Amore hospitable garden spot

BY COURT MERRIGAN

Growing up on a farm back home, in addition to the commercial operation, we raised a garden. Not your typical garden, either, with a few tomato plants, a carrot patch, maybe some cucumbers. This garden was an operation, laid out with precision by my mom to encompass a good half-acre of food production. There were rows of sweet corn. Fields of tomatoes. Spreads of potatoes, sweet peas, green beans, bell peppers. There was even a pumpkin patch, which yielded so many that it became an annual tradition for a truckload of pumpkins to arrive in time for the school Halloween party. Jack-olanterns for all!

My mom rode herd on this effort, because my mom adhered to the creed — familiar to the Yankee ingenuity found in these parts — that homegrown and homemade is superior to store-bought in every instance save black licorice. (My mom has a thing for black licorice.)

That’s why I grew up eating nothing but homemade bread, sporting homemade shirts and trousers, gathering eggs from the henhouse, dining on steaks that came from cattle I’d fed myself and supping on produce straight from our own garden. That halfacre produced vastly more than we could eat in season, so my mom spent a couple weeks at the end of the summer in a hot kitchen, canning. All winter long, one of us kids would be sent scampering down to the cellar to fetch a can of tomatoes, or sweet corn, or sweet peas, to say nothing of raspberry jam, rhubarb jelly and chokecherry cordial. We ate well all year round thanks to her ceaseless efforts. We all should be so lucky!

It’s not particularly friendly dirt out there on the high plains. The tawny soil forms a rock-hard crust you must shatter with a shovel, after which the powder beneath up and blows away at the first hint of wind, which arrives daily. As summer progresses, the soil gives warm welcome to puncture vines (called stickers and goat heads) big enough to pop bike tires and tenacious sandburs, while only grudgingly supporting the vegetables you attempt to coax forth.

And, of course, nothing will grow at all without copious amounts of water. We kept a garden hose running constantly and even used to divert irrigation water from the surrounding fields to give the