GARDENING WHEN I WAS GROWING UP!

Well we really had quite the produce growing during my growing up years. We had 3 gardens and they each were huge.

Potato garden--We grew enough potatoes to last us the entire year and had a potato bin in our cellar. We grew enough to have seed potatoes for the next year to plant, also. Sweet potatoes were grown along with white potatoes.

Our truck patch--We had a huge truck patch and grew cucumbers, muskmelons, squash, sweet corn, watermelon.

Our regular garden close to the house--We grew the following in it--Asparagus, gooseberries, strawberries, lettuce, radishes, winter and green onions, peas, green beans, parsnips, turnips, cabbage, spinach, rhubarb. I might have missed something, but you get the jest. Now these were planted in abundance, because my mother was determined that her family was not going to want for something to eat. These were the depression years and she canned everything she could get her hands on for the winter months. I will talk about canning at another time. My mother, as a child, nearly starved to death when her parents homesteaded in Nebraska. She never forgot this, and vowed it would not be the case with her own family. More about this later. She told my dad that she would can anything he brought home from town that was a good buy. He would drive to southern Illinois and bring back a truck load of peaches.

We picked raspberries along the hedge rows every other day. These were made into pies, jams and cobblers. Yum!!!

We had peach trees, apple trees, black walnut trees, crab apple trees and a grape harbor.

My grandparents had cherry trees and we would help pick the cherries.

Our home had yellow, pink and red roses, lilac bush, peonias, zinnas, holllyhock flowers to hide the outhouse.

This all involved in teamwork to hoe, weed, pick, clean the produce once it got to the house. Peas to hull, lettuce to look (for bugs,etc), green beans to stem was just daily chores to be done. Then there was canning. I will write about canning at another time.

These gardens were our groceries all during my growing up years. Many of these years were the height of the depression (1930---1940). We did not lack for food. My husband told about that for soup they had only milk soup. We had oddles of veggies in our soup. However, his mother had a garden and made the dollar stretch farther than anybody I know. You can see that we were rich in comparison of people that lived in the city and had to stand in soup lines.

There was plenty of work to do and we all pitched in and did it. The only way to get all this done was the secret ingredient. TEAMWORK!!!!!!

Todays wisdom--Stories from the past can give us pointers for the present.