Spring
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The
time of planting was part calendar, part weather and part almanac.
The almanac was kept in the top drawer of the kitchen cabinet,
there in those little drawers between the two flanking doors.
Aunt Merica always got the almanac down to see what the sign was
before the beans, the potatoes, the onions, any planting was done.
If it were a root vegetable to be planted, the sign had to be
down, so the roots would stay down in the dirt and develop well.
The size of the leaves on the apple trees determined the time
to plant beans. Mother had less faith in all this than Aunt Merica
did. Daddy seemed caught in the middle.
All the while, wooden trays of tiny seedlings were sitting around
in the house, gobbling up all the sunshine away from the geraniums,
amaryllis and Christmas cactus that had usually held sway in front
of windows. On one of the first warm, sunny days in February,
Aunt Merica had brought in to the back porch big buckets of dirt
from the best part of the garden, sifted it, put it in old dishpans
and baked it in the oven of the big black iron stove there in
the kitchen. Baking dirt has a very distinctive odor. Once it
had baked long enough to kill off all the weed seeds, she cooled
it and then filled the wooden trays. In tiny rows she planted
some of the tomato seeds she had saved from last summer. Each
row got marked in ways she understood: red, yellow, orange, beef-heart,
cherry. Beef-heart and orange tomatoes were my very favorite.
Another tray got pepper seeds: hot, green. Another, cabbage: early,
winter. Finally, she unrolled the bundle of flat zinnia seeds
and the bundle of thin marigold seeds with their feathery ends.
Flowers were almost as important as vegetables.
As
soon as the ground could be worked, sometimes earlier than when
the farmer came to plow (which meant my father would have to spade
up the soil), Aunt Merica planted onions. The bed was big and
always in the same spot, west of the shed and out from the kitchen
windows. The rows went north and south and always there were yellow
onions and white onions. The selected sets for planting were kept,
pushed aside, near the onions we ate from all winter.
Peas, beets and lettuce went in soon thereafter, the lettuce into
the bed up between the wash kettle and the purple grape vine.
The bed was sown solid. Later, almost as soon as the plants were
an inch or so high and on until the hot days of late spring turned
the lettuce bitter, I would pick a pan full for scalded lettuce
for supper each night, pinching off outer most leaf after outermost
leaf.
When
the weather permitted and the soil was warm enough, the planting
of the rest of the garden took place. If cold, rainy weather had
delayed us until the sign was wrong, Aunt Merica had to go ahead
anyway. It always worried her; she just knew we wouldn't have
a good crop. And if we had been delayed too long, even the Monday
wash or the Tuesday ironing had to be postponed, an almost unheard
of event.
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