While I am at this post reaching into the memory of days gone by, I think it is important to note this additional recollection from my childhood.
In the 1930s and 1940s the major occupation in Minnesota was farming. Most Minnesotans did not live in the Twin Cities. Suburbs did not exist. Small town life flourished. Small town people grew gardens, usually the vegetable and fruit ones.
Farmers Seed and Nursery Company was in business nearly everywhere. Growing vegetables and fruit trees, mostly apples and plums, was thought vital for human consumption here in the northland.
Late January and all February were exciting times for many folks who thought so. They were the months the garden and seed catalogs arrived. My family joined this crowd in 1942 as part of the War effort. I was eight and fell in charge of managing our 40′ by 100′ foot vegetable garden in the empty lots across the alley where we lived in Highland Park in St. Paul. Acres of such gardens were cultivated and harvested at city or private owned property in many undeveloped parts of the city. Montreal Avenue had acres to the south of the street uphill from Seventh Street.
I remember the gypsy hovels in that area of vacant grounds before the war. Half of the Highland Park “area” was still in empty lots.
My father was raised on a farm in Hope, North Dakota. We had relatives remaining in that community until they all passed on from old age. My mother’s dad, a carpenter and house builder by trade, gardened the entire next door empty lot on Bernard Street in West St. Paul until he died in 1947. He always divided his plot evenly between vegetables and flowers. His brothers farmed in West St. Paul supplying St. Paul grocers with cabbages and potatoes.
Sixty years ago the vast majority of Minnesotans knew how to grow things. No one thought that tomatoes were manufactured at a supermarket. Most people made their living from “the” or “a” farm. Moreover, for most, the land meant something to them. Especially to those whose parents or grandparents “homesteaded”.
My own grandfather, my dad’s dad, was born in Cherryfield, Maine, in 1857. Think of it. I often do. He was born 4 years before the Civil War actually began. He left Cherryfield when he was about 17, on horse back to go West……alone. He homesteaded near Hope, North Dakota. Family lore recorded that he met his future wife, ten years his younger, while assisting her father free the three or four wagons which had become stuck in the Sheyenne River mud one spring around 1886. My grandmother, Anna Williams and her sisters were inside one of those wagons. Their family was moving West from LaCrosse, Wisconsin…….to settle and farm.
Seeds, sun, soil, water and an amenable temperature are the basics which make so much of the beautiful Earth so bountiful. It should worry us all that the vast majority of city dwelling folks know so little about the real Earth.
I count my blessings every day…..and often ask myself, “How could I have been so lucky?”
In part measure an answer is, I have almost never been bored…..certainly not ever over the past half century. Life, Book learning and creating and maintaining Garden provides no time whatsoever for boredom. On the downside of this, my God, where did the time go?