Ivan Seeking said:
Did you grow up a city or country girl?
I grew up in the suburbs, but my mom spent part of her life growing up on her grandfather's farm. My greatgrandparents were long dead by the time I came along, so I don't know anything about what they were like, but from my parent's stories, they sounded a bit cold...they raised rabbits, and let my mom have the runt of one litter as a pet...but only until Fluffy showed up in the stew pot one day. I can understand that to a farmer, one rabbit probably looks pretty much the same as every other rabbit, but you don't give one to a kid to keep as a pet and then make dinner out of it!
My grandparents still kept a lot of the country habits...even when they were offered city water, they opted to keep their well water (they think it tastes good......I think it has always had a metallic taste to it; their house still has radiators for heat too, and just window units for air-conditioning...but they live in an area that is now highly coveted by "city-folk", so I'm rather curious to see what happens when it's time to sell that house...I suspect it's still going to sell for a ridiculously high price, but the buyers will plan to gut everything). Anyway, we used to say we were going to the farm when we'd visit them. They used to grow an enormous garden every year (well, my grandfather did, and my grandmother was happy it kept him out of her hair until it was time to pick the vegetables). Their yard was two lots deep and still has an extra half lot to one side that they bought up and isn't large enough to sell as an individual lot. All along the perimeter were mature fruit trees...several varieties of apple, peach, pear, plum...it looked like an orchard. When you walked out of the back door of the house, there was enough lawn for one of those old gliders or sliders or whatever they were called...two seats facing each other that you could rock back and forth...a small grassy area, grandma's large clothesline (she never had a dryer, but had poles set up to string 3 clotheslines across), a row of blueberry bushes, and then garden everywhere. The entire second lot and the half lot on the side were tilled and garden planted. My grandfather still plants a modest garden on the half lot, but sold off the back lot when illness started making it too difficult to keep up with the work.
We used to get enough vegetables out of that garden to freeze and can and eat fresh for several families to live off...my grandparents always had a large chest freezer packed full, plus an entire wall of shelves of canned goods in the basement, as did my parents (we actually had to build an extra storage area in the basement for all the jars of canned goods...I grew to really hate September when every weekend was spent canning vegetables until my fingers were raw from snapping beans or peeling tomatoes or shucking corn), and my aunt and uncle, plus there was still plenty leftover that my grandparents would give away to neighbors or families at church that needed some extra food. People used to tell him he should set up a roadside stand and sell some of the vegetables, but my grandfather always insisted that as long as his family was well-provided for, he would give away any extra...he liked the idea of giving the food to people he knew would appreciate it and needed it, and didn't want to sell it to a bunch of strangers who could afford to buy all their food at the supermarket (even if he proudly admitted it wasn't nearly as good as his homegrown vegetables). (Oh, yeah, we also had a rather large garden in our own yard...all the extra seed and seedlings my grandfather didn't have room to plant wound up in our yard...a LOT of tomatoes, once or twice we grew corn, a few rows of beans or peas, spinach, some cucumbers...we also grew the garlic...once you plant it once and get it started, it'll come back every year on its own...it didn't look as pretty as what you buy in the store, but it tasted all the same).
My cousins, sister and I would joke that we were the migrant workers. In the spring, my father would help out with tilling the garden, then it was the job of the kids to run along behind and pick out any and all rocks we could find (I'm sure a few got thrown at siblings along the way to keep it fun
). All summer long, we'd help pick weeds (when we were little, we only were given that job after the plants were big enough for us to easily know the difference between the vegetables and the weeds...when we got older and could identify the seedlings, we could help with weeding around seedling beds too), and pluck off the potato bugs and tomato worms as we found them. And then fall would come, and it was time to harvest. I HATED it when my grandparents would call that the beans were ready, bring the kids over to help pick them. I don't remember ever being too young to not help pick something. When we were very little, we were given baskets to pick up the fallen fruit from the trees, and as we got older, we moved onto picking beans or ripe tomatoes, then corn as we learned to tell the difference between the ears that were ready to pick and those that weren't (I can feel the outside of an ear of corn and tell you if it's good without ever having to resort to peeling back the husk...of course, when I was a kid, it was somewhat irrelevant...you just cut out the worm or bad kernels and cooked the rest anyway), and then when we were teenagers, we could help with everything, including digging the potatoes...the meal after a long day of harvesting inevitably included a lot of potatoes skewered by youngsters weilding a pitchfork until we learned better to dig in from the sides and not too close to the plant itself.
Oops, sorry, I got carried away reminiscing.
As much as I hated the work then, I do miss snacking off vegetables picked straight from the vine, and even though it was a lot of work, it was also a lot of fun having the whole family out together; it sure seems it was a lot better way to grow up than spending the weekends sitting alone with a Playstation.
Its not just the one tree, its the other hundred or so. But I have the car down here tonight.
Though, I guess Ivan could always install an old-fashioned hand-pump on the well.