MONDAY MORNING MEMORIES: My Mother's Garden

Written for this blog and cross-posted to the my family history blog about ancestral stories.

Photo by author's mother - Shirley Fleece Moore, Hardin County, Ohio, about 1970.

As I explained to the children where I worked as a tour guide on an agri-tourism based farm outside of Atlanta, my earliest garden memories are of working with my grandmother when I was as early as four years old. My mom was an avid amateur photographer but I've never located a picture of my grandmother's garden. My memories are so vivid, some sixty later, I could draw an illustration of it, if I had any talent along those lines.

If I were speaking with high schoolers during these Georgia farm tours, I would joke about what fun it was when I was four, and awful when I was a teenager.  By then, I felt like I was being sent out to the garden to weed as a form of punishment. You know, because I was a teenager and all.

But I would quickly follow up with all of the amazing things I have seen, and learned, and experienced in the garden. Sometimes I would throw in some incidents from other garden eras such as post WW2 Victory Gardens or the Back To The Land Movement (the teens especially liked the hippie stories, lol.)

Mom's garden the year before the hard freeze killed the cannas (the large, red spike flowers in the photo) stored in the basement. These beautiful flowers had been distributed among the gardeners at church and they multiplied greatly, but were not winter hardy in our zone. Mom was devastated but I think Dad might have been secretly relieved because he had to dig them up every fall for protection and stash them in our basement. 

 Pictured are (l) unknown friend of (r) Edna Myers from whom Mom and Dad purchased the farm where I was raised. One of my brothers is hiding behind one of the cannas.

Mom couldn't stand a weed and Dad had very specific gender guidelines in those days, so as soon as the boys were old enough to be on a tractor, the garden belonged to Mom and me. Mostly me I felt, you know, that teenage thing again.

In some circles, my hard labor (seriously?!) meant I developed a strong back from years of yanking weeds out of the garden or running the wheel-hoe down the rows, but really, all it did was make me want to escape the farm. I was slightly too young to run away to a commune, and I was only in Middle School or whatever they call it now, during Woodstock. No such thing as earbuds while doing garden work but I could put a transistor radio in my pocket!

My husband's Grandmother Maggie and (her son) Uncle Paul. Seems like everyone had one of those wheel hoes but dad bought an old broken one at an auction and fixed it back up (he did that type of thing a lot!) It was still in use it when I left home.

Love that Grandmother had her purse with her while holding the hoe in her Sunday best, lol. I've seen a lot of photographs from that era, a good garden was something to be proud of.

In the 1960s, gardens on farms in our area (the midwest) were plowed and disked before the men went to the fields for the season. There was no succession planting or rototilling and no mulching of anything. Everything was stuck in the ground, not in raised beds. For the most part, we didn't even use clay flower-pots, our flowers were planted in rows with the vegetables. I do remember peas always being planted on the end so they could be mowed over when done since they are done very early.

I wasn't able to find anyone who had a photo or postcard of the hardware store in the small town where I lived, We always bought our seeds there by weight. Library of Congress photograph.

We went to the local hardware store with its 100-year old creaky wood floors and manual cash registers to purchase our seeds by the ounce or pound. We always had Black-Seeded Simpson lettuce, and onions were purchased in sets. This spring salad was the only salads we ate until we reached dating age and expanded our horizons by eating in restaurants - the spring ritual of green lettuce and green onions were chopped and stirred into a dressing made of Miracle Whip and a touch of sugar and salt. We ate it every lunch and dinner until the lettuce became too bitter and bolted.

We planted Cherry-Belle radishes, Boston Pickler cucumbers, loads of green and waxed beans (the latter being a yellow version of green beans), Big Boy ad Better Boy tomatoes which Mom religiously juiced then canned in a water-bath canner, and sweet corn, which we froze.

Peas, I decided very early on, was the most disappointing vegetable on the face of this earth, shelling and shelling and ending up with, I swear, one pint! We never heard of eating the pods until this century.

Corn at tassel time (late summer). Library of Congress.

One year, I'm not really sure why, we ate field corn boiled in sugar water while it was still in milk stage (meaning soft. Corn is not harvested until it is completely dry, sometime in the fall.) Perhaps the hardware store had run out of sweet corn, or, more likely, it was one of Dad's failed attempts at frugality. Believe me, it was horrible (as was trying to sneak raw milk into our diet by putting it in an emptied grocery-store milk container -- it is a fine art to raise good raw milk and Dad didn't have it, sadly.)

Potato ad from Weimer's Fruit Market (Lima, Ohio), no longer in existence. 

Via ancestry.com's newspaper collection 2020.

I don't ever remember raising potatoes, perhaps because the price vs. manual work ratio was so off - about $2.00 per 50# in the mid-1960s. Everybody had a cellar or a basement in our area and 50-pound bags were easily available at the local grocery store, and easily storable for long periods.

Mom never saved seeds and never yanked a plant out after it had done it's job which I never quite understood because the chickens certainly would have enjoyed it. I remember being sent out to the garden to pick lettuce for The Salad and, always looking for a more efficient way to do something, I just yanked the plant out, ran my hand down the stem and watched the leaves peel off.

Mom was a "hysterical screamer", not an "angry screamer" and believe me, that was the last time I did that!

As Mom and Dad grew older, the garden grew smaller. Eventually they gave up the large garden that ran the full length of the yard for a couple small plots in the barnyard because there were no longer any animals there.

It became harder to bend over, or to weed in the heat, or to wrangle the heavy canners, or even to lean deep into one of the chest freezers. It was a slow disappearance, and my brother tried to encourage Mom to continue making pickles from her grandmother's recipe, so totally different than other pickle anywhere, but even that eventually became too much.

Mom died  couple years ago at the age of 82. Some of the grandchildren got together and made small flower bouquets for guests to take after the visitation at the funeral home.

Attached to each bouquet was a photocopy Great-Grandma Jennie's Three-Day Chunk Pickle recipe.

In Mom's handwriting.

It was fitting.