It was with skepticism, and a little bit of suspicion, I listened to my dad telling me how the peanuts we were burying in a sandy patch in the garden would grow into plants and make more peanuts than we could harvest and roast in the oven for eating. I couldn’t imagine those delightfully salty munchies actually grew underground and we would later dig them up like potatoes. Surely, he was kidding me,
Over the next 40 or so years, my dad would plant a lot of unusual things in the garden, right along with all the usual, familiar things we expected; radishes, lettuce, peas, onions, garlic, potatoes, squash, green beans, peas, beets, cabbage, sweetcorn, bell peppers and tomatoes. There were a number of established perennials coming back every year and needing only occasional pruning, fertilizing or transplanting; grapes, rhubarb, asparagus, strawberries and an apple tree with three different varieties of apples grafted on one tree. But there was always something “experimental” he’d never planted before (and often never planted again). Things like eggplant, ground cherries, kohlrabi, lima beans, leeks, watermelon, pumpkins and sweet potatoes. Sometimes, the experimental crops were used as a teaching tool to make sure we girls knew where different foods came from. Other times, I suspect he planted something exotic to satisfy his own curiosity. Later, when we moved to the acreage, he planted an even wider variety of vegetables and added an extensive orchard and many different kinds of grapes and berries.
I’m not sure whether it was the planting, weeding and harvesting I loved about gardening, or it was the chance to work alongside my dad doing something we both enjoyed. Whatever the reason, it gave me the confidence and knowledge to plant my own gardens in the years following.
I’ll skip the futile attempts at having a garden when we lived in town. Our first house was rented and in a wooded area where the tiny garden we tried to grow never received enough sunlight to amount to anything. The house and double lot we later bought was overtaken by children and dogs (ours and the neighbors’) and I had to settle for an apple tree and a patch of rhubarb.
When we moved to the country, one of the first things I discovered was my husband considered himself to be what is known as a gentleman farmer. To him, that meant he worked at his office in town and other people did the farm and garden chores. Those other people, of course, our four children and I.
There was a large, established strawberry bed apparently on its final year of good production, a patch of good rhubarb, a couple pie cherry trees, a summer apple tree and an apricot tree delighting me when I found out how delicious tree-ripened apricots can be. And there were some raspberries, gooseberries and pink plums in the timber next to the house. We were trying to get a decent lawn established in the clay soil most recently a hog pasture, and I had no idea where to start a garden. I knew it needed to be close to the house and a water hook-up for the hose.
I removed the sod from two four-foot squares, centered each with a chicken-wire cage for compost and planted eight tomato plants- one in each corner of the two squares. Cooking for a family of six, I soon had enough vegetable waste from the kitchen to fill both the little compost cages mixed with a bunch of half-rotted leaves from the nearby woods. I watered the compost piles regularly, letting the water trickle on to keep the soil around the plants damp, and they grew rapidly, producing many tomatoes. We had all the tomatoes we could eat that summer and fall, and I even canned a few dozen quarts.
At first, my spouse laughed at my small attempt at a garden, but after witnessing its success, he changed his mind, bought a used tractor and plowed a much larger space for a garden. Then he sent in a large order for seeds and bought several dozen tomato and pepper plants. Of course, being a gentleman farmer, he turned the work over to his underlings.
A former volunteer and substitute teacher in the Solon schools, Milli is an artist and a poet living near Morse creating unique greeting cards and handmade books.