Gardening

One of two African Violets that I rooted from a leaf cutting has beautiful white blossoms with blue edges. I’m a sometime gardener. I get enthused in spurts and go all out, 90 to nothin’ propagating plants, buying seeds and digging holes in the yard until my back gives out. Then I take to my bed and read whodunits. From that point on, the fruits of my efforts have to make it on their own or die.

Years ago, when I was in a dentist’s waiting room, I read a magazine article on how to grow roses from stem cuttings. My husband had sent me a dozen American Beauty Roses so when the petals dropped, I collected coffee cans, drilled drain holes in them, and filled them with dirt from the yard. After carefully measuring, cutting, and planting the stems in the coffee cans, I watered and watched. Days went by; the stems turned brown and the cans rusted. It turned out that I had just been watering sticks. Eventually, I threw them away.

One day my daughter wanted to make a bonsai. As we browsed a nursery for a plant with an interesting shape, I saw several women filling flats of sand with tiny pieces of plants and asked what they were doing. They showed me about how to use rooting hormone. Since then, I have had a lot of pleasure learning and propagating various plants.

Mom and Dad always grew big gardens. They were family projects. When we lived on Bliss Blvd, we had a small tomato patch near the back porch and a large field garden on the other side of the railroad tracks that ran in back of our house.

When we kids woke up on summer mornings, we’d find Mom working in the tomato patch and she’d let us pick the biggest, ripest and juiciest tomatoes to eat as we sat on the porch steps. In the afternoons when Dad got off work from the office, we hurried thru supper so we could get as much garden work done in the field garden as possible while there was daylight. We reached the garden by walking down a path and crossing the tracks at the bottom of the little hill.

We’d walk single file down the path carrying buckets of water, hoes and rakes. Carrying water was a hard job. We larger ones made the water trips, filling the buckets at the house then carrying them to the field. We tried not to spill or splash too much water out of the buckets so we wouldn’t have to make so many trips. We gardened until dusk, and then Mom would serve us slices of melon or ice cream and homemade cookies. .

In those days we went barefoot all summer, except when we went to Sunday school. One day I was running down the path ahead of the others and stepped on something. It was a coiled snake lying in the middle of the path. The whole incident was over in a matter of seconds, but to this day I remember how it felt when my foot touched it. On the way back up the path, I insisted everyone go ahead of me to make certain there wasn’t another one.