I have vague memories of a big barn and animal pens beside the house where I lived from 1950 to 1962. I have no idea how old the farmhouse was when daddy bought it and the fifteen acres it was on after graduation from college in 1948 for his new family.
When we tore it down in 1962 to build a modern split level brick house on the same site we found hand-hewn timbers supporting it. The ax marks were plainly visible.
The barn was torn down when I was three or four, I think. Most of my memories of it are piles of rubble and finding boards with nails in them with my bare feet. Then we got it all cleaned up and used the 100×300 foot area for a garden. The soil was extremely rich from years of animal waste and rotting hay debris.
Mama And daddy grew up during the depression and did everything they could to be self-sufficient. Although daddy taught school and later became principal of Dearing Elementary, he worked long hours on the farm, developing a thriving egg business, eventually including 11,000 laying hens.
Mama worked the farm but also made cakes to sell, using milk from our cows and eggs from our chickens. She also canned, pickled and froze everything possible to have delicious food year-round.
Our summer garden included tomatoes, potatoes, corn, string beans, field peas, butter beans, okra, cucumbers, squash, peppers (bell and hot) and onions. Our early spring garden had radishes, lettuce, cabbage, turnips and broccoli. Some of them were replanted in the fall. Daddy also had a small asparagus bed he kept active.
Even as a young kid I “got” to help. I didn’t have the patience to drop two or three butterbean or pea seeds per hill in the trench daddy dug with an old push plow, so I followed mama as she dropped them spaced just right. My job was to cover them, using my bare feet like plows to push the dirt on top of the seeds then step on top to compress the soil. Mama would look back regularly and and also check the first row as we worked back up the next one, checking to make sure I had not gotten distracted.
We planted tomato plants after raising them from seeds inside. I hated that process. Mama or daddy would put the small plant into the ground and I had to haul water in small bucket from the house and pour a little beside each plant, being careful to not wash dirt from the roots. The biggest bucket I could carry was still small so it meant dozens of trip!
We always planted on Good Friday since that was usually a safe timing to avoid a late frost. Is your garden plot ready? If not you have less than two weeks!
I have many more gardening and canning memories. I wish I could still do things like that. Now I limit myself to about eight tomato and six bell pepper plants each year.