We Love Gardening!

Written For Our Grandchildren --

Gardening has always been important to us. When your parents were young, we had two big gardens. One was east of our house and the other was on the west. And we had some great adventures from turning the soil in the spring to harvesting in the fall.

In the early days, Gramp used to come home from work almost every day for lunch. Day after day, he would go to the garden before he ate to see how the garden was going. And he would always announce to me what he saw. "The beans have sprouted".  "The squash is blossomed". "We will need to pick the peas." He simply loved it.

One year our corn was growing beautifully! It was tall and green and just about ready to harvest. I looked out the window just to admire it one day only to see that the neighbor's cows were having a gourmet meal in our corn patch -- twelve rows of it! I went out the door with a broom in my hand and headed to the garden, yelling at those four or five Holsteins. They knew I meant business and they ran in every direction knocking our corn down in the process. The promise of corn on the cob dwindled dramatically in only a few moments of time. Our neighbor was so sorrowful over what happened that he brought us two sacks of peas from HIS garden.



Every fall we were able to can and freeze large quantities of vegetables for our family to enjoy until the next harvest time. Our children -- your Moms and Dads -- were always very helpful in planting and gathering! And they also enjoyed helping themselves. It was common to see our children pulling carrots to eat fresh, shelling peas for a snack, picking and apple or berries, or eating a ripe tomato.
It was just part of the joy of gardening!

Growing fruits and vegetables has, indeed, been a tradition for us. That and apple picking at nearby orchards after we moved to Glenburn. I remember the times that we took some of our grandchildren and their parents to the orchards nearby. It was something that we really loved to do. This year we went by ourselves. But we did pick enough to share!

This spring I thought Gramp shouldn't plant anything. He has the aches and pains of age and I am not able to do much to help him. But he said he wanted to plant a few things. So he planted a row of green beans, a row of beets, about a dozen summer squash (zucchini and yellow crookneck), and around a dozen tomato plants. He planted some cucumbers, too, but they didn't survive.

What a tomato harvest we had! And because the frost was delayed for about a month, the plants continued to produce until nearly the middle of October. We blanched and peeled quarts and quarts of whole tomatoes for the freezer. We cooked tomatoes with summer squash, onions and peppers to freeze and we had more than 30 packages of those.

We made ketchup, tomato soup, and spaghetti sauce. We also froze some beets and made pickled beets -- a favorite. We have also been working on apple sauce. Are we ever stocked for the winter!
Not only are we well stocked, but we had some to share with others. By the way, half of the fun of gardening is to share!

And what about next year? Well, I am thinking already that it would be fun to have a few things to eat fresh. We will see.

The growing season is evidence of our Lord's faithfulness to us and His provision for us.
The Bible says, "While the earth remains, Seedtime and harvest, And cold and heat, And summer and winter, And day and night Shall not cease." - Genesis 8:22

A Lesson From The Great Depression

I am a child of parents who lived through the Great Depression, a time of serious financial struggles for many after a Stock Market Crash that devastated the economy.

My mother has told me stories of how she and her brother Lawrence shared a pencil at school. They stopped at a little store on their walk to school and spent a penny on a pencil. The idea was for the pencil to last for a week. My Uncle Lawrence would cut the pencil in half to share with his sister. One of them kept the end with the eraser and the other used the end with no eraser.  The prior week's stub with the left-over eraser was used by the one who had no eraser on a given week.

Lunches for school were carried in lard cans that had a bail on them. Most frequently lunch was a serving of baked beans packed with a homemade biscuit on top. Fruit was rare. In fact Mom said that a highlight at Christmas time was an orange in the toe of her stocking. It was usually the only orange that she had for the year.

One standard was that NOTHING was wasted! Let me tell you about a treasure that I have from those days:

A few years ago, my cousin Andrea told me that she had a little stack of quilt squares that our grandmother had given her for making a quilt. She had forgotten about them, but had found them in a drawer with other fabrics. She wanted to know if I would like it if she made up the quilt and gave it to us to have at our camp (under construction). And I told her I would love it.

