Garden Skills and Other Stuff You Won’t Find in the Almanac

Gardeners need a good sense of humor. It’s a prerequisite for planting and harvesting. My family’s garden shortcomings emphasize this need. No matter how well intended, “things” were always popping up to foil the best of intentions.

My sisters, Elaine and Rhonda, illustrate just how easy it is for plans to go awry. They love green beans, so they set about planting what would surely be a bountiful harvest. Soil prep was done with an eye to perfection that would make an agronomist jealous. They shuffled more dirt than a squadron of moles.

Next, four arrow-straight rows were laid out with the idea that a crooked row was a sign of lazy plow person. Finally, they drove metal fence posts at each end of the four rows and strung a taut wire from pole to pole.   

When the beans began to peek through the earth they tied sections of baling twine from the wires down to the emerging sprouts.  If all went as planned, the beans would climb the twine up to the wire, which would not only facilitate picking but also keep the beans out of the dirt.  

A few days later they walked into the garden to check on the progress of the bean bonanza. Alas, instead of healthy bean sprouts shooting ever upward, they were greeted with neatly cropped, unhealthy-brownish-looking bean stems. Momentarily vexed at this turn of events, they continued down each row until suddenly two balls of brown fur darted out of the garden and into a nearby patch of woods. The only thing that had been swinging on the twine was a creature known as Sylvilagus floridanus—the cottontail rabbit. Suddenly, at least according to my sisters, the rabbits had changed from cute furry bunnies last winter to evil personified this spring, the long ears having been replaced by horns.  

My own misfortunes began with a creature known as a front-tined garden tiller. Either my dad or my uncles had bought the thing. For my folks, this was a fairly new concept. For me, it was both new and foreign.

I was somewhere around 14 when they told me to go plow the corn. The beast was sitting in the yard gassed up and ready to go. It was some 20 yards to the corn patch.  When I fired it off and depressed its accelerator, it headed toward the corn patch dragging me with it.

I was not smart enough to let go of the gas feed, so off we went. I rode that machine for the next 20 yards. I tried to stay on for a full eight seconds like any good bull rider but it threw me at seven. Though my time disqualified me, everyone watching gave me very good style points.

As wonderful as fresh produce can be, there were times when planting could be taken to the extreme. Dad was one of those people who had a hard time understanding when enough was enough. Squash is one example. If you garden very much, then you know that three or four properly pampered squash plants can produce a bushel basket full of squash in short order.

The way Dad viewed it however, was that if four plants were a good thing then 40 would be better. Once it all got going half the garden resembled a pond of giant lily pads. Those leaves provided shade for everything from rabbits, to snakes, to itinerant potato beetles.

It was impossible to find all the squash in that much vegetation, the result being that some of those hidden squashes grew to enormous size. I always marveled that we could grow a zucchini three feet long which weighed 40 pounds while the best we could do with a pumpkin was no bigger than a tennis ball.  

As fun as it all was, I should mention that there are two things about gardening that I never liked and both of them are picking okra. Okra is very itchy. My dictionary even defines it as having sticky, green pods. It bothered my dad so much that when he absolutely had to pick it he wore a long sleeve shirt. The main rule of thumb, however, was that offspring were expendable so I was often the sacrificial okra picker.

One hot afternoon I was asked to go pick the row of okra located beside the corn crib.  As I picked, I was basking in the thought that I possessed an okra knowledge uncommon for someone my age. I quickly recognized that a majority of the stuff was overgrown and too hard for consumption so I just threw most of it into the hog lot which was adjacent to the row of okra.  

Back at the house the folks asked why I only had two pods. I told them that the stuff was too old and hard so I fed it to the hogs. My aunt informed me that I had picked the wrong row. The hog lot row was an heirloom variety that she had been saving for seed. They never asked me to pick the okra again, which made both me and the pigs happy.

Hardly a day passed that there wasn’t a new garden tutorial. Sometimes our lessons were taught by the weather, or drought, or too much rain.  Sometimes it was hail that could make a corn patch look like it had gone through a paper shredder.  

Other lessons were taught by insects: Japanese beetles, corn worms or maybe hornets. Through it all there was one common denominator. We never forgot the need to stand back and have a good laugh.