My father had a large vegetable garden. I helped my dad a lot in his vegetable garden.
Not every year, but every second year, my father had a truckload of manure delivered from the mushroom farm. At that time there was an old underground mine near Butler, PA which was used to grow mushrooms. The tunnels of the mine were filled with wooden structures that looked like bunkbeds. Each ‘bed’ was filled with horse manure. The mushrooms grew in the horse manure. The mushroom farm flourished until Ronald Reagan removed tariffs on Chinese mushrooms. When the tariffs were removed, the production costs of the Butler mushroom farm were too high to compete with the government subsidized mushroom production in China. So the mushroom farm in Butler closed. Anyway, after growing a couple crops of mushrooms in a ‘bed’ of manure, the horse manure was replaced with new manure. Every couple years my father ordered a truckload of this ‘used’ horse manure for his garden. It came in the spring, before anything was planted in the garden. I used a pitchfork or a shovel to spread the manure all over the garden. Then my dad used his Sears-Roebuck garden tractor to plow the garden. That tractor was a fairly big combustion engine between two wide tractor tires. There was a place to stand on behind the engine and a lot of levers and handles to control the speed, to brake and to steer the tractor. There was a gizmo behind that stand to attach a plow or other utensils, as well as a gizmo at the front of the tractor to attach other utensils, such as a mower. Every once in a while I see something similar to that tractor in somebody’s garden, but those things are getting to be rare. Too bad, it was cool!
After the garden was plowed, we raked it to remove grass, weeds and stones. Then we made long indentations in the ground in the freshly plowed garden. We put green bean seeds, sweet corn seeds, carrot seeds, onion seeds, beet seeds, yellow squash seeds, zucchinis, salad, etc. into those indentations and then covered the seeds with dirt. We planted tomato and green pepper plants in the garden. Every year we moved the locations of the various vegetables in the garden, because my dad said if the same vegetables were always planted in the same place, after a few years they wouldn’t grow well. He also knew which vegetables to plant near one another to keep pests away. I don’t remember those combinations, but an example would be planting garlic near tomatos to keep certain bugs away from those tomatos.
My dad never had any luck with growing potatoes, so they weren’t in our garden. But that wasn’t a problem because not far away were several potatoe farms that had delicious potatoes. Other than potatoes, dad’s garden had just about any vegetable you could think of.
All summer I weeded the vegetable garden and watered the vegetable garden. When bugs would start to eat the leaves of plants in the garden, we would mix soap into buckets of water and pour that water onto those plants. My dad was an organic gardener even before that term was coined! It was always pleasing to see the plants grow, to see the beans appear on the bean plants, the eggplants appear on the eggplants and the ears of corn appear on the corn stalks.
In late summer and fall, the family picked green beans and ‘put them up’, which was to put them into boiling water for a short time, take them out of the boiling water, let them dry off and cool off a bit and then put the green beans either into wax-lined cardboard boxes or into plastic bags. After they cooled off, the boxes or bags went into the freezer. The same was done with carrots and corn. Tomatos were put into glasses and cooked in a big pot until the metal top on the glass sealed shut.
During the winter months, we always had delecious vegetables that tasted like they were fresh out of the garden.