How Does Your Garden Grow?

I don't have a garden. We don't own any land. We live in an apartment. I would love to own some land, though I don't know if I will ever have a garden like my mother's.

Growing up, for those prime years of my childhood, we lived on an eighty acre hobby farm. My dad commuted into the cities to work. In the evenings and on the weekends, we would occasionally have to help dad with the fields. Wheat, oats, and hay are the crops I can really recall. Now about a good third of that land was in forest and swamp, so that wasn't too bad. It provided some supplemental income I gather, or at least reduced the cost of living there. Because of it, I grew up on a wheat diet. Wheat bread, wheat in our cookies, and wheat pancakes.

Now my wife is correct that my mom did have a garden that you used the word "acre" to describe the size of it. It wasn't in back though. One of the fields off the driveway had part of it converted into mom's garden. I remember being told that before we could go to the lake that we had to weed a row of corn. We moaned about it like many kids do when told to work on mom's garden. And although we enjoyed the fruits of her garden all year (corn would be prepared and frozen so we ate mom's garden corn for many months), we would give mom the complaint "but it so long!" or "You cannot even see the end of the row!" Her garden was on a hill, so you literally could not see the end of a row of corn standing at the driveway. Corn, potatoes, beans, peas, carrots, lettuce, and even tomatoes were a few of things mom grew in her garden. The spot dedicated to watermelons and pumpkins was probably as big as many people's backyard gardens alone. And, yes, mom had a backyard garden as well. Probably still bigger than most suburban gardens, but we did live in farmland. There was a large section for strawberries. And I cannot forget the raspberries. Thinking of raspberries, I seem to recall that the raspberries were divided into several groups and not all restrained to just those two gardens. Not all the raspberries flourished while we lived there either.

I wonder how many gardens are prepared by tractor and plow instead of 'tiller.

Mom's garden may have been rather large, but now when I hear others complain about weeding gardens I generally get a good chuckle out of it. I have since learned that when we complain as children that the nature of the task is what drives our complaint and not the scale of it.

I heard that some of the neighbors wondered who was going to maintain my mom's garden when we left. Remember, that large garden measured in relation to an acre was along the driveway, a portion of a field in front of the house. So everyone around had been seeing that garden for years. My parents have moved several times since then, and my mom has often kept a garden. Though none of them on quite the same scale.

As big as my mom's garden was, I seem to have heard some stories of another amazing gardener who worked in a much smaller garden. Someone who was in wheelchair? If I got that right, that is a story my wife witnessed.