Like the Ingalls Family, Only Not

There sure has been a lot of media coverage of home folks growing their own food this year, have you noticed? The New York Times has been a great source of both inspiration and frustration for me, as I read the many articles about people with tiny lots growing enough produce to sell at local markets. I long to eat zucchini and tomatoes and pole beans from my own yard, like we did when I was young and my grandparents had a large garden in the side yard. But for now, when I look into my own side yard I see two thriving pumpkin plants and two pitiful corn plants. It's late July, and our corn will be ready by about October. When we drive by fields full of corn taller than I am, I have to wonder when these farmers sowed their corn, given the cold and wet spring we had in Minnesota this year. I guess that's why we're not farmers: lack of know-how. 

Because I love the Little House books, I've been reading and rereading them since I was young. I am especially fond of the parts of these books that include descriptions of cooking and growing food. Ma made her own cottage cheese by scalding milk: this sounds like a recipe for a ruined pan and, possibly, a fire on the stove, were I to try this myself. In the spring, Laura and her family delighted in eating creamed potatoes and peas, tomatoes in sugar, and fresh lettuce dressed in vinegar and more sugar (which I also ate as a child, thanks to my Grandma). In the fall and winter months, they ate vinegar pie, green pumpkin pie, Hubbard squash—so rock-hard was this squash that Ma had to split them open with Pa's ax—and smoked meats. All this reading about providing for yourselves makes me wish I'd dug up a much larger piece of yard for a much larger garden. My son brought home a single bean plant that is now yielding slender, pale green beans. Would that we had planted a whole seed packet of these, I love green beans! My son, not so much, though, so I'd be able to enjoy them all by myself. 

Our neighbors have dug up most of their backyard and turned it into a garden. They share lettuce and tomatoes with us, and I'm always reminded of summertime at my grandparents' house in Cincinnati. My grandma grew up on a farm in Michigan, and she made delicious meals, some she called "concoctions." I wish I'd had an appreciation for all that she did in the kitchen while I was at her hip. I wish she'd taught me how to put up preserves. And I wish I'd inherited her cherry pitter, a heavy metal thing that clamped onto the edge of the countertop when we'd picked enough Bing cherries from her tree to bake a pie. Given that we had cherry pie for Thanksgiving, I have to wonder now, were those cherries that grew on her tree, and that she saved for the holiday? Did she make her own pie filling by making cherry preserves? I guess I'll just have to wonder.