Good morning and welcome to Saturday Morning Garden Blogging!
Frankenoid is taking a scheduled morning off which worked out well as she's probably very busy making a delicious celebratory breakfast plus baking some totally cool coconut cake concoction for Younger Son's birthday. I'm honored to fill in for our coconut encrusted host and publish my first-ever diary on DKos as part of her legendary long-running Saturday morning gardening series. Join me below as I throw tomatoes and share a bit of family history with Y'all in a reprise of a comment I posted here a couple of years ago.
I hate tomatoes.
I love things made with tomatoes like sauces, soups, and chili but you couldn't pay me to eat one raw. Yuck! Blech! Ack!
My maternal grandfather had a ginormous vegetable garden. He grew all sorts of veggies but tomatoes were his first love and one true passion. I remember bags and bags and bags of tomatoes during the summer when we would visit. We always came home from trips to my grandparents with at least two bushels of tomatoes plus corn and other assorted produce. I never really understood why we lugged so much home with us because we had our own humongous vegetable garden which my parents used as a forced labor camp for me and my sisters. A large garden in constant need of weeding and tending was the perennial pitfall of growing up on an acreage.
Two years ago I asked Mom to do a small write-up about her dad's veggie-tomato garden so I could share it with you folks here and also so the family would have a written account of it. The apple didn't fall too far from the tree although I take more after my grandmother who loved growing flowers. I even have some of her irises in my garden. But it was always home-grown produce that ruled the day at my grandparents' house. I remember spending time with Grandma shucking peas and snapping green beans fresh-picked from the garden. Somehow vegetables became less tedious when working beside her but try as she might, Grandma never could get me to acquire a taste for raw tomatoes.
Mom's diary:
After returning home from WWII, my father started a truck garden. Some of my earliest memories are helping my dad plant his acre garden and then delivering tomatoes and other vegetables in our wagon to the grocery store with my oldest brother. My dad planted his own flats of seeds mid-January in our enclosed south porch. He planted hundreds of tomato seeds plus pepper seeds and countless other vegetables which he ordered out of the many seed catalogs he received in the mail. Tomatoes were his greatest passion though. He spent many hours in his garden planting, cultivating and staking each and every one of the numerous tomato plants. He put in between 1000 and 1500 plants in the garden next to the house. After he retired, he had two more gardens in other locations. As his tomatoes ripened he would wipe each and every one with a cloth and carry them by the bushel into our basement until needed.
On a shelf by the back door he kept a scale, price list, money bag, and paper sacks. Neighbors would come in unannounced without knocking, pick out their own wants among the tomatoes and all the other vegetables on the shelves on the porch, weigh them on the scale provided, and leave their money in the till. My dad always said no one had ever cheated him - not even once - as if he had any way of knowing! The money my dad earned from his garden paid for our vacation each year and for my parent's winters in Texas after he retired. In addition to the vegetable garden we also had grapes and an apple tree.
My mom grew dill and asparagus among her flower beds. She had peonies, lily of the valley, sunflowers and iris among other flowers. She also had an "attack cactus" along the sidewalk to the back porch entry. It would try to take over the sidewalk and if you weren't careful walking past it - it would "attack" you, scratching you as you passed by. My favorite of Mom's flowers was her tube roses. I could smell their fragrance the minute I walked in the door.
When my father died, we planted white peonies near his grave and I plant a tomato plant each year on his grave site. What most people in our small town remember about my dad are his tomatoes and also his generosity, integrity, and honesty - his trust in his customers and neighbors.
I believe I inherited the "gardening gene" from my dad and always had a large garden ( not nearly as large as my dad's! ) when my children were growing up. Now I grow flowers. My kids have picked up the gardening gene as well although their passion is growing flowers instead of vegetables.
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I inherited the gardening gene from both my parents as Dad was an avid lawn and garden man as well. A heartfelt
thank you ( hold the tomato ) to my parents and grandparents for the glorious gift of gardening. And
thank you to Frankie for creating the forum to share it.
What's going on in your garden, do you like tomatoes, and where did you get your gardening gene?