Digging Potatoes and Pulling Pumpkins
This is the time of the year when all the thinking and ordering, cultivating, planting, weeding, watering, picking, cleaning, canning, freezing, and pickling come full circle. You've done all the work starting back in January when the seed catalogs showed up in your mailbox. You've accomplished and crossed off each step on your long list. Now it's October. Time to dig for those potatoes and pull those pumpkins from their straggly old vines. Digging into the earth in search of potatoes is as exciting to me today as it was back when I was a kid living in the country. My grandparents had massive gardens. They had to. With 6 daughters and farmhands, meals were major productions especially during haying season. When it came time to clearing the gardens in the fall, helping dig for potatoes was like going on a treasure hunt. You never knew what the shovel pushed into the ground might reveal when pulled back out. The hope was for oodles of potatoes but there were no guarantees. ...