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Spring

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Corn, beans, squash, cucumbers, tomatoes all got planted in hills. We went down the rows that had been laid off, scooping up soil with our hoe, piling it up and then patting it down with the back of the hoe. Six or eight inches or one or two feet further on, depending on what was to be grown, we made another hill. In it, that day or the next we either dropped a few bean seeds, or a few corn seeds and covered them with a hoe full of dirt, or we pushed squash or cucumber seeds down with our fingers.
We planted enough cucumbers to slice, to make cucumber slaw, to make all kinds of pickles: sour, sweet, mustard, German (later called Liberty), mixed. Later and all summer long, Aunt Merica would pick them, stepping gingerly through the mass of vines, finding the right size for pickles, sorting the overlooked and now grown big ones into lots for slicing and those for slaw. The buckets were emptied onto the- cool floor of the cellar and when there were enough and time permitted, we made pickles. But now it was still early spring, long before the cucumbers would come in.

Some afternoon we went to the woods to pick up ends of tree branches to bring back to the garden to stake the peas. Even bunch peas produced better if given support, and certainly the telephone peas required it. If Daddy was not working out of town, he put up two tall poles and strung wire between. Then we could tie pieces of binder twine to two stobs, throw one over the wire and stick them in the ground down the pea row.

When all the vegetables were planted we left them to come up. Daddy was working in West Virginia one spring when the garden came up so beautifully. The potatoes were eight inches high. The night before he arrived for a visit, a heavy frost killed the potatoes and most everything else, back to the ground. Mama and he stood, sadly surveying the sight. Daddy could only imagine the work she intended to show. Frost was always the enemy. Late frost, the killer.

While we waited for the new garden to grow, out at the asparagus bed young shoots were sticking up and ready to be eaten. The rhubarb was growing and we had our first rhubarb pie. All the wild greens were thriving. We got baskets and a knife and picked in the orchard, the lane and the fields lamb's quarter, narrow dock, poke shoots, a couple rhubarb leaves, a bit of dandelion, and anything else that Aunt Merica knew was good. Each leaf was looked, the mess par-boiled and then heated in the grease from frying side meat. It, with the new potatoes that soon were forming, made one of my great meals.

In the flower beds around the house and out beside the path to the pig pen, all the perennial flowers were coming up. So were the weeds. They had to be pulled out in spare moments. Some of the early flowers were in bloom: the baby iris, the creeping phlox, the grape hyacinths, the early tulips. The peonies had fats buds. Out in the woods the dogwood and the orange wild azalea were in bloom. Daddy and I brought in armloads to put in crocks in the hall and in the rooms. In the orchard the pear was dropping petals and the apples were covered with their pink-tipped white blossoms. Down in the front yard the two blackheart cherry trees were a great mass of white.

At the hen house the old hen's eggs had hatched and little chickens were running about the floor. The guinea hen was setting. At the barn the calf was being weaned. Out there we often found another hen wanting to set. Sometimes we used our eggs, but more often a setting was put in a basket and taken up to Aunt Lillie's or down to Miss Cynthia's to swap. Sometimes they came to our house. When this happened, Aunt Merica would go get the wooden box of eggs from the cellar and bring it down to the front porch where Miss Cynthia and Mama were still talking. Then the two of them, Aunt Merica and Miss Cynthia, would go over the eggs, selecting the ones they felt would hatch the best or would produce the best chicken.

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