As far back as I can remember we have always had a garden. And where I couldn’t remember us having one, my older siblings do remember. At first, the biggest garden I remember us having was a bout fifty feet long and twenty feet wide. HUGE. I mean, GIANT! I was seven, and that was a BIG place, especially when I had to weed one whole fifty foot long row of green beans. Then once they started bearing, I had to pick them too! All throughout my life I had those long dirt rows staring me in the face, starting out furrows, waiting eagerly for the hands that would drop the seeds, one by one, into the small furrow. Once the dirt enveloped the seed the easiest part of the gardening was done. It was after the small shoots began to pop out of the dirt that we had the battle begin. Weed after weed was pulled, clod after clod of dirt was broken up because Mom never allowed a clump in her garden; bucket upon bucket of water was hauled from the pond by hand up the hill to the never ending rows.
The largest garden that I ever worked in with my family was the three acre one that we planted in 2007. We had corn in two of the acres, and the rest was potatoes, maters, beans, squash, melons, peas, peppers, strawberries, asparagus and a bunch of different herbs.
I remember the day that we planted that two acres of corn. No, its not a lot of corn, compared to what the old timers used to plant each year, or the mountain folks would put in the ground just as a matter of course, but to me, as I stood there barefooted surrounded by empty dirt, watching Adam cut row after row after row out with the tractor and plow, I felt small. Very small. As we gathered up buckets filled with the powdery red seed in it, and started hauling wheelbarrow loads of mushroom compost up to the first row, I realized that this was gonna take a WHILE.
Seven hours later. Halfway through. Burnt as red as a overripe mater. Worn out. And just halfway, get that? HALFWAY through? The sun was out in full force that day, I remember shading my eyes with my hand to look up at the sky and not seeing ONE cloud.
There were seven of us working out there. Once an hour Noah would take a break to run down to the house and bring up a bucket full of fresh cool water and a dipper to drink it with. After a few hours had gone by there was more water being poured on our heads then there was going down our thirsty throats.
Then we were finished. We all stood back with our hands on our hips at the edge of the field, where the green met brown. Nasty filthy sweat rags were hanging out of the boys limp overall pockets, and my skirt was full of dust and filth. But looking over that field, at the two acres of corn there was such a feeling of satisfaction at a job well done, that we could look at each other and say, ‘it was worth it’. There’s nothing like putting in a good hard day of labor to accomplish something big like that.
