Spring
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Right
after breakfast, early, before the sun got hot, Mama and Aunt
Merica changed to their old clothes and their old shoes, put on
their bonnets and got their hoes down from the nails in the first
room of the shed. I got my bonnet and my little hoe. Sometimes
I had the job of dropping potatoes. Right behind me, Mama would
scoop up hoes full of dirt, cover the potato piece and give the
hill a firm pat with the hoe's back. We had cut the potatoes the
afternoon before, sitting there on the back porch. The pieces
had to be not too large and not too small but always with a good
eye. And we had to hope that the weather was going to be good
on the morrow, for we didn't want the pieces to sit for days.
Aunt Merica always said: red at night, sailors delight; red in
the morning, sailors fair warning. I listened for the cardinal's
rain calls.
Mama and Aunt Merica had talked and talked about where each vegetable
would be planted. They could not plant tomatoes (or corn or beans
or peppers or whatever) where they had been planted it last year.
The upper part of the garden, the part that dried out most quickly
and was full of tiny rocks, got planted, but more rows of the
vegetable were planted to make up for an expected slimmer crop.
After
a rain, all the little cabbage plants were reset into the garden.
It was a muddy job. We poked a hole in the hill that had been
made earlier, maybe poured in a bit of water, dropped in the plant
and pushed the wet soil close around the tiny stem. Our shoes
got heavy with clumps of stuck on mud.
The
tomatoes and peppers, zinnias and marigolds were put in when all
danger of frost had past. Some weeks later, Daddy staked each
tomato with the roughly split wood and, even later, we spent hours
tearing tomato strings from old garments and tying the yellow-staining
tomato plants to the stakes. Not once, but several times they
were tied as they grew taller and taller.
Early
corn and later corn went in some weeks apart. Pole beans were
planted with the corn, the corn forming a natural support for
the bean vines. A few hills for pumpkin got made and a ring of
seeds; pushed into the soil. At another part of the corn patch,
the yellow squash and the winter squash were put in, free to run
through the corn and far enough away from the pumpkin so we didn't
end up next year with squash that tasted like pumpkin.
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