RAISIN'
14g GARDENS
Mother and Daddy always had a good garden full of scrumdiddliumptious veggies.
When I was little, the garden was down the hill from the side yard by the two pear trees and a big water oak tree. It was probably about ½ acre in size. They grew about any common vegetables common to this area of the South. Items such as corn, peas, English Peas (we didn’t get many of those cooked as we all ate them raw in the garden!), turnips, collards, mustard greens, onions, snap beans, butterbeans, and many other things.
Things like Irish potatoes, sweet potatoes, watermelons, cantaloupes, muskmelons, and cucumbers were grown in one of the fields, mostly the “little new ground” that is in front of Tom’s house now.
Later the garden spots were moved in search of better soils for a garden with less sand, such as north of the old potato house, down by the pond about the northeast corner, down by the creek in the bottom side of the pecan orchard, down at the back side of the big flat near the dam, and finally the 50 foot square garden by the cow lot.
I made a comment about putting a garden there being very close to the lot, so Daddy always called that one “The Nasty Garden!”
It didn’t matter where the garden spot was located they managed to keep their freezer full of vegetables and provided all of us younguns with lots of good fresh stuff to eat. Daddy prided himself in being sure that JoAnne had plenty of Kentucky Wonder pole beans from the Nasty Garden.
We tried to have a garden a couple of years after we moved up here, but I guess my thumbs were too black and not green enough but we did have a couple of good years for growing. Then we got into some dry summers and everything starved for water and we didn’t get much.
We’ve had several dry years of late and I didn’t even try to raise a garden as I’d have had to water it about every day as that area is so sandy. This season, we went to a truck farm near Lucedale and picked some good veggies there and Sib got us some corn from a guy in Copeland. That works better than stirring up the dry sand trying to grow our own!
When I was little, the garden was down the hill from the side yard by the two pear trees and a big water oak tree. It was probably about ½ acre in size. They grew about any common vegetables common to this area of the South. Items such as corn, peas, English Peas (we didn’t get many of those cooked as we all ate them raw in the garden!), turnips, collards, mustard greens, onions, snap beans, butterbeans, and many other things.
Things like Irish potatoes, sweet potatoes, watermelons, cantaloupes, muskmelons, and cucumbers were grown in one of the fields, mostly the “little new ground” that is in front of Tom’s house now.
Later the garden spots were moved in search of better soils for a garden with less sand, such as north of the old potato house, down by the pond about the northeast corner, down by the creek in the bottom side of the pecan orchard, down at the back side of the big flat near the dam, and finally the 50 foot square garden by the cow lot.
I made a comment about putting a garden there being very close to the lot, so Daddy always called that one “The Nasty Garden!”
It didn’t matter where the garden spot was located they managed to keep their freezer full of vegetables and provided all of us younguns with lots of good fresh stuff to eat. Daddy prided himself in being sure that JoAnne had plenty of Kentucky Wonder pole beans from the Nasty Garden.
We tried to have a garden a couple of years after we moved up here, but I guess my thumbs were too black and not green enough but we did have a couple of good years for growing. Then we got into some dry summers and everything starved for water and we didn’t get much.
We’ve had several dry years of late and I didn’t even try to raise a garden as I’d have had to water it about every day as that area is so sandy. This season, we went to a truck farm near Lucedale and picked some good veggies there and Sib got us some corn from a guy in Copeland. That works better than stirring up the dry sand trying to grow our own!
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