Momma's Spring Veggie Garden
During the heatwave of 1977, this skinny, 11-year-old country boy refused to wear shoes, and thank goodness, because otherwise, I’d never have learned all about okra.
The big, baking hot vegetable garden on this farm was way away from the house. To get there, you’d leave the house and hear the screen door slam behind you about the time the baking sun changes to sycamore shade. Then pecan trees offer a few minutes of cool, too. Keep on past what was the Barbie townhouse of chicken houses, and finally, there's a gate into the rectangle of rows.
Momma says Daddy always drove that garden, but these days, it’s all her. He’s been gone for 14 years. She uses a cane to get there, but she's there every single day of the year. The chicken house is an office today—well, more of a shipping shed and supply room with a few seats out front. She stops there to rest. Every single day.
Yesterday, we set her new tomato plant crop out on the table. “I don’t know if I want to can all those tomatoes this year,” she said back in February. Yesterday, she had 44 tomato plants started and dreams of canning them in June.
“We worked so hard. Really, Linda worked so hard. I just sat and watched," she told me as we arranged seedlings. Linda is Momma’s young friend who gardens with her. One wouldn’t do it without the other.
They did, too. This veggie garden, on March 10, looks amazing. If you dream of vegetable self-sufficiency, just look at my Momma’s spring garden. Kelly green spinach, mulched with old hay, fountains of chartreuse celery, and teal, broad, crinkly leaves of Savoy cabbage. On one side, there’s a carpet of oregano, a sliver of lavender, and a weed patch we all refuse to tame. It has purple larkspur mixed in. If there’s one flower for my Momma, it’s Larkspur.
A dozen trenches, six inches deep, hold tiny clumps of potato leaves. Soon, Momma will pull dirt into the trenches– she can use a hoe to do it and use it for balance in place of her cane. (photos below)
There’s a whole section of new stuff: tiny lettuce, carrot, beet, and turnip rows, and 80 onions. We’re watching under the trellis for pole beans to germinate. There’s another section of cardboard and compost—that’s all decomposing and waiting for a warmer day. Yellow squash will go there.
That one spot, the place that's old cardboard now, that’s where this skinny, loner boy who refused to wear shoes learned all about okra. My parents wanted me to fit in with the boys. That summer, they tried the community basketball team. Here in this rural area, that meant someone’s Dad poured a concrete pad and put up hoops and forced some older boys to lead a ‘team’ of the same old boys who I didn’t fit in during the school year. They all took this very seriously. They made fun of me for not wearing shoes. After the first practice, I refused to go back. “OK, but during the time that you would be playing basketball, you’ll have to work in the vegetable garden.”
The way he said it, it kind of felt like Daddy’s punishment for not being like the other boys. The way she looked, it kind of felt like she knew, even back then, that I’d be alright, better off really, alone, working barefoot in the okra.
Meet me for a lunchtime lecture on Friday in Aiken, SC, for this free presentation about our little farm and my new book, Garden Disruptors. It’s free!
Great morning read. As usual, your stories make me feel as if I were there growing up with you.
A wonderful read. Mommas know their boys. They come from a resilient generation and determined to never give up.