I will never forget those hot summer days of working in the garden. Grandpa would plant lots of cucumbers, rows upon rows of potatoes, long rows of green beans, melons, corn, and quite a few tomato plants. There were other vegetable plants I may not remember but I do know I didn’t like gardening all that well. It was too hot and laborious.
Grandpa would always make Grandma drive the tractor, as he would follow along with the hand plow creating the rows. Grandma would cut the potatoes he had bought so there were potato eyes showing on each piece she would cut. We would haul the buckets of potatoes across the field to where the garden was and grandpa would drop the potatoes in the rows, step on them once with his shoe, and then use the hoe to pull the plowed dirt over on them. It only took them about fourteen days to pop up through the soil and start growing.
The only real part of gardening I didn’t like was pulling out the weeds. It seemed back in those days the weeds would outnumber every plant we sowed in the garden. Once a week we would go out and pull weeds while my grandparents would tend the vegetable plants. Toting the water in five gallon buckets out to the garden was no easy task either. I would spill half of it before I got there with it. Grandpa always expected more of us than we could actually physically do. I think it was his way of actually making us stronger as people.
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