Few things of summer that impacted my pre-adult life more than "gardening". It was all encompassing for us.
I can recall cutting up seed potatoes in late February and being picked up by Uncle Dick to go quail hunting. Easter was an amazing combo of picking english peas and "gravelling" new potatoes from under the vines with a dinner fork. The "right of spring" was a salad of leaf lettuce, radishes, green onions with crubled bacon and its drippings for dressing. Chopping cabbages under the oaks and filling churns with brine for kraut.
Then summer stick and bush, Blue Lakes, Kentucky Wonders. Picking bushels, breaking, breaking, breaking while watching a baseball game in the den. 250 quarts minimum, seven cans at a time and the look Pop would give me of thanks to God everytime you'd here the pop of a can lid sealing on the kitchen counter as we broke bowl after bowl.
Fourth of July was Siver Queen, Peaches and Cream. The arguments, Daddy's "on the cob" position against Mom's "too much freezer space" cut it off contention. Hundreds of dozens with her, "let if fill out one more day" and him, "it's just right when the kernels aren't touching in the silks". 63 years of compromise.
Then okra, "don't lose my pairing knife and put these socks on your hands, it won't bother your tender skin boy", came the order. On 'till frost. Pop, "I don't care if you had "three a days" we gotta plant these peas for nitrogen". Me, "What do these turnip greens do for soil?" Pop, "Shut up, you know your Mamma loves them!" On past frost.
My, how I miss it. "Take this box home with you son, but bring my jars back", Mom would say. But of it ALL, and there was WAY MORE than mentioned, the first black skillet mess of fried yellow squash the second week of June and the almost concurrent first tomato sandwich(stand over the sink to eat it) are THE BEST!
Though the old bittie vultures were circling when Mom passed, I gave the hundreds and hundreds of quart jars in the cellar to the "under 40" crowd. My favorite remnants are the stainless dish pan, with a few red rider dents, that mom would cook tomatoes in for canning and juicing and the juicer with the wooden pestle, round and round it went!
Thanks JG, you know how it's done well. Thanks MG, what great pictures of quality dogs and envious produce. Thanks Marvin, it's great to know tommies can be raised for family and elk in an environment of such dampness without blight!
In case you're wondering what a long-winded reminiscence has to do with college football, we'd pick the peas in the morning and shell the with a bowl in our lap watching the games in the afternoon!
