hard labor. There were acres of forest behind our house, so for weeks or months (it felt like years but I know that we actually got it done that summer), my mother dug up and hauled wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of dirt from the woods into the walled-off area. I know it was hundreds of loads. It was truck-loads of dirt brought up tiny bit by tiny bit. She would load up the wheelbarrow, we kids would pick out the rocks and roots, and then we would push it up the hill to the garden area. It was all we did that summer.

My dad was able to put in a garden the following Spring. We grew everything; cucumbers, squash, green beans, string peas, potatoes, carrots, beets, tomatoes, peppers, onions, garlic, okra and, one year, even corn. It was the most highly producing garden in the area and fed our family of 8 through every summer for literally decades. My mother canned everything she could, so the garden fed us through most winters also.

While my time-subdued memories of that garden are fond, in my youth I hated it. I would have rather read a book, watched television, or even just stared at a blank wall than spend time in the garden, yet my parents expected that we girls help weed and de-bug the garden, plus pick the produce. There was no sense in complaining; my mother had begun work as a five-year-old in the tobacco farms of rural Tennessee, carefully turning over the wide tobacco leaves, picking off the bugs on the underside, and squishing them between her fingers. As I said … no sympathy there.

So many years later, I have my own garden now. It measures a very modest 16 feet by 25 feet, and is one of the first things I put in here at ‘the new house’. I made a frame of fallen trees and … yes … hauled loads of dirt of out of the woods to fill it in. I have tried my hand at everything I remember tending as a youth. Corn was a failure, and I ripped the potato plants up before they were ready. But many other attempts have been successful. I do compost.

Every year I have a bumper crop of exactly one thing; last year it was Jeff’s hot peppers, the year before that it was cucumbers. The very first year, I grew okra and watered it with left-over coffee; the caffeine-happy plants grew over four feet high (which is very tall for okra) and the police helicopter flew over our property on a regular basis … trying to figure out if I was growing pot out here in the woods, I was sure. I would just wave up at them as they circled. I still have frozen okra from that summer, and it’s been five years.

Right now my radishes look like they will be a strong contender for this year’s bumper crop title.

I do not can my vegetables; I have found that just about anything will tolerate a gallon freezer bag. If I fill the deep freezer, I give the veggies away. But mostly, we just eat them until they are gone. I have so many recipes for fresh tomatoes, you would be amazed.

As a kid, picking spiky yellow bugs off the green beans (which I hated to eat anyway), I promised myself that I would never be so cruel to my children when I grew up, and I would never have a garden anyway. Well, I have the garden but I did keep my word about not making my girls work in it. In fact, they have to beg me for permission to enter it. I just love it. I love working in the dirt. I love to watch my little garden grow.

I have an inkling that, as grown women, my daughters will enjoy the same.