Mother's other garden

I just lost the whole composition.  I don't know what I did.  It just deleted.  Bummer.

So, I start over.

Here I go and hope that I don't mess this up.

I have written several times about my mother's garden -- her flower garden. 

I actually have a very small garden, which I am permitted to have as long as I put it in the mulched area in front of my condo.  It has mint and lavender in it.  That's it.  Two tea-making plants.

Mom had another garden, however.  It was between the garage which was in back of the house, and the church.  Some kind soul in the church had put up a fence around an area 20 x 20, next to the garage, and it got sun almost all day.

Someone would till the remains of last year's garden and mom would get started.  She would rake that tilled soil until it was smooth, very few lumps.

Then she and I would plant marigolds all around inside edge of the fence.  She would take her finger and make a 'trench' into which I would put the seeds -- seeds she had saved from the prior year's marigolds.  That would be Day 1.  Day one was the day of protection.   Mom told me that marigolds kept certain bugs away from the garden.

Day 2 would be the day we would go out and plant the lettuce.  I love, love, love garden lettuce.  My daughter, Becky, recented bought me two bags filled with her garden lettuce and it was enough for five dinner salads for Alan and me.  And that reminded me of mom's other garden.

Also into her "other garden" would go tomato plants and old broomstick stakes for holding up the plants as they grew and grew and grew.  We had enough tomatoes on her plants each summer to put up jars and jars of tomatoes which she would use for stewed tomatoes, a favorite of my father's, and spaghetti sauce.  I recall that several years she started her own tomato plants from seeds she had save from the previous year's crop -- Jersey Tomatoes.  The best!

She also planted zuchinni, which I didn't really enjoy until I was a teenager and my taste buds changed to liking everything.  Cucumbers, from which she jarred up pickles of the bread and butter variety.  I vaguely recall watermelon, but I think that was a trial run and it ran over a lot of the garden and mom wasn't thrilled.  We gave away a lot of watermelon that year.  She also planted beans and one year she planted corn.  I think we got six ears per year.  Not exactly the bumper crop she was hoping for.  And all the seeds were saved from the prior year's crop.  She also had a large crop of sweet basil, chives, and scallions.

So, that's mom's other garden.  And lest you readers think that was the only garden in the neighborhood, it wasn't.  I was born in the waning years of World War II and victory gardens were the norm, and that vegetable growing thing continued until I was in my late teens all over Runnemede.

Finally, I have to tell you that I would eat tomatoes right off the vine -- no washing, just a wipe on my overalls.  What parent today would permit their child to do that today?  They might get sick.  I guess eating dirt was normal back then.  The apples from the neighbor's apple tree got the same treatment.  We picked them off the ground, wiped the surface dirt off and bit in --  we ate those apples worms and all.

I'm don't remember many stomach aches either.

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Instant Messaging System circa 1950

I have a friend who actually talks to her children on their cell phones, even if they are in the house.

I remember when I was a little one, before I was nine or ten, my dad had the upstairs room that was over the kitchen which he used as his office/study.  Mom and the kids were downstairs doing their thing while dad was upstairs studying -- for his sermons.

Mom and dad had an instant messaging system rigged up and it went like this: 

Mom would get the broom out of the corner by the chimney (in the kitchen) and she would use the broom handle and tap three times on the floor and dad would know that dinner was ready.  He would come down, usually on the first tap.  Sometimes, however, he must have been engrossed in what he was studying, and he didn't appear at the dinner table which had four hungry kids waiting for him, so mom would rap again on the ceiling, five times.

I don't think she had to make the request more than twice for him to get down to the dinner table.

She also used the broom handle at other times -- if she really needed dad to do some disciplining, she would rap and rap and rap until he came down to take care of that nasty business.  Believe me, you never wanted mom to rap on the ceiling to get dad down for a discipline problem.  No, you certainly didn't. 

Visualize this:  Four children hanging on their mother's arms so she couldn't get that broom handle to rap against the ceiling. 

So, my question is:  which works better -- the old rapping method or the new phone method, or texting, I guess would be another present-day method?

Well, I think that if you are a child and want to avoid daddy's discipline, mom couldn't sneak in a text message using a broom.

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