Good morning Saturday Morning Garden Blog-Friends! This cheerful tradition appears every Saturday morning at 9am Eastern, and lasts well into the week as conversations percolate. I’m a relative newcomer to the community and this is my first diary in the series — super-friendly folks here, I’ve found. :-)
Today I’m musing about garden history in my family. My parents, and my parents’ parents, all helped feed the family from substantial fruit-and-vegetable gardens. My dad’s parents were farmers, and my mom’s parents were one generation away from the farm, so it’s definitely something that’s part of the heritage.
The vegetable preparation that most dramatically blends the ancestral heritage on both sides of my family is the crock-full of pickles (sometimes two) that I brine up every year, to sit on my counter and devolve into delightful funky dill-pickle goodness. The recipe comes from my father’s mother. Here I am with my aunt and my mother picking cucumbers in grandma’s garden:
Grandma grew her own dill, too, though I’m not sure about the garlic. I remember being fascinated with the swallowtail butterfly caterpillars that would be munching on the fragrant fronds.
My dad spent many summers on an on-and-off quest to make dill pickles that tasted just like his mom’s. Some batches were better than others; if it was going to work out, the brine would start to get cloudy about two or three days in, and then in another day or two the pickles would reach that lovely ancestral perfection. Sometimes, though, the clouding up just never happened, and then eventually the whole mess would rot and need to be cast away.
I began to pursue pickle perfection myself as an adult when my mother’s mother gave me the ancestral pickle crock in the headline photo. She herself never had never used it for pickles, using it instead to hold dried ornamental grasses for display. But she passed it to me (skipping my mother who also never liked dill pickles) with not only the instruction that this was a pickle crock… she also gave me the provenance tracing back up her husband’s line to my great-great-great grandmother Sally in Medina County, Ohio, who was the original owner.
So, these are heritage pickles in a deep way! We grew the cukes (Snow’s Fancy Pickling), the dill (some random seed packet from the grocery store), and the garlic (German Porcelain) ourselves. And the crock is near magical in our success rate of getting properly cloudy and funky. I think I’ve only missed once in nearly 2 decades.
Another tradition from my paternal grandmother’s garden is the strawberry patch. Ohhh did that woman grow strawberries! Here are some pics from 1970-something that show her doing the picking, and me & my brother with all the containers of berries from one day’s harvest!
The strawberry patch skipped a generation, as Grandma & Grandpa only lived 20-some miles away, so we enjoyed the bounty of theirs. But once Mr. AnnieJo and I bought our own place, a strawberry patch was one thing we were excited to plant. One of our daughters has a birthday during strawberry season if the ripening happens early, and we made it the centerpiece of one year’s party:
We’re now on our second round of strawberry plants, when the first patch kinda tapped out. We replaced it with a raised-and-fenced bed, which Mr. AnnieJo built with help from our older daughter:
(We’ve had years that have a similar vibe to Grandma’s strawberry haul, but this wasn’t one of them.)
Anyway! On to the last example of passing down the garden rituals, and that’s the green beans.
Green beans are one vegetable that I know were a component of the gardens for the grandparents on both sides, and my parents, and my own. My mom’s parents had beans both in their backyard garden in Ohio, and then their retirement community-garden in Indiana. My dad’s folks preserved green beans by freezing, but in two other ways that I don’t do — pressure-canning, and drying.
The dried green beans were a holdover from the days before canning and freezing (kinda like folks of Swedish descent still make lutefisk even though there is no longer ANY need to boil fish in lye and dry it before reconstituting the gelatinous mass… but I digress). These were string beans so you first had to wash and string ‘em, then you’d lay ‘em out to dry. I think my grandmother put them on an old bedsheet on top of a layer of newspaper in a back room.
Then for a big company meal, you soak the dried beans in the morning and then simmer them long-time till they make a nice pot-likker, with a bit of ham or bacon, and the aroma adds to the background of all the good cooking smells. And THEN… the dried beans are not only heartily enjoyed by family members, they also become a test for any unsuspecting wanna-be addition to the family. I have an uncle who was allowed to marry in because he always was willing to eat, with great ceremonial reluctance, 2 or three of the beans. They are definitely an acquired taste for most folks, and this uncle never did quite manage to properly acquire it!
When I brought home A FIB in Cheddarland, who later became Mr. AnnieJo, I didn’t tell him about the dried beans that were going to be the big test at Thanksgiving dinner. I wanted to see what would happen… and, he took a big heaping helping, and then asked for seconds! (At which point, I seem to remember a cheer going up around the table...)
It was clearly meant to be, even though he’s a city boy who didn’t grow up with the vegetable garden thing. He has become an enthusiastic gardener, and we’ve gradually split the gardening elements for which each of us is responsible. He does the tomatoes and peppers and kohlrabi and the soup beans that we’ll dry and shell (kidney beans and black beans this year). But the green beans, those are mine.
I remember freezing green beans with my mother, and at least once with her mother (I remember my gentle grandma taking some delight in how you boil the beans for a minute and then “shock ‘em!” in ice water!) I’ve tried to pass these teachings to the next generation too; the process was fun for chilly little fingers, but we’ll see whether an actual taste for beans ever really develops, which is kind of a pre-requisite for making all the effort.
So, how did YOU come to gardening? What gardening memories do you have from back when? And, how does your garden grow?
Let’s chat!