The Garden of Eatin'

When we moved to Smith Valley in September of 1962, our five-acre plot had been planted entirely in stinking cabbage. We ate slaw. We ate boiled cabbage. We fried cabbage. We put cabbage in soup. We gave away cabbage. We were sick of cabbage.

Once you cut a head of cabbage from the garden, it leaves behind the root, plus whatever you didn't cut off when you harvested the cabbage. Those things take a long time to decompose. So we had the rotting cabbage smell around for quite a while. We don't know why the former occupants of our house planted five acres in cabbage, but they must've decided to sell when the cabbage started stinking up Smith Valley.

The next spring, we had the garden plowed and set to work planting tomatoes, potatoes, onions, radishes, and lots of sweet corn. I don't remember planting all five acres, but we did have a pretty good-sized garden---probably close to an acre.

I guess Dad thought he'd get some return on his investment on raising kids by buying us each a hoe, and enforcing his rule that we would hoe one row every day. We weren't happy about it, but we did it. I remember hoeing furiously just to get it over with. At times I would miss and hit the corn instead. So I'd pick up the cut corn stalk and stick it back in the ground real fast. Maybe Dad would think that there was some worm in the ground chomping his corn.

Every day I finished my chore before the boys. I'd straighten up, and loudly proclaim, "I'm the best hoer in Greenwood!". Nowadays, every fourth-grader knows what a "ho" is. To me, it was just a piece of metal attached to a long stick that caused blisters on my hands. Since I used a hoe and I was the fastest at it than anyone else I knew, I thought I had earned the right to call myself "the best hoer in Greenwood". (By the way, Smith Valley is sort of a "suburb" of Greenwood, so no... I hadn't forgotten where I lived--we had a Greenwood mailing address.)

Fast forward about seven years. I had taken a day off of school. I wasn't sick, but just didn't feel like going to school that day. It also happened to be my Dad's day off, so that wasn't good planning on my part. (What I wouldn't give for an entire day with my dad now!) Dad went to Farm Bureau and bought a couple hundred tomato plants. They came wrapped bare-rooted in wet newspaper strips. When he got home, he told me I was going to help him plant. Just like hoeing, I wanted to get this chore over with so I could do what I wanted with the rest of the day. So I dug holes and planted tomatoes in warp speed.

I was probably 30 feet ahead of Dad, who was planting tomatoes in his own row. Out of the blue, he started chuckling quietly. Then his laugh got louder and louder. I straightened up to look at him to see if I could figure out what was so funny. He finally said, "Helen, I have enough weeds in this garden without you planting them". Right in front of Dad in my row was a weed...in its own little spot, planted and watered. Evidently, there was a weed in the middle of my tomato plants, and I planted it right along with the tomatoes!

By the way, those hard reddish "rocks" you buy in the store are not tomatoes. If you have never eaten a Hoosier-grown tomato right out of the garden, you have no idea how good a real tomato tastes.