Winter. The main farm tasks are keeping the horses fed, supplied with water, and provided with dry, warm stalls overnight . Although planning for the new gardening season is already starting, there is still time for remembering other gardens, other gardeners.
My parents always kept a small kitchen garden. As did their parents before. And everyone else around, too. Our garden was at the back of the property, adjoining the lane that separated the farms and homes from the fields of wheat and sugar beet. It had a fence and a gate which was always kept latched, despite the fact that all the other villagers grew their own carrots and lettuce, and would hardly be prowling around trying to snatch some of ours.
We grew basics: tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, herbs. Whatever you might toss in a salad. And then some strawberries, corn, and potatoes. The corn and potatoes didn’t fit in the garden, so they occupied a small open patch next to it. I remember being out there in the evenings picking off and killing potato beetles. Even though in death they stained your fingers orange I quite liked the look of them with their elegant black and white striped backs.
Growing vegetables wasn’t anything special. It was what one did. Not because it was trendy, but because money was tight, and why would you spend it on buying something you could grow for a fraction of the cost. The 100-mile diet was a fact of life, except for the few vegetables that came from the grocery store freezer. We ate fruits and vegetables when in season. Our yard had apricot, plum, pear, walnut and apple trees in it, so snacks were never far away, and they frequently included live protein in the form of worms. You either ate around them, if you spotted them, or …. well, sometimes you just missed them, and that was that.
My mother ate more than her share of live protein. She couldn’t bear throwing food away. If it was something in the cupboard that had gone moldy, she would simply scrape off the mold and eat the rest. She said it was because she knew what it was to be hungry. Growing up in the thirties and forties in central Europe meant knowing hunger. First, there was the Great Depression, and then came the war. My mother’s grandmother, who had lost her husband and a son in the first great war and who had no pension or other income, worked a small field by hand to help support the family. My mother often went along to help her, and was rewarded with stories of life in earlier days.
When war arrived, much of the equipment the local farmers had was needed for the war effort, and fuel was tightly rationed. So they went back to working with horses and oxen. In the photo above my mother is helping a neighbouring family bring in the harvest.
Poverty is not romantic when lived, though it easily comes to appear that way in stories. What is inescapable is that people who actually depend on the land for sustenance have an intimate relationship to the earth that the rest of us don’t. We have other options, and we often seem to be only “playing” at gardening and growing food. I let tomatoes go to waste on the vine without much regret, and when I don’t feel like waiting for the next crop of lettuce to be ready, I will go buy it overpackaged and pre-washed in the supermarket without much thought.
We are the instant gratification society. But we no longer know the joy of first oranges that used to appear in the stores at the beginning of December. They tasted amazing, partly because they were picked when ripe, and partly because of the many months we had had to go without.
It has been many, many months that I have had to do without my mother. She will not return to give me another chance at appreciating and loving her more. All I can do is dig within to find seeds of what she has sown, and nurture them: a simple love of all growing things, an immense joy at the “greenness” of spring (which she never ceased to comment upon in the most rapturous terms) and nature’s many visual delights, a deep gratitude for enough food to eat.
Comments