LOOKING BACK: I don't remember not having a garden

GRAVETTE — I don’t remember ever not having a garden. Planting onions, hoeing corn, chopping weeds, digging potatoes were a part of my growing up.

I admit there were some parts of gardening I liked better, especially the eating. Sometimes I’d snip off branches of rhubarb for mom to make pies. Or my father would send me out to cut asparagus. I’d boil it, add a bit of home-churned butter and serve it to him. Only if there was any left over could I have a taste.

Harvesting was a special time. Shelling peas or snapping beans and watching those newly canned jars of fruit and vegetables lined up on shelves was rewarding.

My husband Jerry told how neighbors once gathered at his country house when it was time to can corn. The young lad watched adults using their knives to cut corn off the cobs. Then, with his ingenious mind, he got out the kraut cutter.Setting the space the size of a kernel of corn he began cutting, making quick work of separating the yellow kernels from the cob. Everyone thought he’d come up with a brilliant idea. One man tried it and immediately cut his finger.

Another bright idea Jerry came up with was shelling peas by sliding the green hulls through the wringer on their old fashioned washer. He said it wasn’t too successful, because he mashed so many, and peas spilled all over the place.

As if our garden wasn’t enough work, each summer Mama would load her 12 kids who could work into the old pickup. She’d drive us back into our woods to pick buckets of blackberries. Sometimes Mama would bring a picnic lunch which we’d eat under a shade tree beside a cold, flowing spring. What berries we didn’t can in jars, Papa would sell at the market in town. During strawberry and green bean seasons Mama would again take us to neighborhood patches, where we’d pick beans and berries to be sold at market. We kids did the work, but we never saw any of the money. It took every bit we made to pay the farm mortgage and buy our necessary meager supplies.

I didn’t do much gardening after my dad died and we moved to town - not until my husband and I bought an acre west of Rogers. I quickly claimed a chunk of land and grew the most wonderful strawberries.

Then we bought acreage in Little Flock where I could have a big garden. Together, my husband and I planted 24 tomato plants each summer. That’s probably our favorite eating and canning. Each year we cut down on the size of our garden. I use a hand plow to hoe through the rocks (we have plenty of them), but mostly I let the straw which I lay between the rows take care of weeds (we have plenty of them, too). My next-door neighbor hauled in a load of good dirt and poured it over his rocky side yard. Not fair! Some peopleplace sprinklers over their soil but, in order to preserve our well water, I am forced to depend on summer showers. Sometimes there aren’t many.

As everyone knows, thishas not been a good year to grow anything. I don’t remember ever having a drought in June. We had apple trees laden with apples, but the deer thought they belonged to them. I managed to steal enough to make a couple of pies. Something ate tops off everything in my garden. Squirrels are even eatingmy tomatoes. Now that’s too much!

I wonder how much longer I’ll be able to do this chore. I hope I never get too old or decrepit to have a garden.

Marie Putman is a former Gravette resident and regular contributor to the Westside Eagle Observer.