By Shelley Tegart
It’s that time of year to be thinking about gardening.
I’m repositioning my thoughts from how romantic gardening is to – it is downright hard work – and I will be happy to see the fall again this year.
Somewhere between starting the seeds indoors in the little black trays in front of a south facing window to transplanting seedlings to the greenhouse to watch them grow throughout the warm weather, I reconnect with past generations of gardeners in my family.
I recall my grandmother’s small garden tucked in beside her woodshed that produced fresh veggies all summer.
The family farm, though, produced much more than simple lettuces, and was the sole responsibility of my great uncle to provide the winter root vegetables for his sister’s table. There were often words about when he should start the large veggie patch and the storage of the vegetables in the old root cellar.
Their mother, my great grandmother, kept an orchard large enough to be an economic enterprise. Plums, apples, pears graced the perimeter of a small field. She sowed asparagus in amongst her fruit trees, which my mother had a knack of finding decades later.
No piece of fruit was left to go to waste. In the late summer evenings, she would walk among her fruit trees looking for fallen fruit, or windfalls, tucking the fruit into her half folded apron. The fruit would be added to a pot on the back of the old wooden stove to make jam.
While I never knew the ins and outs of gardening or the running of an orchard, now I would love to have some of my ancestors’ insight on gardening.
To that end, the South Cariboo Sustainable Society (SCSS) is developing a blog “Hometown Heritage Heroes” to profile pioneer families and their gardens. We would like to come out and interview the elders of our community.
If you know of anyone living in the area, we would be pleased to sit down with them and listen to gardening stories. You can contact us at: info@southcariboosustainability.com or call Shelley at 250-395-3364.
Shelley Tegart is a South Cariboo Sustainability Society director.