My mother's garden

I think that I might have written before about my mother’s garden when we were growing up in Ekalaka. In a recent Eagle, I saw Lois Lambert’s story about their garden and how it was so late getting in so I decided to write something else. I am sure that in the years we were there we had late springs and early springs. I do remember snow in May, June and even on July 3rd on one occasion. It didn’t amount to much as I recall. It seems as if they talked about getting potatoes in on Washington’s birthday Isn’t that awful early? My sister Bertha says that the magic day is Good Friday but I don’t remember that.

Potatoes were a very important crop for us with so many hungry mouths to feed. The first thing was to plow the ground. Mother preferred a horse drawn plow. One of us kids, usually me, would follow along behind the plow and plant the potatoes. Then the next row would cover it up. We had a great big bin type thing in the cellar where the potatoes were stored after harvest. One year we put away 1400 pounds of potatoes and were scraping the bottom of the barrel before the next harvest. Harvest was just the reverse of the planting; the plow turned it over and then we kids followed and rooted out the loose potatoes into sacks or buckets. I was scared to go down in the dark to get potatoes because there was sometimes a salamander there. Mother would fix a great heaping skillet of fried potatoes and we would practically lick the bottom.

She grew lots of other things also. I didn’t like the turnips and rutabagas much but ate them anyway. I liked parsnips; sometimes she would leave them in the ground and pick them out during the wintertime. We grew lots of tomatoes and Mother canned them for winter use. Some people said that it wasn’t safe to can green beans but Mother canned lots of them and nobody got sick. She made sauerkraut, I could tolerate that but couldn't stand cooked cabbage. I like both of them now.

Gardening was a family project. Each of us kids had our own rows to keep weeded. On some of those rows, I swear that before you got to the end of the row the weeds were ready to be cut at the beginning of the row again. We helped harvest and plant. We also would sit at the kitchen table and sort peas and beans. I don’t know if I ever helped with canning stuff but my sisters did. Mother usually did it with a pressure cooker.

My favorite thing that we canned was rhubarb. We had several big hills of rhubarb and Mother would get quite a bit more from other people that didn’t want it. There was a little cabin out in the forest just before Conger Hill, I think it belonged to the Macleods. It had been abandoned for some years but still had rhubarb and we would get permission and get that. She canned lots of rhubarb and we ate it all winter.

Another thing that she canned that we didn’t grow was peaches. Every year someone would set up a truck full of peaches at the outskirts of town. Word got around and people would come and buy lugs of peaches. Those canned peaches were far superior to any frozen or store bought peaches.

Sometimes Mother would can meat, antelope, deer, mutton and beef. Once in a while she would make mincemeat. This all helped feed the family for the winter.

I started this out to talk about not getting your garden in because of a late spring. We have the same problem here in California now but we have a much longer growing season. We don’t depend on gardens like we used too except for our psyche.