Two Saturdays ago was the farmer’s market opening in our town for the season and above was our purchased goods. I believe our eyes were bigger than our stomaches and wallets but we did consume all of this during that week. Neither of us has ever met a vegetable that we didn’t like. I wish every kitchen table in the world had this and I know that we are very fortunate and extremely thankful.
It would be hard for me to grow all of the above by myself. It also gets expensive buying it, even though you are cutting out the middleman and buying directly from the farmer. I supplement it by growing all that I can, such as this year, I have already harvested from my own garden, onions, strawberries, lettuce, peas, radishes, mint, thyme, sage, basil. Still to come is tomatoes, eggplants, green beans, zucchini, cucumbers, ground cherries, beets, Swiss chard and hopefully some watermelon. Once you have had fresh, you just don’t want to go back.
This is our haul from this past Saturday. P’s in NYC today and I am doing SMGB so none this week.
Where did I first acquire this hunger for fresh off-the-farm taste? It wasn’t from my parents or paternal grandparents, none of who ever grew a vegetable as adults. It wasn’t from my maternal grandmother as I never knew her as she died from complications during her seventh daughter’s childbirth. My mother was the middle daughter. So that leaves only one person in my family who would have a vegetable garden influence on me during my childhood.
My maternal grandfather was a short muscular man who fathered fourteen children. He remarried after my grandmother passed and had seven more kids with his second wife. He farmed, drove a school bus and truck and had the largest vegetable garden that I’ve ever seen. You ate healthy and didn’t go hungry at his house. My mother always cherished his gifts of canned tomatoes, green beans, peaches and blackberries. His biggest joy in life was having his house filled with his children, their spouses and grandchildren, serving dinner and afterwards playing “pitch”, a card game. His house was always filled with loud laughter, kids running in and out slamming screen doors and dogs barking.
Almost his entire adult life, he would rise up in the middle of the night to go coon hunting. He never harmed the raccoons when treed but would call off his dogs and leave. He passionately loved the sport and his coonhound dogs. He passed away forty-six years ago. With so many first cousins, I was fortunate enough to end up with one of his dog collars. It’s the only one I’m aware of that still exists. The leather collar with the brass tag is lying on top of the books below. The tag has his name and address which I erased parts of in the photograph. How cool is this family heirloom!
Below is the only photograph where I am with my grandfather without us both being with many others in some type of family reunion photograph. I like his hat, his smile and the fact that he has his hand on my back. I always loved the smell of his pipe and have one of his ash trays that I use as a flowerpot saucer. I recently gave my sister one of his ladder-back chairs which was the only other thing that I owned of his.
Besides one aunt, he is the only family on either side that raised vegetables. Now I seldom eat a tomato while in my garden without thinking of him as I was shocked the first time that he had me do this while in his garden. I started to cry and told him “...but the tomato wasn’t from the store”.
We drank water with a dipper from a graniteware bucket on his back porch, used an outhouse and he would send me down to the well house to get milk or butter from the cool hill springs. It’s the only place I ever drank unpasteurized milk. Probably his favorite treat was to crumble cornbread up into a glass of buttermilk and eat it with a spoon. I loved when he allowed me to ride with him on his tractor or help milk one of the cows. I can see him now in a white sleeveless undershirt and Dickies khakis wearing his wide brim hat with a hoe weeding his garden, usually laughing and hollering at me to come eat a tomato. I wasn’t allowed to ride one of his horses or to go in his barn without him. I enjoyed watching him brush his horses or cool them down by throwing a bucket of water on them. Once some cousins and I went into his barn while he wasn’t there. He surprisingly caught us playing up in the hay loft and had us all line up with a switch in his hand but he didn’t use it. This was the only time he ever got angry with us, including forgiving me when I hid behind some curtains while playing hide-and-go-seek and fell through an upstairs window screen and broke the window’s glass while landing on the top of his front porch. I was quickly found. He loved “Jockey Day”, also called “Trade Day”, that was held outside the local Stock Yard on Friday mornings where he bought dogs, traded household or farm necessities and I’m sure the occasional horse. And he also went to auctions. He loved auctions. Yes, I got this gene passed from him to my mother to me and now a niece has it. I am sad that my niece never knew him but he still lives through me.
