As I have gardened over the years, things have changed and progressed and I realize that the progression is very much based on "what Mom did". Let me explain. My mom was quite the avid gardener. She loved everything about growing and harvesting. I'm the youngest of five kids, so my "Mom Gardening" memories are certainly different than my siblings' memories. When I was two years old my family lived on the outskirts of Newell, SD, and it was the late 60's and my mom had 5 children ranging in ages from 18 to 2 so she did the logical thing......she bought the local laundromat. Whaaa? Yeah, that seems logical to me, maybe not to most readers, though. I think Mom had birthed, diapered, cooked, mopped, and laundered as much as she could through the 50s and into the 60s, now she was ready to get out and do something else.
So essentially my earliest memories are of rows of washing machines, dryers, folding tables, and a couple dry cleaner machines. By the time I was four years old I knew how many pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, and 50-cent pieces were in a dollar so that I could make change for the ladies. I frequently got loaned out to fold washcloths and hand towels for the farm wives as they worked their way through literally bags full of laundry. Remember, in the 60's it was not necessarily common place to have a washer and dryer in every household, in fact it was kind of rare. It was a lot easier for the ladies to bag up all of their laundry for a week or two weeks and bring it to the laundromat than it was to try to get through a family's worth of laundry mostly by hand at home, then put it out on the clothesline, etc. So a laundromat was quite a commonplace occurrence at that time for many, many families. The days were very busy and very long at the laundromat. Mom and Dad had rigged up an ingenious little opening device which allowed the front door of the facility to be opened by the first customer any time after 6 a.m. I think Mom went in about 8 or 9 a.m. to see how everything was progressing and to start the day cleaning the machines, doing other people's laundry and dry cleaning for them, refilling the coin-operated soap and fabric softener machines, etc., etc. It seems she always went home and got supper for all of us, but I know many times her laundromat day ended about 8 or 9 p.m. if everything was going well.
Needless to say, not a lot of flower or vegetable gardening happened during those years. Mom had entered into a different era in her life and all of a sudden there were some really great convenience foods on the market that made life so much easier and more fun like boxes of mac and cheese, Velveeta cheese, cartons of milk, Jell-O, Kool-Aid, store canned fruits and vegetables, and sliced white bread......pretty much all of those things that have since been deemed to have no real food value whatsoever. Don't get me wrong, Mom was a top-notch cook and definitely spoiled us all with great homemade meals. But along with those meals we had a sprinkling of all these new foods, too. And we (Mom, Dad, and me) frequently got to lunch at the diner down the street because we were a two-income family and we could. It was great!
When I was eight years old my parents made the decision to sell the laundromat, Dad quit his job with the city, and they put the house up for sale and moved 25 miles down the road to the bigger community of Belle Fourche. Here is where my gardening experiences began. We had a smaller place right in town, but the yard was very mature and the soil was good and Mom now had a little time to get back to gardening. She had beautiful shade trees, lots of established perennials, and a nice side lot for a vegetable garden. Within a couple years she had gotten four kids through high school and it was just me and Mom and Dad. So she put up a grow light and started planting seeds in the late winter, transplanted out to the beautiful little garden spot in May/June, and gardened to her heart's content. Of course she had gardened before and absolutely knew what she was doing, but this was all new to me. Mom loved her time in the garden and the yard, so of course it was an enjoyable experience for me, too. Other than the crossing with an occasional garter snake, things were very happy and mellow in the garden.
My memories of Mom's garden in Belle Fourche consist of hybrid tomatoes, onions from sets (which can indeed be planted too deep, Dad and I found out), potatoes, peas, radishes, turnips, cucumbers, beets, green leaf lettuce, carrots, and rhubarb. There may have been other things, but I know for sure there was NOT squash, beans, spinach, cabbage, herbs (except for dill), or corn. She always told me that cabbage crops and corn got too buggy. She had a bad experience once with opening a jar of canned green beans and finding an intact bug, so they were out of the question. When she was a kid her mother had a root cellar which evidently the prairie snakes and lizards liked, so easy keepers in a root cellar like squash just weren't on her list of favorites. I don't even remember discussing herbs or mixed salad greens, so I guess they were pointless for some reason or another. And if you could see Mom's garden, it was pretty perfect. No weeds, absolutely straight rows, nothing that grew haphazardly, just nice and neat. And Mom believed in canning when she had time, so we would have shelves full of her favorites......chokecherry jelly and syrup, canned tomatoes, pickled beets, and sweet pickles, dill pickles, bread and butter pickles, 10-day pickles (or was it 7 day?). She also liked to can meat, so there would be a couple shelves of canned beef and canned heart of something, both of which I'm sure were yummy, but just never looked terribly appetizing to me. It seemed like canning season would never end sometimes. I appreciated all that she did, but it was a lot of hot, sticky, hard work and not always a happy, calm situation, so it left a bit of a negative memory for me.
So this finally leads me back to how and what I garden. For years I had varying degrees of gardens. Maybe I would only do flowers, no vegetables. Maybe I'd do a couple kinds of vegetables, a few plants each. Maybe I'd throw in some lettuce seed. I just kind of dabbled in gardening, but I frequently tried the things that Mom wouldn't grow. Of course I also had a couple kids and a job or two most of the time, so I was never terribly serious about gardening and I certainly never wanted to grow so much stuff that I felt compelled to do canning. That would just take the fun out of it. I certainly raised my children to work out in the garden with me and help me and have fun with growing things and I think either of them are completely capable of doing their own gardens some day if they have a desire to do so. I have to admit I never have gotten the point of gardens needing to be weed-free and of course there are studies to back me up, so there you have it.
Now I'm at the middle age point and I'm reconsidering so many things. This summer I've spent more time in the garden than I ever have and can't get enough of it. I don't have a huge garden this year, but it's a nice size and I've had the chance to try a lot of new things, stick with some of my old favorites, and just experiment a lot. Of course, most of my favorite things in the garden are the items that my mom never grew........big rangy heirloom tomatoes, pumpkins, spinach, mustard greens, all colors and kinds of lettuces, squash, red carrots, seed onions, corn, watermelon, and cabbages of every variety---broccoli, brussels sprouts, purple cabbage, head cabbage. A couple things that I do grow in common with Mom are peas and potatoes. One thing I may never grow is turnips. Something I really don't miss growing is cucumbers. A new venture this year is the pumpkin patch and I predict it may take on a life of its own in the future, just for the fun of it.
So I do have my mother's love for gardening and I am forever thankful to her for that. It is a pleasant, calming experience for me like no other. I can literally spend hours just "piddling around" doing this and that......weeding, mulching, picking, watering, planting. As the years go by, I am sensing the need to preserve the foods I raise in the garden for eating at a future date, so of course that means canning, freezing, root cellaring, etc. This phase is kind of surprising to me because I didn't honestly think I would ever view these as "enjoyable" activities, but they quite possibly might be. Last year it was simply freezing up sweet corn. This year jams and jellies and possibly tomato sauce and salsa. Crazy!
Michelle Grosek
Bear Butte Gardens
Michelle@BearButteGardens.com
http://www.bearbuttegardens.com/
