One of the first signs of spring was when Grandma started the tomato and cabbage seeds. She had shallow wooden boxes filled with cans with both tops and bottoms cut out. The cans were filled with dirt and seeds planted and the boxes sat on tables and benches in the south-facing enclosed kitchen porch. Often the tomato plants were already blooming when they were set out.After the long winter, we were always anxious for the first fresh produce of the season. Rhubarb was one of the first things up and fresh rhubarb shortcake for desert, with whipped cream from our cows was one of the early taste treats. Leaf lettuce, radishes, green onions, green peas, carrots, cucumbers, new potatoes all came quickly, then green beans, cabbage, beets, corn and squash.
Besides providing fresh produce all summer, the garden provided vegetables that carried us through the winter as well. We canned peas, green beans, corn, carrots and beets, pickles from the cucumbers and potatoes and onions in bins in the root cellar.
The garden was a family project, with my grandfather and father helping as well. With limited rain, irrigating was a necessity. The house garden was watered from the well, with a gasoline engine that ran the pump during the summer with the"big garden watered from the creek with a pump and pipes. Much of the garden work was done in the evening, watering, hoeing and pulling weeds.
One of my earliest gardening memories is of my father sneezing while he was hoeing potatoes and losing his false teeth in the potato patch. I was only 5 or 6 years old at the time and thought that was hilarious because he had to take his teeth to the creek and wash them off.
When canning time arrived, everyone helped as well. I remember sitting on the back porch shelling peas, snapping beans and shucking corn out of bushel baskets of vegetables brought up from the garden in the early morning. I was too young to help much with the actual canning, though I remember the big black Monarch kitchen stove being stoked and the racks of jars full of vegetables being lifted into the big canners to boil.
Apples, peaches, apricots and cherries were sold in grocery stores in town in wooden crates and we always got several crates of fresh fruit to can every year. There were thickets of wild plums and chokecherry bushes in several places at the home ranch which made our jelly, jam and preserves.
The cellar walls were lined with shelves from floor to ceiling filled with row after row of pints and quarts of canned food. I can remember being sent to the celler to get another quart of green beans, a jar of dill pickles, more potatoes. Then back for a quart of peaches for a cobbler or another jar of plum butter for the biscuits.
I have never quite outgrown the feeling that I need to plant a garden in the spring. Regardless of where I've lived, I have usually at least tried to have some garden, tomatoes in Las Vegas ... lettuce, tomatoes and corn in Montana again, even when I was working full time.
I've done a bit of gardening here in Kentucky as well. Unfortunately, the heat and humidity severely limits what I am able to do though I try to manage a few of the things I like best fresh from the garden every year. Tomatoes simply don't taste right out of the store either. I really enjoyed getting fresh brocolli out of the garden one year, one of my favorite vegetables, and one I could not grow in Montana.
But I would give anything to be able to sit down to a breakfast of my father's sourdough pancakes drowning in home made chokecherry syrup ... or a lunch of sliced tomatoes and onions on home baked sourdough bread.
