How Does Your Garden Grow?

The following information appears in a self-published book by former Raymond resident, David A. Sorrell, called “As I Remember.”  The book features Mr. Sorrell’s recollections about the early days of Raymond. The stories appeared in a weekly column in The Raymond News from 1963-1972. 

Let’s think of spring as we knew it and saw it happen there in our town so long ago. Let’s start, say, on Good Friday. In our town, almost everybody had a garden and I can hear Mother saying, “It is almost Good Friday and I would like to get our potatoes planted if the weather is fit. I must get your brother, Sam, to come in and plow our garden up if the weather stays nice as it is now.” So we will say that the weather did stay good and one morning, brother Sam came with his plow and big team of horses and did plow our potato patch there back of our house and harrow it down good to make the furrows in which to plant our potatoes while Mother and I were cutting up the bushel sack of early Ohios that grew into the fine white mealy tubers that would perhaps be our principal article of diet all through the year. Mother would caution me again and again not to cut but one eye to each piece of potato. Then we dropped the fine potato seed into the black earth of our garden, Sam covered the furrows with a one-horse plow, and the job was done. For dinner on potato planting day, Mother would fry a huge skillet full of these seed potatoes for dinner and to a hungry boy there is nothing better than a plate full of fresh fried potatoes, as Mother knew how to fry them. Homemade bread - fresh butter and perhaps a good piece of steak and for dessert a good big piece of Mother’s gooseberry pie. I wonder now if gooseberry pie is something that has been lost to the art of cooking. Years have gone by since I have tasted one.  

So the potatoes were always planted first and then when they attained a bit of growth it was my hated job to take a stick and an empty can and go along each row and knock off the red potato bugs that were always on the vine it seemed. We had the potato patch where Mother grew corn between potato rows and by the corn was planted pole beans that would vine up on the tall corn stalks. Too, over there by the row of Gooseberry bushes in the middle of the potato patch we would plant squash seed for the huge Mother Hubbard squashes that made those delicious pies. Have you ever tasted this squash boiled and seasoned just right? On one side of the patch was a row of peach trees that bore big yellow peaches about August. There was a cling peach tree there at the end and in the fall, a pocket full of those were mighty good tasting to a hungry boy.

We had a smaller garden there by the driveway where we raised our lettuce, radishes, and bunch beans, and Mother had a row of flowers across the front. In this garden were two apple trees and a pear tree. At the back was a row of cherry trees and there just back of the combined coalhouse, cob house, and chicken house, was a huge strawberry bed. Let’s see how Raymond was doing on a spring morning. Mr. Weber was busy planting corn and potatoes in the lot next to our place. Going up towards town there was Doctor Hicks busy in his garden next to Ira Blackwelder’s house. George Woods was making a garden just about where the water tower is now and oh, yes, I don’t want to forget George Beeler’s garden there on the corner. I think George could be safely called the “master gardener” of our town.

Yes, all over our town in the spring making a garden was the order of the day. Men, women, and children were out in the spring sunshine spading, raking, hoeing, and planning the seed that would give to our town the hundreds of filled jars there on the clean cellar shelves in the fall - the bins of potatoes, the big store jars filled with the good sauerkraut and all the other things that the fruit trees and the carefully tended gardens would be put way to be brought out in the winter for our tables.