Harvest Time On The Farm

Harvest Time

When you grow your own food on the farm, there is a whole lot more to
it than putting seed in the ground and watching it grow. We had a great
big garden and grew all kind of vegetables. onions, lettuce, cabbage,
beans, peas, okra, tomatoes, potatoes, corn. Planting was in early
Spring, and harvest time was all the time.

After school buckets of water had to be pumped and carried uphill to
the garden and gently poured on the vegetables. That soil better not
look dry, Mama checked it every day coming in from the cotton field.
Weeds never got a chance to grow we brought our hoes with us.

It would be nice if everything you planted needed to be harvested at
the same time, but thats not the way it works. You always had to pick
or pull something that ripened overnight. I hated the tomato plants
worst of all, because of the tomato worms you had to pick off.

I was so afraid of these things they were green and fat, with a horn on
top of their head.---check them tomatoes for worms---Lord I hope I
don't find any. You had to look on the back of the leaves for them. If
I did find one I pulled the whole leaf off and put it in the bucket so
Mama could kill it. She wasn't afraid of anything, and could kill
anything that needed killing.

She would put those worms in her hand to show me they were harmless.
Didn't work, every hair on my body would stand up and try to run away.
I still get the shivers when I see a tomato worm.

Okra was real hard to pick, I hated this stuff anyway, left up to me it
could have stayed right where it was. You needed gloves for this one it
had short silvery hairs on the stalks and pods. These hairs would stick
in you like needles and hurt like thorns.

Beans and peas had to be picked so that more would grow. You had to
shell the peas and snap the beans. What you didn't eat or give way you
put in the freezer in plastic bags for winter. One year we planted
blackeyed peas, and purplehull peas. The bees cross pollinated them and
we got peas with black eyes, and purple hulls.

We had vegetables coming out our ears, visitors never went home empty
handed. We canned tomatoes in fruit jars. washing fruit jars and re
washing fruit jars, it just never ended. Mama shredded cabbage and
mixed vinegar sugar, water, and spices, put it all in a crock and
waited until it turned into sauerkraut. She would stir this stuff once
in a while, when it quit blubbering and foaming we canned that in fruit
jars too.

Potatoes were real hard to harvest and nasty. Daddy would turn the
ground over with a tiller, then we got on hands and knees to find them
in the dirt. Then they had to be washed and dried, put in a cool place
scattered out not touching or they would rot each other.

We grew peanuts in the sandy areas. Mama would roast these for us in
the winter time. We picked up black walnuts and pecans off the ground
put these in boxes and stored them in the barn. In the fall we would
buy peaches from the peach orchard down the road. For two dollars you
could have all you could pick. two bushells was enough for us we canned
these in fruit jars also, for the pies, and cobblers Mama was famous
for.

Then when the corn had dried on the cob we had to shell it off the cob,
and grind it for chicken feed. If you had spare time you shelled corn,
the chickens had to eat year round too. This was hard, you had to use
the back of your palm and the pad of your thumb to get the kernels off.
Eating shouldn't be this hard, but it was worth all the work. Food
shure does taste different when you make it yourself, and eat it with
people you love.