HOME GARDENER

The picture is of a plow. The part that look like blades from a wind mill are that part that need to be cleaned and greased. And as a bit of trivia, John Deere a blacksmith in 1837 made the first plow from wind mill parts.
This is a Garter Snake. My grandmother called them garden snakes.

As Old Trunks has stated previously, my grandparents were both gardeners. The processing of the canned goods kept them stocked throughout year until the next canning season. Grandma Mae had a cellar, she stored her potatoes and carrots, just like the Anderson's did. It was called canning but it was put up in jars. Why didn't they call it 'jarring'?

It didn't look that hard; as a Girl Scout, I decided to work on the Home Gardener Badge. If you can find an old Girl Scout hand book from the late forties, you will see that badges were much more complicated than they are now.

I enlisted help. Daddy would break and till the soil with the tractor and Grandma Julia would help me design the garden. After all, she was the person who sprinkled the seeds, dropped the left overs in her apron and sorted them out later. Benhard wasn't so lucky, he put the left over watermelon seeds in the oat box and Babe, Greg's pony, ate the seeds!

The first point in the hand book states:

1. Make a garden at least 10 x 12 in a place you know vegetables and flowers will grow. This may be one plot or the equal number of feet distributed in various parts of a piece of ground. Make a plan to show where the plants will be and how they are to be arranged. Take care of this garden for a season.

Well...that sounds simple enough but if 10 x 12 is good, why not double that? After all, you really can't count the path space can you? The garden COULD have been along the back side of the garage, more accessible to water and easier to work, but NO, we planted it in some place no one saw and the water had to be dragged in buckets!

The planning was easy. Peas, lettuce, radishes, and beets. Carrots, for sure. Grandma and I drove a stakes at each end where the row was to be, to this, a string was tied. Actually, it was more like a string was tied to one stake and pounded into the ground and the other stake with the other end of the string was pounded into the ground only after it lined up with the other. After the pounded and the stringing, she took the end of her hoe and made a furrow. This is where the seeds were dropped. This, she said, made a nice straight line and you would know just where to drop the seeds, then very carefully, the seeds were covered. After everything was planted, we put the empty seed package over the stake so we knew what should be growing and where. She explained to me that what ever was not in the rows, where weeds. Except, of course, for the lettuce, which was planted all the way around the garden to detour rabbits, which I never saw.

2. Raise one vegetable from seed.

All of it was seed. Oh, I get it! Onion sets and potatoes with eyes! Called seed onions and seed potatoes.

3. Learn what makes different types of soil, and know three different kinds of soil and the plants that prefer these. Show that you know the proper use of three types of fertilizers, such as sheep, cow, hen, or horse manure, phosphates and bone meal. I shoveled a LOT of manure out of the barn and I sure wasn't going to haul that all the way to the garden!

4. Learn six types of weeds that grow in your garden. Recognize them at each stage of growth.

Big, bigger, biggest!

5. Visit gardens and make a list of what is grown.

When families visited other families on Sunday afternoons, part of the visit, included looking at the garden and the flowers.

6. Watch how he insects gather nectar and pollen, and learn about the two processes of pollination, namely, cross pollination and self-pollination.

7. Visit your garden after dark for at least a week noting which insects visit. I loved number seven and did it with my children when they were young.

8. Learn how vegetables can be stored for winter used without processing. Back to Granny's cellar!

9. Chose six vegetables for flowers in your garden and know the insects and diseases of which you must protect them.

This should have been rewritten to say what to do about mosquito's! Nasty little worms in the lettuce leaves!

10. Find out the native country of four of your flowers or vegetables.
Radishes are from China, Lettuce from Egypt, and Peas are from Turkey. Beets, mother's favorite to make pickles, came from Europe. The origin of carrots is Asia. We all know from elementary school that corn/maize is North American!

11. Pot something at the end of the season and bring it indoors.

12. Observe some of the occupants of your garden other than insects, such as earthworms, snails, toads, and snakes.

Oh grandma and her garden snakes! Well, that is what SHE called them but they are really Garter Snakes. This was the kind of snake Bud found on the street and name Dallas. My sweet Thomas says he liked to roll the little ones up and put them in his pocket, "Because they were cute"....His mother had a good shock when she saw her little daughter carrying a larger Garter snake into the house. The boys had taught her how to hold it. Little Garter snakes DO bite!

13. Know the necessary tools and how to care for the tools.

Daddy gave me fifty cents per share (plow blade) to grease it up after the soil was cleaned off.

14. Show you know how to gather seeds and take care of them over winter.
Not, put them in the oat box!

15. Know what garden or farm clubs do in the community.
Future Farmers of America had neat royal blue jackets with patches. Girls weren't allowed in the organization 'back then'.

16. Learn how to cut and arrange flowers for the house.
Must have learned this well, did A LOT of this while at the nursing home. Flower arrangements from funerals which were donated to the nursing home where broken down into arrangements for the residents. My favorites to work with were carnations and babies breath because they last for weeks.

Okay, so I had this garden and I watered it and weeded just like grandma told me to. The lettuce came up, as did the radishes. Sometime after the radishes, I lost interest. I had to be reminded. The reminders stopped. It was time for camp. Mother said I would have to weed the garden before camp. By this time, the ground was so hard and full of weeds, I had to sit in the garden and pull the weeds individually. I ate most of the peas except for a cup full I brought in to share. I went to camp. When I came home, the garden was full of weeds AGAIN! I had hoped some big rabbits would have eaten everything. I hoped mother would have hoed, she had not. Why should she, it wasn't her badge.

I did not earn my badge until the summer before Bud was born. Rachel and I earned it together. We planted purple petunias on the east side of the house. Every morning, she would pluck the old blooms off. A few years later, after the neighborhood cats had skat in the sand pile, I planted tomatoes in the sandy soil near a natural ditch. We had lots of tomatoes that year but so did everyone else.

I do not like gardening, I do not like to toil the soil. At the lake, I do not sit on the patio in the evening and become fodder for mosquito's. I promised to love Tom and I promised not to do yard work. I am not victorious when it comes to thinking I can actually save by spending hours and hours nursing green beans to prime, then boiling them and canning them and putting them on a shelf somewhere to be forgotten and THEN being thrown out forty years later like Mrs. Johnson's pickles which were taken from Sabin to Thief River Falls in 1960 and then to Moorhead and carefully carried to the dumpster in 1998 when she died.

But for those of you who like to garden and for those of you who have friends who come over and you take them for a garden tour, I admire you. When you come to our house, we will give you a tour of concrete and rock. We will even let you push the lawn mower 10 minutes; you will have our yard mowed and part of the neighbors.

Shilpa states it is stupid to have grass in California. I will agree. Since our neighbors have fine lawns, I will look out the window and admire theirs.

Do I have a green thumb? Well, let's think about this. I wanted shrubs along the north property line in Lawrence. It was a natural ravine, so they would get water. The shrubs came in a bundle and fit in the mail box. I cut them down a third and planted them in a snowstorm in holes Bob had dug with an auger. I put two in a hole, just encase. They grew like wild fire. Then, after a disagreement with the neighbor, we let them grow wild. We had 100 trees on a 150' lot. I will plan it and plant it, beyond that, well.....you know the rest of the story.

I came to the garden alone.

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