Mom had a green thumb and she enjoyed the whole process of gardening. Every February the garden catalogs began arriving and Mom poured over the pages. Vegetables, herbs, annuals, shrubs and sometimes trees were marked for varieties she liked and the list was pared down to an affordable level. A few new things might come from the catalog. Mail order was slow, so the decisions had to made in a timely manner.

Most of the seeds and plants were from local sources. Mom kept seeds from heirloom variety vegetables, usually the tomatoes. A couple of seasons were possible with harvested seeds with patience and care. After that, it was harder to get the seeds to sprout.

Leftover seeds were never discarded, whether they were hybrid or heirloom. Once my then-husband found a variety of sweet corn that was the best we ever tasted. We got a bushel of seed, gave it to Mom and Dad who gave it to other family and friends. Mom and Dad froze the rest. The seeds were viable for about three years. That is how the gardening culture works, people share seed, plants and if nothing else, the names of great varieties that grow well in the community. Sure wish I could remember the hybrid sweet corn we liked so much.

Mom was fearless with her selections. Swiss chard, pink green beans, sugar baby watermelons, red popcorn come to mind as some of her experiments. Most seeds she planted bore something, a few became new garden staples. Each new plant meant we were able to have something new to eat that was fresh from the garden. There were few total failures with either the plant or seed not growing or its taste not up to its description. Mom didn’t mind that so much. You never know if you don’t try.

Mom planted broccoli and cauliflower for a few years. She learned that the sun damaged the heads of these plants. Her solution was to clothespin leaves together over the center stalks to shade the important parts. It worked and we enjoyed them fresh and frozen! One year, Mom planted about four varieties of lettuce and three types greens. Some of them we had never eaten before, like the Swiss chard. We learned that sometimes, simpler is better because the fancier you get, the more care it might require. While we enjoyed the broccoli, it was a bother to keep it covered.

The garden was large and had wide spaces between the rows so that Dad could cultivate it with the tractor. Hoeing and hand weeding was on the chore list to get the weeds in the rows with the vegetables. Cultivating in garden and farming lingo means to scrape or disturb the top layer of the soil to remove weeds between rows. There are garden sized cultivators, ones that you push or ones that are self propelled. They are troublesome compared to sitting on a tractor for the same job. Using the tractor meant that the rows had to be as straight as possible. Any curve or misplaced seeds would be wiped out with Dad’s first run.

Plowing, discing, mowing and jobs like these puts you in a sort of reverie. This is not an unpleasaant way to pass a day on the farm, making sure to watch for obstacles. In a big field that you know, the chances of trouble are pretty low. Dad had a bad habit of day dreaming when he worked in the garden or mowed the yard. Maybe he dropped into the same zen that he did in the fields, we will never know.

‘When Mom planted trees, shrubs or perennial flowers in the yard she did so with some anxiety. She put stakes around the new planting, strung rags on the stakes as flags, what she could think of to draw attention to it. There were many times that her efforts were not enough. Dad mowed over so many of her plants that it was like a contest between them and a running family joke. Only Mom didn’t laugh.

Dad didn’t damage as much in the garden with his daydreaming. I think it was because he helped plant and seed and had the boundaries mentally marked better. There was one memorable time in the garden when he made Mom as angry as she ever was with him. It was over strawberries.

Strawberry plants must be three years old to bear strawberries. The first two years, there are just green plants. Usually you buy plants that are a year old to plant in your garden , so you save a year’s time, but you still have to wait through the second year. That is what Mom and Dad did, they put out several one year old strawberries. The second year had passed. The third spring, Mom was very much anticipating picking fresh berries in May or early June. It was plowing time, so late in March, and Dad was in the garden with the tractor, plowing along.

Mom saw the tractor heading for the strawberries and she yelled, screamed, waved her arms and did everything but stand in front of it. She might have done that as well, but she was too far away to get there. Dad kept an even pace, didn’t acknowledge her and plowed up the three year old strawberries. Mom had a hoe in her hand, she threw it and went into the house. She said she was afraid to get too close, she might have swung the hoe in Dad’s direction. Mom and Dad never planted any more strawberries.

When Mom and Dad’s garden was the largest, five years perhaps, about 3 acres were in production. An acre was in tomatoes and vining plants like cucumbers, a half acre of potatoes, half in corn and the rest in other kinds of vegetables and produce. My older sister and her husband helped with the garden during those years, the tomatoes and potatoes in particular. Split labor provides for a split in the harvest. There was always more than they needed and the family shared the bounty.

We all had fresh vegetables and some berries and melons. When we prepared it, the flavors were amazing. Simple dishes had layers of tastes that we did not add to the pot. This is what modern palettes are missing.

It is what I miss too, more so because I remember the citrus of coarsely chopped leaf lettuce, so fresh that the dew was washed off when it was washed in the sink. The green jungle-y taste of fresh asparagus, the bite of a small red radish. Sweet corn was so sweet and fresh that the cobs were sticky after we bit off the kernels. There is a saying that goes like this, “If you want fresh corn, don’t trip on the way back from the corn patch. Throw that out and pick fresh ones”.

The term “organic” was decades away when Mom and Dad grew the gardens. They used manure from the dairy barn when they added plants like strawberries and asparagus. They used insecticides to eliminate a variety of bugs, the kinds that move into the garden in swarms. It was the bugs versus the vegetables and each side won at times.

The big garden, the work to put it out, keep weeds at a mininum, the watchfulness against insects, marauding cattle and nibbling rabbits were to get big harvests. We ate a lot during the growing season, but the majority was preserved. The amount of food that Mom canned or froze every year amazes me still. She did it all in a small, un-airconditioned kitchen.

Mom’s goal for canned green beans was 100 quarts in the season. She froze over 50 pints of corn, cut from the cob. She canned whole tomatoes, tomato soup, sweet relish, three or four kinds of pickles, blackberry jam, grape juice, and grape jelly. She froze applesauce, apples, green peppers, yellow squash, pumpkin, and winter squashes. I know I forgot several.

The grown children and grand children in our family felt that we knew how much we were loved by Mom. Where we stood in the pecking order was based on how she gave out certain home canned and frozen goods. The more the better.

Grape juice, jams and jellies, and pickles were once part of the cellar pantry treasure trove. Time changes things. The grapes stopped bearing after decades, the work that went into pickles became onerous as Mom got older. We occasionally got pints of blackberry jam, but that was a rare thing, so we were more appreciative than greedy.

Frozen apple sauce in quarts and pints, quarts of tomato soup and pints of sweet relish were jealously counted by the kids and grandkids when Mom gave us the go-ahead to get some from the cellar shelves to take home. We remembered from trip to trip how many were left, figured who gained access since we had and we calculated our chances of getting more the next time. Begging did not help increase our loot, Mom was fair with the bounty. Adult children can still act like children when it comes to splitting up favorite foods.

Each item on the list required hours of work in the garden gathering the vegetables and in the kitchen, bushels of the vegetables and additional supplies that had to be purchased. Mom is a generous woman and she loved that we loved her cooking and her canning. This was a win/win situation, but I always thought that we got the better deal. Happy Early Mother’s Day.