Lessons from Fred

I decided this week that next spring we are absolutely, definitely, positively going to plant a garden. A big garden. I haven't worked out the fine details yet, but I refuse to go one more summer and fall without tending to our own plot of land.

When we lived in our duplex in graduate school we had a huge garden with Fred. Fred was a character. He was almost seventy years old and had just retired when we moved in. He had also just lost his wife to lung cancer. At first I don't think that he was really excited about renting his duplex to 2 young graduate students, but pretty soon we struck up a friendship with Fred and he became like family to us.

In our garden with Fred, we planted beans, corn, lettuce, squash, corn, pumpkins, cucumbers, melons, and tomatoes. We had rows and rows of tomatoes.... 150 plants one year to be exact. We had long rows of plants in the middle of a huge farm field right behind our house.

John and I spent almost every day in the spring, summer, and early fall working in our garden when we weren't studying, teaching, or running experiments at school. We were dirt poor, but we were happy. Fred taught us everything that he knew about gardening and we learned a LOT!

He taught us how to plow up the field and use stakes and a string to make perfectly straight rows.
He taught us how many seeds to drop in each hole and how far apart to space them.
He taught us how to dust for bugs.
He taught us how to tell when our veggies were ripe enough to pick.
He taught us how to make wilted lettuce!
He taught us how to make rhubarb crunch (a secret recipe from his wife)!
But most importantly, he taught us how to can, and freeze, and preserve everything that we grew!

Oh how I miss the days of picking and canning and freezing. We would spend entire days making and canning salsa, stewed tomatoes, tomato jam, frozen corn, pickles, canned beans, and tomato sauce. We would work until our hands peeled from the acid in the tomatoes and our fingernails were yellow. We would be covered in tomato and sweat, but it was time spent together working on something for a common purpose. It was incredibly rewarding.

On canning days, everybody had a job. There was somebody to pick the veggies, somebody cleaned the veggies, somebody to find and clean the jars, somebody to clean the rings, somebody to cut onions (the least favorite job...because we used to buy 50 lb bags of onions), somebody to buy apple cider vinegar, somebody to put everything into the pot and stir, somebody to heat the jars, somebody to hold the jars while somebody else poured, somebody to screw on the lids and rings, and finally somebody to cover up the jars with a towel and wrap our little babies and wait.

Then came the best part. While we were all cleaning up or sitting down resting and eating or drinking a beer or two came the sound of a ping from the kitchen. As each of our jars vacuum sealed shut they would make a little ping sound that would make everybody crack a smile. That sound meant that we did it right! Our jars were sealed. Our food was ready to store and enjoy. We had gone from planting a seed to sealing our jars. There was pride in that!

I want my boys to have that experience too! I want them to see the cycle of growing from planting to the ping. I want them to take pride in something that they make with their hands. I want them to have something that they look forward to doing together as a family. I want them to remember the ping as fondly as I do. That's why we are going to have a garden next year.