garden & potato patch

To one side of our house was a garden. There is nothing like home grown tomatoes, corn on the cob, cucumbers, and peas. My dad says there’s nothing like West Virginia homegrown vegetables. He left here when he was sixteen and has traveled all over the United States but has yet to find a tomato like the ones his dad raised. The first several rows of our garden were strawberries. They were small and full of holes, but were the best strawberries in the world to me. Ruth made great strawberry pies and a lot of people wanted her glaze recipe. She said the secret was to add just a couple drops of oil to the glaze to improve the consistency.

Just beyond the garden was our potato patch. There has to be Irish blood somewhere in this family. When I got older and started visiting other people, I couldn’t believe they could serve a meal without potatoes. And was even more shocked that other people have never even tasted a raw potato! We had potatoes at almost every meal (except when pasta was our main dish).

The Stove Top Stuffing commercials used to drive us crazy. “Have Stove Top Stuffing instead of potatoes.” Instead of potatoes!? We were incredulous. Why not with potatoes? I’m sure others would have laughed at our holiday spreads. We often had mashed potatoes and gravy, sweet potatoes or yams, and potato salad too. Sometimes we even had Stove Top Stuffing with all those potatoes.

Recently I was discussing food with my Grandma and I mentioned that I thought peas were my favorite vegetable. She got the strangest look and said, “What about potatoes?”
I said, “Grandma, potatoes are my favorite food! They are in a class all by themselves and cannot be considered with mere vegetables.”

I loved helping during hoeing time in the potato patch. I rarely got to hoe because I wasn’t careful enough. I often swung the hoe with too much force and would plant it deeply into a potato damaging it. Sometimes I cut them clean in two. So my hoeing days were short lived. But I was allowed to pick them up and carry them to the wagon after Jack uncovered a pile of them. I loved the smell of the dirt and potatoes.

After the potatoes were dug, we took them to the back yard water pump—we called it a spigot. We washed the potatoes carefully and dried them. Ruth explained that we couldn’t let the sun dry them because they would get sunburned and sunburn on a potato is poison to little bellies. After drying them, we sorted them. Any that had damage were taken straight into the house to be used first. The rest we carried down into the cellar under Jack’s tool shed. There they were kept cool and out of the sun’s damaging rays.

The door into the cellar was in the floor of the shed. I hated going completely into the cellar. I was the one who handed the potatoes down into the cellar. Ruth often asked me to go get potatoes for our next meal. I would take David with me and make him stand on the stairs with his head above the door so nobody would shut it accidentally. When he got to the age that I thought he might try to shut it on me as a joke, we changed roles. I made him go into the cellar while I stood guard.