Oh yes, I remember the garden to the south of our house. I feel like I'm standing at boot-top depth of sticky clay right at this moment. That just shows my time in the garden has stuck with me all these years. Some people might call it post-traumatic stress disorder but I don't think so; there is no nightmares or feelings of low self-esteem. Although I did feel at the time that I was being taken advantage of in my gardening duties.
As gardens go, it was very fruitful. As I said above, it was mostly clay. We had corn, cucumbers, beans, tomatoes, and, sticking to our Irish Protestant roots, potatoes. We had potatoes at almost every evening meal. Don't get me wrong: I love potatoes as far as eating them. This so looking after them before they become suitable to eat that I have my problems.
In the spring, there was a planting of the potatoes. That meant cutting up several whole potatoes into pieces so they could be used as “seeds”. I got into a fair amount trouble because I had a tendency to cut the potatoes into pieces that were too small or too large for my parents. So this consisted of several stops and starts in this part of my duties.
Then came the time of planting. This meant shoveling. Actually, there were two types of shoveling: warm weather and cold. The warm would happen during the spring planting season, obviously. It wasn't too hard as the ground was dry and easily turned with a shovel. The sun could be quite warm on those planting days but at the time I only weighed 120 pounds and I didn't get hot easily (although my older sister said I stank to high Heaven). I sometimes went inside for a job so water but this was not something to take advantage of as it seemed like I was malingering to some people. I remember my younger sisters were not involved in this Rite of Spring. Perhaps my Dad, due to my meager form was trying to make a man out of me.
I didn't ask.
But come the fall...this was the time of the reaping, as I guess it could be called. The difference between the planting and the reaping of potatoes was that I usually had to do that after the sun had gone down in the early autumn night. It was not a fun job then. A few moments after the sun went down, the soil that had been so unforgiving in the spring suddenly became like iron. As I said, I wasn't very big as far as weight and muscle went. So I would be out there in that garden, cursing under my breath at times, uprooting the plants, and grabbing the potatoes off them. Of course, my bare hands got coated with freezing cold clay and went numb. This numbness made the job that much harder. I remember especially the harvest Moon that was always rising while I was doing my little task for my parents.
I put the potatoes in bushel baskets and, if I was lucky, I could wait till the next day to take them to my grandparents' root cellar just down the road. After all was said and done, I went inside our large farm house and tried to warm up by running my hands under hot water with lots of soap.
Well, that's the end of my woolgathering for this time. I could tell you my experiences and my Mother's flower gardens but I am still not quite ready to talk about that...
