We discovered a repellent consisting of something like sawdust infused with castor oil. It’s tempting to use poison, but that’s a cruel death even for varmints, and a potential danger for our neighbor’s cat, who likes to stalk them but rarely catches one unaided. I’ve tried turning the hose into their exit holes and drowning them out, but they just laugh at me. Weeds are manageable, but we have a robber’s den of voles that love to tunnel into the garden and eat the roots of our plants, especially the bell peppers. Last year, we planted black-eyed peas straight from the dried bean section of the grocery store, and they did very well. It’s enough to plant a sampling of green beans and squash, tomatoes and bell peppers and okra. We have three raised beds on one side just below the fig tree, and we extended a flower bed into the front yard far enough to make space for a few short rows. We do what we can on our little fifth of an acre, half of which is occupied by the house. Vegetables always taste better when you’ve had something to do with raising them. Now, of course, I wish we could do that very thing. I would have cursed that garden if I hadn’t been taught that such words would put me in danger of hell fire, and I often declared that when I grew up, I would never plant a garden. When it hit me right above the ear, I clearly heard a bell ring. It turned out to be a dirty rock rather than a dirt clod, and he had a good arm. We took to throwing dirt clods at each other, which were mainly harmless until my brother flung one directly at my head. Both of us were mad about having to be out working in the sun, so it didn’t take much to spark an argument. The first time I “got my bell rung” was on one of those days.

Mainly, we were trying to finish as quickly as possible so we could go back to playing in the shade.

My middle brother and I spent many hours in the hot sun with hoes that were too big for us, trying to dig out the grass while not digging up the peas and butterbeans. When we planted, he’d dig the holes and we’d come behind dropping seeds or tomato plants.īut the weeds grew as fast as the vegetables, and it took all of us to keep up with them.Ĭhopping Bermuda grass was the worst. I recognize now that my father did the hardest work, plowing and preparing the rows with a heavy walk-behind garden tractor. I liked most of what came out of it, especially the corn and butterbeans, peas and potatoes, but I did not enjoy either planting, weeding, watering, or harvesting. Most of the rest was wooded and fenced in, with enough goats to keep the undergrowth under control and to provide meat for the freezer. The house and yard took up about a third of that. When I was growing up in the red clay hills of eastern Georgia, my parents believed firmly in the value of a big garden.

Subversive kingdom weeds