My Life in Gardening Part 1

I have had gardens at various times in my life, since I was young. My mother grew up in the country before moving to the big city in her teens. I have the recollection that we always had a garden in some form or another as I was growing up. Momma kept close to her rural roots by cooking country food from scratch, gardening and canning.

My 1st garden was as a 5 yr. old. back in 1964. Mom gave me a little plot in one of her flower beds on the side of our house and let me plant anything I wanted. Of course I chose to sow watermelon seeds and carrots, 2 veggies/fruits that most kids love. The carrots never sprouted(the wrong type of soil not worked sufficiently)but the melon plants did grow and we ended up with a couple med. sized watermelons.
From then on, I was hooked on gardening.
Let me back up here.....I was hooked on the Yummy FRUITS/VEGGIES part, NOT hooked on the back-breaking, sweating in the hot summer sun, laboring part.

As a disgruntled teen, I was FORCED by my parents to do yardwork at home. Summers from 1973-1975 were spent weeding massive flower beds of Azaleas(I still have an aversion to azaleas) and weeding a rather large garden my father put in. Ok, he didn't actually put it in....the garden was an excuse for him to rent & use a rototiller(overgrown boys with their big noisy machines syndrome). What's even more amusing is that dear old dad didn't eat vegetables....ok, he ate onions and if pressed, he'd eat corn, but our gardens didn't grow those veggies. My mom planted the garden w/a little help from me. Being the only child left at home, I was responsible for all the weeding of the garden. Weeding is one of my LEAST favorite things on earth to do.

After I left home, attended college & then got married, I tried to have a garden in the yard of the house where we rented the 2nd floor. That was the summer of 1984. I put alot of blood, sweat & tears into that tiny garden. I even lugged buckets of bathwater down the narrow backstairs of that 100 yr. old house from our clawfoot tub to water those plants.
But it was all for naught. The soil was poor & compacted and I had no gardening tools, except for a hand trowel. This was in urban NJ, with the houses nearly on top of one another. Between the trees and the closeness of the neighbor's house, my little plot didn't received enough sunlight to produce anything beyond a few tomatoes that never made it to red & ripe.
In hindsight, perhaps that wasn't such a bad thing, as a few blocks from there was an old watch factory's radium dumping ground that turned into a Super Fund sight while we lived in that town. My tomatoes, if they had been eaten, might have made me glow-in-the-dark.

To Be Continued.....

Sluggy