Slugweirta Life Lesson Number One: IF you live in a home with a yard, then AT
LEAST half of said yard should be dedicated to a vegetable garden. Failure to do this (if you are one of the
aforementioned children) will result in genetic testing. Of course at least two of us would fail that
test.
Slugweirta’s
passion for gardening has a long familial history. Some of my very first memories are of the
vegetable garden. Starting in February,
we would all plant little seeds indoors in little biodegradable cups. Then nurture them, water them, thin them
until May when we could safely (usually) plant them.
 |
| You can see here some of the little seedlings in our living room. Luckily they are in focus, unlike Nana. |
That first garden, which if I remember
correctly (and I’m sure I do) was larger than our home. So we grew everything. Broccoli, squash, corn, carrots, sweet peas,
potatoes you name it, we grew it. Each
bed had a plant assigned to it and each group of four beds had a child assigned
to weeding it. I hated weeding the
garden, so every time I would kick up a gigantic fuss. My favorite thing to do (because my nickname
was Weed, remember) was to complain loudly about being forced to exterminate my
own kind.
“Oh,
you poor little weed. I don’t want to
murder you, but my mother’s making me.”
I
believe Slugweirta was prouder of that garden than she was of her Master’s
degree. If I picture my mother at that
time in her life (really at any time in her life) she would be out in the
garden, tilling. My mom is not afraid to
get her hands dirty. Part of her
passion, I am sure, is that this is a super cheap way to feed eight children
fresh produce, and also teach them the value of child labor laws. In that yard we also had an apricot tree, two
cherry trees, a pear and an apple tree.
Every
spring we would go to the local dairy and fill our pickup truck full of cow
manure. IF you do the shoveling
yourself, they let you take as much cow poop as you want. FOR FREE.
I well remember standing knee deep in manure and shoveling it into piles
in our garden. I’m pretty sure I smelled
fabulous for days afterward.
Our
other source of fertilizer was the compost pit.
The most despised chore at my house has always been taking out the
compost. At the very back of our yard
was a giant hole we dug every spring.
Throughout the year we would fill it with kitchen scraps. Trekking out to the back of the yard with a
bucket of smelly scraps meant for the pit was a daily chore. My biggest fear was falling in. And becoming compost myself. I still have nightmares about it.
BUT who’s
going to turn down free fertilizer? Not
my mother.
In our
next home, the garden was significantly smaller than the house. Mostly because the house was slightly larger
and the lot much smaller. Slugweirta
fixed this by turning random bits of yard into garden. And compost pits.
After
that we moved to a house with a huge yard.
And went back to a more suitable home to garden ratio. My mother still grows a giant vegetable
garden. She also grows several citrus trees indoors. Although I've never seen one produce a single fruit. Every time she purchases an avocado, she tries to grow an avocado tree from its pit. To do this she pierces it with three toothpicks and suspends it in a jar of water in the window sill. I'll bet there's one in her kitchen window sill at this very moment. She's been doing this for thirty years and I've never seen one do more than sprout. Most of them mold and have to be thrown out.
Because
of her dedication to gardening, I (and most of my siblings) have a passion for home grown veggies. I love tomatoes and cucumbers from the
garden. Although I could do without the
long keeper tomatoes, which Slugweirta keeps way past their prime, simply
because they are supposedly “long-keepers”.
That doesn’t mean they are still edible when they start to turn black, Mom.
In
order to avoid genetic testing, all of the kids who have homes with a yard
(currently 5 of us) also have vegetable gardens. Although, I go to Lowe’s to buy my manure. Don’t tell my mother.