Grammie had made the squares from cotton sugar sacks and from scraps of material that she had saved. Often she saved good parts from worn clothing -- like the backs of shirts. And she reused them in making quilts or other useful items.

Andrea is a great seamstress and she went to work, using those wonderful pieces from 70 years ago -- or more.  When she was finished, she gave it to me and I was astounded! What a beautiful quilt! How precious to look at it and touch the squares that my grandmother had held in her hand.

Each square has a "Sunbonnet Sue" appliqued on it by hand-stitching -- Grammie's hand. Some of the squares still have the printed "Revere Sugar" on them! But to look at it again and think of how Grammie's thread, needle, scissors, and thimble were used to turn something common into something beautiful really touched me! Parts of each one had some hand embroidery, as well. And Grammie, by the way, taught ME to embroider when I was small. What good memories!

The quilt has been stored at our house during the construction of our camp / cottage. But this week we took it there. And we spread it on Mom's bed so we could get a picture to show her.

When I showed it to Mom today, she said, "What's that?" Then she caught her breath and said, "Oooooh!" She was so thrilled to see it.

So, thank you, Andrea! Your labor of love cannot even be described. . . it is beyond
wonderful!

They Were Going To Be Famous!

Grampie Wayne spent some of his growing up years in the coal and corn land of rural Illinois, near the Kankakee River. His Dad was pastor at Custer Park Baptist Church, where his grandmother had been a member several years prior.

Now, according to him, Custer Park was a "one horse town and the horse was dead." You can't imagine the road back in the 1950s. The road had a paved lane in the center and a wide shoulder of gravel on each side of the pavement. Drivers would stay on the paved lane until they met another vehicle and then they would pull over with one tire on the pavement and one on the gravel. He says that was really scary for kids.

The Wabash Rail Road ran through town and the mail sack was grabbed on the way through, by a train crewman, who snatched it from the pole where it was left hanging. We cannot imagine that today, but -- from Pony Express days until now, the mail had to get through! And it did.

There were two grocery stores in town. The main store was Aldrich's and the other was Case's. Case's didn't operate very long, as he remembers. Between the two stores was a low building that housed the post office. He remembers getting baby chicks through the mail and at the post office, that annual delivery day found the building full of chirping!

Next to the post office was a hotel, he thinks. And for some cause, unknown to him it burned to the ground. That really changed the mini-skyline and as far as he knows the hotel was never rebuilt.

The Church was nearby and the cemetary. You can visit that cemetary these days and see a headstone at the grave is his great grandparents, Frank and Martha. The Church has a new building outside of the little town center.

Near the graveyard his friend, Jimmy lived and it was a short hoof for the boys when they visited. Gramp tells of many adventures. And they were typical boys from the time when there was no TV, no internet, no digital games and all that is available today. Most of the play time was outside.

One day a few boys, including his friends Gary and Jimmy were playing in a nearby corn field. As they went between the rows, kicking at the wonderful, black soil they found a BONE. It was big and it needed to be dug up. A DINOSAUER BONE! They had to dig it up and report their find to the Chicago Museum of Science. They were going to be famous. And they were going to be wealthy.
So they dug and dug with their hearts beating faster and faster (I presume). AMAZING! They had an area, probably 9 x 11 feet dug up in the field and probably as much as 6 feet deep. Whatever the size, he remembers it as pretty massive.

Everything was fine with the young scientists until someone driving past the research site stopped the car and screamed at them. They took off running -- all in different directions! Gramp said he ran into the electric fence but he was so scared he didn't know if he got a shock or not. Maybe it was off at the time.

It was so humiliating to Gramp! Not only did they find that their archeological dig was unappreciated, but their dreams were shattered when they found out the skeleton was that of a horse! (Maybe it was that one horse from the one-horse town.)

But one of the boys kept the dream alive by keeping a "dinosaur tooth" in his collection at home. Gramp doesn't know where he got that specimen, but likely from another adventure at a different time or place. From time to time he would take the tooth to school and show it. Your Gramp thinks it was a rock!


Note: The photo of Grampie was taken about a half century later very close to the original scene.