Welcome to my garden!

I’m new to blogging but I’m not new to gardening, come along and let me tell you how it all got started…

I grew up in the rolling hills of Tennessee, only a few miles down the road from my grandparents on my mother’s side of the family, and like many people who’ve grown up in the American south, my grandparents loved to garden! I have only the faintest memory of helping, but the first time I helped my Paw (as we all called him) plant his garden I was only three years old. I’ve been told I was wearing a small pair of overalls, and as I would plant a seed in the row I would secretly tuck a seed away in my little front overall pocket. When I ran out of seeds…I just pulled more from that little pocket and dropped them in the row. Only no one was really paying all that much attention to me. A few weeks later and it became clear to everyone that all the rows I’d planted were mixed together! Everything interplanted, corn next to the cucumbers, tomatoes next to squash, beans next to okra – it was pure chaos! He laughed it off though and everyone called them Josh’s Salad Rows that year.

Ironically…..I grew up to really loathe salads.

Paw was a machinist by trade, an avid hunter at heart, and a hobbyist gardener in his spare time. He tended to a fruit tree orchard on our farm, and over the course of his life he planted many different varieties of fruit and nut tree around the property. If the spring and summer rain arrived at the right time, we always had plenty -and I do mean plenty- of wild blackberries and a few wild raspberries. If it came at the wrong time…well…if you know then you know, you know? For most of my life Paw always planted a garden that was easily 2 acres or larger every year and he planted almost everything that could be planted. We were very privileged to have the space for such a large garden. Even if it didn’t turn out all that great or only a few plants produced, even if weeds overtook the garden like the jungles in Jumanji, he planted a garden every year like clockwork and we were almost always overwhelmed with produce.

Unlike my Paw, Maw was…not a fan of gardening. Which is something I know now, but not something I knew then. Some of my earliest memories helping in the garden aren’t so much about planting seeds actually, but I do remember quite a lot of picking…and harvesting…and more picking and more harvesting. And then there was the canning, lots and lots of canning! When I think back to being a little helper in the garden, one memory that truly stands out in my mind are the memories of picking, popping, and canning copious amounts of green beans. I wasn’t so much an active participant in the canning so much as I was a passive observer, I mean we’re talking about a 5-10 year old you know! Everyone would gather in the front yard and pop beans until they were all popped, and usually there was a hot water-bath canning operation going full steam in the kitchen. Assembly line style; we had folks washing the freshly popped beans, cleaning and sterilizing mason jars, and of course Maw was monitoring the canner on the stove. There were beans, jars, and family members everywhere!

Apart from green beans I remember us growing almost everything you can imagine over the years; corn, all kinds of tomatoes, peppers, okra until it grew too big to harvest, cucumbers for pickling, squash, potatoes, lettuces, watermelon, pumpkins, and more. He always set the rows far enough apart to easily till in between them after the plants matured. A old style pump action powder duster to handle the bugs, and liquid fish fertilizer were never in short supply…or the 5 gallon buckets we had to use to mix, carry, and pour the fertilizer along the rows. I remember Paw always wore the same baggy button up work shirt whenever he was working in the garden, usually haunched over picking vegetables with a half-lit/half-chewed blackjack cigar hanging off the corner of his mouth and a wad of plastic grocery bags stuffed into his back pocket as he walked along the rows, haunched over. I can still remember the distinctive smoked tobacco odor that brand of cigars gave off.

And just like that…it all became memories.