Monday, September 20, 2010

Dad's garden

In the 1950s and 60s my Dad always planted a garden in the back yard. He labored long and hard all summer to raise a crop of vegetables and melons when the days were long. He would get up early before the day got hot and go out and labor in the garden each day to make sure everything was done that could help produce a bounty my Mom could can for the winter. When times were good and the rain came, most times the garden did well.

My part of the job was to pull weeds and chop the garden with an old hoe. Several days each week after school I headed to the garden to carry out the work assigned to me to help the process along. Chopping, pulling weeds, setting stakes, tying up tomato plants and later picking the beans, okra, tomatoes and squash as they began to come in made up a daily routine. The days got hotter as they got longer and each year the task seemed to last forever. When I got older, I was allowed to spray a white powdered insecticide with an old tin hand-pump sprayer onto the blossoms and plants in a continuing struggle to stay ahead of the season's bugs that also wanted their share of the produce.

After most summers we ended the season with a lot of jars of all the items the garden produced and stashed them in the small pantry in the kitchen. During the winter, one or two of the jars would be taken out every day or so to add to the other food items my Mom would bring home from the grocery store. The old garden went a long way to help provide the food we needed and is now a cherished memory of life "back in the day" when times were slower and life was good.

As I got older, the garden slowly faded into the past. My Dad continued to make the effort to have a garden most summers, but as he got older his time was more often spent going to his day job at the local auto dealership each day. The space the garden occupied gradually became part of the lawn I continued to mow until I graduated from college. My Dad passed away a month before I graduated from college and the annual garden became a thing of the past and a distant memory of how it used to be.

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