Lessons learned in the family vegetable garden

To the editor:
    At Nickerson Lake our family had a big vegetable garden. Porter first pushed a cultivator, then dug rows with a hoe. My brother Leonard and I spread fertilizer lightly from a coffee can, covered it with a layer of dirt, and sowed the seeds, which Porter hoed over with dirt.
    One row was left for Ina’s glads that sometimes grew so tall she staked them. One evening she showed me how to preserve a single blossom with warm paraffin wax. This was my miracle to share at school.
    At one corner of the garden was a three-foot by five-foot raised cucumber bed, prepared with chicken manure hauled by Leonard from behind the coop. Drills for seeds were made in the top dirt. My cousin, a longtime gardener, says, “All cucurbits are as happy as a pig in mud when they are planted in composted manure, especially hen and cow. Your father had the right idea.”
    We weeded in the evening when mosquitoes, black flies and midgets came to help. I was proud I could make a smudge: Take a metal pail, add some paper, wood shavings from the shop, and a few twigs. Once lit, add just enough grass to make good smoke.
    The proof was in the eating. When Ina checked for readiness, she would take a radish, carrot, or cucumber, scrape off the dirt, and take a bite, then hand me one, saying, “You have to eat a peck of dirt before you die.” Later on, finding an oversized yellow or orangey one, she would say, “Here’s one for the chickens.” and Leonard and I would rush to smash it against the chicken-pen fence before throwing it over the top.
    She had one warning, “Don’t pick waxed beans and green beans if they’re wet. They’ll get rust spots.” She canned both, but the pole beans were dried and shelled for baking. Canning gave us many full jars of chicken barley soup with chopped carrots and onions; beets; and pickles (mustard, bread and butter, small sweet and large sour).
    Cider vinegar for pickling, and to fill a cruet on the table for sliced beets, iceberg lettuce, cabbage and cooked greens, came from a cask at the Grange store. We carried in our own glass gallon jug to fill from the spigot.
    Porter said, “Tomatoes are poison. Keep them away from my plate,” but grew them for Ina, who was immune to their poison. He eschewed cold vegetables, except for a salad of cooked green or waxed beans and peas with a bit of onion and salad dressing.
    Today’s purchased vegetables can never equal those of yesteryear, raised with loving care and brought fresh from garden to table. Produce at farmers’ markets comes close and I never complain about blemishes or holes. But at the supermarket when I see huge, partly yellow cucumbers, I long to say, “Those should have been smashed and fed to the chickens.”
Byrna Porter Weir
Rochester, N.Y