Ruth Penelope Smith
This is my first year attempting gardening by myself, but I’ve been fortunate enough to have spent most of my youth with a Grandmother and Mother that had spent their lives farming.
From early on I recall watching the large plot behind my Grandmother Smith’s rented house being fertilized, tilled, cleared of rocks, debris, and racked into symmetrically straight rows before a hoe was used to create furrows for the seeds, plants, and starters were placed in the fertile soil. As I grew older I was happily let help. Never was I pressured or told I HAD to work gardening.
Grandma Smith surrounded by family with her garden in the back planted for the spring.
Applying the word garden to the field that my Grandmother Smith planted yearly makes it sound, by today’s thinking, of a little area that someone plants a few things in as a hobby or for leisure. Which is so far from what my Grandmother’s plot was. She grew enough food to literally provide ALL of our fruit and vegetable needs for the year! There were three grandchildren, her daughter (my mother), and off and on her youngest son.
The land she sowed with plant life provided her family with the greatest, healthiest, most economical food there is to EVER be had. The word garden is minumializing how important and significant that land was. It is the closest I can come to describing it.
My Grandmother was raised farming in Southern Alabama. Where she then bought with her second husband a farm to work for profit and to sustain their large family. Teaching her children how to grow and nurture life and feed themselves (if need be) and their own families.
This tradition and knowledge I was privy to, and sadly, in my youth while my Grandmother was still living I did not appreciate , nor take advantage of her skills and expertise. I have though leaned, learned, and depended on her daughter’s wealth of farming and gardening. Luckily for me she paid closer attention then I did.
The height of harvesting was always when the fruits were ready to be picked and eaten. The highlight for all children of course. Before there was a commercialized, massed produced, having more sugar than fruit ‘fruit Roll-Ups’. My grandmother made us fresh, WHOLE fruit ‘fruit leather’. We were enjoying these treats when the majority of children my age had NO clue what such a wonderful, sweet, healthy, amazing treat they were missing out on!
Able to pick ripe apples and apricots right off the trees! No worry of chemicals, just bite right in. Being so eager for those strawberries to turn their lushes red, and feel the juice slide down already stick fingers. The mouth-watering wait as a sun warmed watermelon was clipped from the vine and split, cut, and handed out to cousins and family gathered together to enjoy such awesome bounty and the love for one another!
Cooking and caring for her family
As I grew older we would be blessed to have my Grandmother Smith live with us again. At that later date she did have the modern definition of a garden. Still she planted and grew. I have so many loving memories of my Grandmother Smith; but then her whole family does.
The sweetest smelling one is of helping her plant her annual flowers. Petunias, marigolds, and pansies. I recall her starting the seeds and transplanting them around the drive, the front walk, and encircling the mailbox.
Shortly before we moved I helped with the traditional mailbox flower circle. She always planted pansies there. As our fingers (her gloved ones, my bare ones) eagerly delving into the moist rich, cool dirt she would impart wisdom. Her soft voice and as sweet as the scent of the flowers imparting things she learned. Views of how to live. What was truly important in life. Never was it her lecturing. She merely let me in on what she understood to be fact and truth about the world.
When finally I flew the nest to gain my own truths and facts I came back to wanting to plant. To grow life. My first foray was to take place while we were stationed in Japan. The air force base in Misawa, Japan offered garden plots (and these were the VERY definition of the modern understanding) for military personal and their families. I excitedly gathered my then only child and we headed to go grow!
What a disappointing sight those plots were! They were dry, barren, and poorly maintained. We raked and hoed a few rows and planted some onions, peppers, and radishes. It was not the success I had envisioned. The soil just was not suited to grow ANYTHING. Even the surrounding area that was not cultivated and sectioned off for garden plots grew NOTHING. Not a grass or weed insight. I was so very disappointed.
A year later while working and going to school I hired a ma’ma-san to help care for my son and housework. What a blessing this wonderful Japanese lady was! She became part of our family, and we her’s!
She taught my son to understand Japanese, me to prepare many Asian dishes, and how to grow plants in plastic planters on the two steps, lining our back deck. It was SOO amazing! I had been blessed with a sera-get Grandmother all those miles from home.
She took and showed me how to pick wild greens in the forest for authentic stir-fry. When to tell that radishes were right to pick. Watering. Sunlight. And to sit and enjoy a cup of hot tea in the spring morning just watching the plants grow. Something I STILL enjoy and do!
The two years we were granted to have our Gramma-son (a name my son gave her that brought a smile of love and pleasure every time she heard it) only intensified my desire to GROW things. To plant, weed, water, nurture, harvest, and enjoy the bounty and goodness of our labor and God’s amazing gift of food from the world He created for us!
Our first base stateside was Elmendorf. In Anchorage AK!?! Oh my goodness! I didn’t even CONSIDER trying to have plants or garden there. Even after going to several friend’s and church members’ houses and seeing their truly surprising and amazing plants and crops! I just didn’t feel that growing need. I wouldn’t feel it for many years.
We eventually were stationed in Oklahoma at Ft. Sill and I tried the garden plots on the post once more. The plots had far better soil and situated with shade from the legacy trees and excellent drainage. The draw back was we didn’t have a tiller, nor the money to buy/rent one. I did have a nice retired gentleman that tilled it once for me, but I didn’t have the proper planning and tiller needed again once I was ready to start my planting.
Once moved to Ft. Stewart in Georgia I tried my hand last summer. The area I picked was perfect (so I thought), I tried twice with planting several things and just never got anything to grow.
This year I was all set! I had a rented tiller, and two strong men (eldest son and husband) to help me. I discovered he original area didn’t grow for a reason. Too sandy. The rain fall is so frequent that roots don’t have to go deep, including tree roots. So the sandy area would have had to be built up with a lot of mulch and rich soil (luckily we had an abundance of that right across the side fence in the cultivated woods) and pulling up tree roots, so the husband suggested moving the plot next to the side of the house.
Ready to grow some food!
As we dumped six buckets worth of rich decomposed top layer on to the tilled area and then another sixteen buckets of dirt after the mulch was tilled in, I was channeling my grandmother. So was my husband, since he made me twelve (I had plotted my garden map for eight; I was in ecstasy having the extra four rows!) perfect rows!
With my calls to my mom to partake of her wisdom, I felt that I had FINALLY fulfilling my gardening DNA that had at times burned with in me, lain dormant with a yearning, and now finally fulfilled!
With pure pleasure and excitement I happily bore anyone of wonderful budding of something new, or the set back of something not sprouting and needing to be replant.
From this amazing woman who taught her daughter the value of growing your own food, I have been able to carry on the tradition with my children! Encouraging them to join and help plant, tend, weed, water, and eventually gather and eat what we have sown.
A legacy that is precious and priceless.
Grandma Smith
Fulfilling her legacy