And some of you are thinking “ but GUG, what does any of this have to do with SMGB”?
Nothing and everything. We are all here because we are passionate about politics. We are also part of a subgroup here that is equally as passionate about gardening. We love sharing our gardening experiences with other liked minded individuals. We look forward to seeing each other each week and hearing our garden/wildlife adventures. In other words, we are kindred spirits. I have known some of you now for ten years. That is unheard of in internet time.
Each of us has individuals and slices of life, like my granddaddy above, that help shaped us into who we are and gave us our love of gardening and plants. I just shared a slice of mine. We would enjoy having you also share yours. By listening, we begin to appreciate and better understand each other, why something appeals to us or why we might despise it. Also photographs help each other to learn and reflect on our own gardening/style. In other words, we all become better friends learning together. And isn’t this sorta why we are all here to begin with?
and still others of you might be thinking “ but GUG, what did you do with all those vegetables”? Never fear as below is a few pics.
We had turnips, peas, scapes and asparagus with a turkey burger hid below the cheese and avocado in the center.
another night, we had Swiss chard, asparagus and scapes with shrimp, carrots and cauliflower rice.
grilled pork and beet greens with chorizo, potato salad without mayo, tomatoes with stracciatella cheese and from my own garden the basil, a slice of Amish bacon and cheese bread.
So thank you Granddaddy for giving me my love of fresh foods, vegetable gardening, dogs and especially buying other’s trash. I even won second place in our county sportsmen’s club “Pitch Tournament” in 1977 where around one hundred people competed, every one of them knowing that I was your grandson and would be a challenging competitor. You learned me good.
and then in 1995 at my town’s fall fair which is the largest in the area, I entered several agricultural categories for the first time. Disappointingly, my tomato and other vegetable entries didn’t win anything (these were not the tomatoes entered but I did grow them)
Yet you would have still been very proud of me as I won First Prize in “Herbs” and First Prize in “Other Annuals” with my entry of “Love Lies Bleeding”. I won Second Prize in the “Nature Collection” with my entry of Petrified Black Walnuts and Second Prize in the “Man-made Collection” with my entry of Japanese Fishnet Weights.
I kept the Fair’s program and this week found the drawing below tucked into the pages. I drew it to identify the various herbs for the judges. I had placed the herbs in an old Boston Bean type crock.
and you would be proud of another grandson, my brother, who finally got rid of his motorcycle! Two friends and I stayed with him and his wife in Japan for a month in 1984. The Pacific Ocean was down at the end of their road and the beaches were covered with sea glass and antique pottery shards. And because of my fascination with them, my brother wanted to show me a special beach so I rode with him on the back of his motorcycle. I took this photograph of him and his cycle in the beach’s parking lot when we arrived.
I went wild. These are some of the Japanese handmade pottery fishnet weights we found there. There were several on the beach and my brother helped me gather them. These won the Second Prize above and my brother sounded proud over the phone when I told him. Granddaddy, he has slowly shown interest in gardening, but so far mostly trees, shrubs and his wife’s roses and they rescued a dog! He also said he would like to dig up some plants from momma’s yard to put in his. Forget our sister! She never met a plant that she couldn’t kill by overwatering or neglect.
Now y’all are saying that I am rambling …….. maybe, as that was part of the diary title …...
So back to you Granddaddy (these people here are getting so pushy for me to wrap this up). From your three grandchildren through your fourth daughter, I am the only one to receive your true passion for gardening and animals. Out of your 28 grandchildren, only Greg is like us. Maybe I’ll enter some of my Speckled Roma tomatoes this year in the September Fair for you and we’ll win this time. Regardless, you were always First Prize to me!
Well, Granddaddy, someday we will be back together again and I look very forward to meeting my grandmother for the first time. We’ll sit with her on your front porch eating fresh tomatoes from “my” garden this time and I promise not to cry. We’ll teach her how to play pitch and hopefully while we’re sitting there that no kids will fall out of second floor windows onto the porch’s roof, but we’ll have switches close by just in case they are needed. Maybe now, you’ll let me ride one of your horses or better yet, go coon hunting with you in the middle of the night …… hearing for the first time the eerie sounds of the tracking coonhounds’ excited yelps and howls in the darkness will become beautiful music to my ears as well …….. after all, it’s already in my blood.