The Fruits of Rose Park

Kids usually prefer fruit over vegetables.  I was no exception.  In Rose Park, we actually had quite a variety of fruits available to tantilize our palates and tempt the fate of parents discovering unsupervised consumption.  We had strawberries, raspberries, apples, apricots, peaches and plums.  One good thing about the variety is that the ripening dates spanned late spring through early fall.  We had sporadic opportunities through the outdoor months to sample the fruits of the backyard.

My favorite fruit from the Rose Park home was raspberries.  As a small child, maybe four years old, my Mom sent me out with a small pail to pick some raspberries.  After 20-30 minutes, she called me to come in.  I had five or six raspberries in my little pail and red stains around my mouth.  "What did you do with the raspberries?" my Mom asked.  I held out the pail, proud that I had picked raspberries for her.  "Oh dear!" she exclaimed.  "You weren't supposed to eat them all!"  I hung my little head, but still loved every one of those delicious berries I accidently popped into my mouth.

The strawberries were just outside of the back porch, on the southeast corner of the glossy green house.  Those strawberries just begged to be picked and eaten as I walked to and from the backyard.  Strawberries were special because they were the first fruit that ripened, a few weeks before the raspberries.  They were small and sweet, very different from the large, crunchy, relatively tasteless strawberries we typically find in the store these days.  It would take me a number of years to understand why those little ones by the back porch tasted so much better than the ones from the store.

The fruit trees provided not only fruit, but trees to climb and scale and to set afire the imaginations of children.  One summer day, before the apples were fully ripe, my brother, Dave, my sister, Penny, and I set out to construct a communication device between the apple tree and the plum tree.  We got two tin cans and used a nail and hammer to punch a hole in the respective can ends.  We used string with a button on the end to connect those cans.  We had heard that the can phones would work better if you rubbed a bar of soap on the string, so we did that.  We had a grand time talking to each other on the can phones.  Even with that fun, I was distracted by the green apples in the tree where I was stationed.  I picked one to eat.  It was hard and sour.  It made me pucker.  I was suprised it wasn't all that delicious.  Penny told me that if I put a little salt on the green apples, they would taste better.  She was right.  I'm still not a fan of green apples.

The fruit from the Rose Park house set me on a course to appreciating and antipicating fresh fruit.  Maybe on my farm, I can pick some fresh raspberries on my way back from the barn to go with my breakfast.

The Rose Park Vegetable Garden

Living in Rose Park as a young child, I learned several things from the vegetable garden in the back corner of the yard.  I learned that planning and planting a garden was almost uncontrollably exciting.  I learned that fresh vegetables were quite yummy.  And little did I know at the time, I learned a bit about appropriate technology that is scale and place appropriate.  In this post, I will explore a bit about each of these topics.

I remember as a young child, the buzz and excitement in the spring as we talked about getting ready to plant the garden.  I remember the discussions between my parents about what to plant and when to plant it.  I remember the idea that we had to get the garden ready to plant.  We talked about early vegetables like radishes and peas.  We talked about tomatoes and growing them to make Grandma Leishman's chili and meat sauces.  I remember talking about sweet corn.  How I loved sweet corn!  I wondered, could we plant the whole garden in sweet corn?!  It was the best!  As I recall of my young childhood memories, the house was abuzz with the prospects of getting out of the winter confines of the house and getting our hands in the dirt so we could plant our garden.  It was exciting to plan and to prepare.  It gave a hope for the new.  It gave hope for the excitement of summer after the cold white and gray winter kept us inside for months on end.  I liked the idea of growing the food that we would eat.  It seemed proper.  It seemed right.  Everyone would want to grown their own food, or so I thought.

One vivid memory I have, which seems quite odd to me as I glance backward now, is a memory of sitting in the garden by the tomato plants and eating green tomato after green tomato.  They were delicious.  I remember sharing these tomatoes with someone.  I don't quite recall whom.  Was it my brother, Tim?  Maybe?  Was it my sister, Penny?  I don't think so, she was too grown up for such antics.  Perhaps was it the little neighbor girl, who was my brother's age?  I think her name was Karen Cannon.  My memory is foggy on that one.  At any rate, I remember being scolded by my parents for eating the tomatoes before they were ripe.  At the same time, I recall their thinking it quite funny that I was eating green tomatoes with gusto and lack of cultural concern for their unapproved coloring.

Other garden foods tasted delicious too.  Carrots from the garden tasted both sweeter and with more of a bite than grocery store carrots.  I wasn't much of a fan of lettuce at that point in my life, but I remember eating some leaf lettuce from the garden.  Sometimes I would cringe at a hole in the leaf a bug had eaten.  Sweet corn was the best, of course.  We didn't have a large garden, but we grew a few ears of sweet corn, enough for a couple of dinners.  Each and every thing was yummy.

I really don't know how large the garden was that we had, by I imagine it being maybe 30 X 50 feet.  This certainly wasn't big enough for a tractor.  We really didn't have access to a roto-tiller either.  The solution was quite common, and reflective of an appropriate technology.  My Dad turned over the garden with a shovel.  One shovelful at a time.  He would step down on the shovel and rock it back.  He would take the shovelful of soil and flip it over and sometimes knock the overturned soil to break up any clumps of dirt.  My Dad let me try.  I felt successful in helping, but I'm sure it was mostly about my participating and learning the basic ideas associated with the skills.  A 35 pound child doesn't have much hope in pushing the shovel into the ground very far, let alone turning that shovelful of soil over.  What I didn't realize at that point is that the shovel really was the appropriate technology for the size of garden we had.  We didn't need to spend hundreds of dollars on a tiller that would get used for 20 minutes a year.  The shovel was just fine for what we were trying to do.

The Rose Park garden helped to build a base of memories, principles, and ideals that continued to feed my farm dreams for decades.  I can grow my own food.  Growing your own food can be fun.  Planning the garden is an annual treasure in dreaming and experience.  Appropriate technology is good and satisfying.  Remember, you don't need a dump truck to go to the lumber yard to pick up a couple of 2 X 4's.