“There is nothing that is comparable to it, as satisfactory or as thrilling as gathering vegetables one has grown.” —Alice B. Toklas
“God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.” –Francis Bacon
In their younger days (and mine), my parents enjoyed vegetable gardening. My mother would drive my sister and me up to our grandparents’ house, about an hour away, every week during the summer. Mom and Donna would go out and work in the garden with my grandmother and sometimes my uncle if he was off of work that morning. I stayed inside with my watching game shows with my grandfather, enjoying the air conditioner going full-blast.
Our gardeners would come in around lunchtime, hot and sweaty and flushed, bless ‘em, carrying baskets and buckets of green beans, tomatoes, yellow squash, cucumbers, bell peppers, and potatoes. After quickly getting cleaned up, Mom would spread mayonnaise on white bread to make sandwiches and my grandmother would cut two or three big red tomatoes, still warm from the morning sun. We’d have chips and homemade bread ‘n butter pickles, with either sweet tea or an ice-cold Coke, maybe even from the bottle (!). Then we’d finish it off with a piece of homemade chocolate or coconut cake.
All these years later, my uncle has carried on the family gardening tradition (although he’s taking a break this summer). “I like to smell the freshly-plowed ground,” he says. “Then I get a feeling of accomplishment when the veggies start coming up and growing. I enjoy eating the first picking of everything, knowing they came from my garden.”
He adds, with a smile, "Then it gets hot and I'm ready for fall.”
He and my mother both agree: the tomatoes are their favorites.
Back then, I didn’t like anything but tomatoes and potatoes, but especially not squash. When Mom put a bowl of it on the dinner table, I had to force it down and try to seem polite in the process. Honestly, if someone were to serve it to me now, I might have to turn the other cheek.
Come to think of it, I wasn’t crazy about green beans either, and we always seemed to have a billion of them.
I remember those days—years—of gulping down our family’s home-grown vegetables and the shudders that would follow.
At some point, though, my taste buds wised up. In my 20s and 30s, I was practically a vegetarian. My parents must have had a good laugh about that. In fact, my favorite veggie now is broccoli—which I guarantee I would have hated during those gardening summers.
But not nearly as much as I hated squash—I’m sure of it.
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Green beans photo by I Baihaqi on Unsplash
Big tomato photo by Kate Laine on Unsplash.
Yellow squash photo by on Unsplash.