Our first summer as a married couple, Ruth and I lived on Kalamazoo’s Stockbridge Avenue, and I decided to plant a garden. I’d never planted one before but thought it couldn’t be that difficult, so I dug up a ten-by-ten patch of earth behind our garage. I just turned over the soil, did my best to level it out, and planted several rows of green beans and radishes.
During the soil prep, I uncovered what I thought might be the knee joint of a large human or perhaps a small dinosaur. I didn’t want to create a local uproar, so I stopped my excavation long enough to take the bone to the local butcher shop for an evaluation. If it was human, I might have dug up a crime scene. If it was a dinosaur, Ruth and I might be on the verge of becoming very famous. Perhaps even rich.
I thought the butcher could give me enough information to determine my next course of action. When he told me it was the knee joint of a cow, I started digging again. Such a discovery proved only one thing, sometime between 1895 when the house was built and 1972 when I was doing my digging, someone buried a cow, or at least a cow’s leg, behind the garage.
Our next house was on Reycraft Street. Once again, I dug up a small patch of earth and planted a garden. I had little success with my Stockbridge garden but thought an older and wiser me could do better in our new location. I planted several rows of green and yellow beans because my Stockbridge radishes were a total failure, but I did get a few green beans from the garden.
It turns out I was correct. My Reycraft beans were prolific. We had several meals with fresh beans. My biggest problem was the weeds grew faster than the beans, and I got tired of the constant battle between the beans and the weeds. I ultimately let the weeds take control.
When we moved to Lake LeAnn, I stayed away from gardening for the first few years. After I took on the duties of middle school principal, one of my teachers talked about canning meat and potatoes. He used fresh venison and grew his own potatoes. He did the canning in the middle school home economics room because he could work with several stoves at the same time. He gave me a jar of each and encouraged me to give it a try.
The next spring, I planted potatoes on our beach. I placed them close to the sandstone wall so they wouldn’t interfere with the kids’ beach play. I monitored their growth and hoped for the best. After the harvest, I met my teacher in the middle school home economics room one Sunday, and we canned together. When we were done, I had two dozen quart jars of canned potatoes. It’s the only time I canned anything, and they turned out great.
TBC