The Beauty of a Summer Garden
Growing up, we had a garden, which started as a project to earn a Brownie Girl Scout badge, but turned into a something much more elaborate with each passing year.
The garden was easy to maintain the first year, so it was fun. But then my dad got garden fever. During the winter, we flipped through seed catalogs, and he read and researched organic gardening (and subscribed to Organic Gardening magazine), studied seed varieties, compared fertilizing techniques and more. He brought in railroad crossties to build a huge U-shaped, raised garden bed, and began building a compost pile in the middle of the U.
I don’t remember where / when he got the dirt for the garden, but I sure remember some of the ingredients of the compost pile.
We lived on a lake and went fishing almost daily. We fished for food, not for sport, so we kept the freezer full of bream, crappie, stripe, bass, and catfish. If we caught them, we had to clean them, and all the fish remains went to the compost pile. Veggie scraps, too. Pop brought in manure at one point, but I think we all tried to forget that part.
The day the seeds arrived was exciting, because of one particular package. All of the seeds, except in the one package, were “normal” seeds, which we’d seen and used before. But this one packet was onion seed tape and seemed so magical and fun. (And a lot less work than planting those tiny little seeds one-by-one.) Pop handed me the end of one tape, and told me to run to the end of the row and place it in the trench he’d made. We quickly pushed dirt on top, and the onions were done! Best invention ever, at least to kids itching to play.
Harvests were the best. We’d meet Pop in the garden after he got home from work, and we’d “have dinner” fresh off the plants and vines. Cucumbers, tomatoes, green beans, radishes, onions, squash. Eating raw corn straight from the stalk as we stood there in the summer heat with the rich soil under our bare feet was the finest gourmet meal we’d ever tasted. (At that age, our only gourmet meal, but still one of the very best decades later.) We ate tomatoes like apples, with juice running down our chins.
More hard work came with the harvest, from our garden and from local farmers. Early Saturday mornings, Mom would take the three of us kids and head to the farmer’s market where she’d buy cantaloupes (3 for $1 - I remember that because there were three of us kids!), and corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, and purple hull peas by the bushel. All summer, she prepped the freshest of fruits and vegetables to freeze, but also filled our cupboards with jams, jellies, pickles and other pickled vegetables like okra, and chow-chow (my very favorite.) Our winter meals were filled with all the goodness, and it took about that long for the purple stains to vanish from our hands.
These days, I have a small patio garden, but I still pour through the seed catalogs every winter. Harvests occasionally produce a gourmet meal - I grew green beans for the first time in a container this year! When the first two beans were ready, they went in our salad for dinner. Still gourmet dining at its finest.
Do you garden? What part of gardening is your favorite?
