Apples never fall far
from the Tree

by Lisa Baker

Resources for Family and Parenting >>

The other day I made one of our family favorites, vegetable soup from scratch. As I fed the contents into my behemoth stainless steel pot it occurred to me that I knew the source of every ingredient. All the vegetables, down to the fat, pungent bulb of garlic, had come from our garden. Some, like the carrots, potatoes and onions, had been pulled from the ground that same day. Peas: shelled during the morning news. Others, like the green beans and corn, had been pulled from the freezer. Tomatoes: canned last summer. Even the beef I had seen as a complete cow grazing in my brother-in-law’s pasture last fall. Steven, in his lackadaisical drawl, had pointed and ominously pronounced, "It’s that un’s turn."

Both my husband and I grew up in the country. He was raised on a working farm. I lived in a series of country homes that always had a large garden, plus spent summers on my uncle’s farm. We both recalled the adolescent embarrassment of country bumpkinitis, of vegetables from a Mason jar and nondescript bundles of beef wrapped in white freezer paper. We had vowed always to buy our food in supermarkets where everyone else’s mothers shopped, and never EVER have anything to do with a garden again.

There are many quaint sayings to account for the change that came over us, like the one about apples not falling too far from the tree. I prefer to blame the Alar that farmers started spraying on the apples, but that is another story. Somewhere around the birth of our daughter, we changed. We started caring about the quality of food we were putting into her little body, and hence into ourselves. I started hanging out in my mother’s kitchen, learning about canning and freezing. We begged vegetables from our parents’ gardens, who in their wisdom never said a word about our previous store-bought sophistication. We began to accumulate the accoutrements of the trade: jars, rings, and a prodigious pair of tongs to lift hot jars from a granite kettle. Someone gave us a decrepit freezer to hold the side of beef we bought from Steven, who had somehow managed never to leave the farm. Oh, and the swollen pride I felt the day I came home with the coup de gras, a pressure canner, complete with a regulator that jiggled and hissed at the appropriate times.

Our enterprise expanded into our own back yard when we became homeowners. Our postage-stamp backyard permitted little in the way of volume; we grew tomatoes and peppers in the flowerbeds. And we grew sweet-pea green with envy as we watched our neighbors till the lot behind our house each spring. Then the day came when the lot went up for sale. We paid an exorbitant sum, rationalizing that since it was adjacent to our property it was worth more to us than anyone else. But we weren’t fooling anybody; we wanted that garden!

By then we were reading Organic Gardening with religious fervor. We poured our souls, and truckloads of rich black topsoil, into that plot. We bought the largest roto-tiller the hardware store offered; a monstrosity which would burrow to Australia if left in one spot too long. We ordered blackberries, raspberries, strawberries and grapes from a seed catalog, and dubiously planted the sticks they shipped us. We learned a lot, like how young thornless blackberry canes look a lot like weeds, ( Wait, wait! I think that’s supposed to be there! ) and, never rub your eyes while picking jalapeno peppers. We nursed aching backs, privately certain each had worked harder than the other.

Spiritual things happened there. Like marveling at God’s miraculous cycle from earth to crop and back again, otherwise known as composting. Like puzzling over the creation of the Colorado potato beetle, which exists only to be plucked off the plant by hand and drowned in soapy water. And don’t forget the tasty things, like succulent ears of corn and buxom tomatoes by the basketful.

Our daughter enters the kitchen and stirs the soup. At eighteen, working two jobs in preparation for college in the fall, she doesn’t spend as much time in the garden as she once did. The garden saw her through adolescence, where, often by conscription, she weeded her way through many an attitude problem.

I realize it may just be her temperament, but I believe the hours picking strawberries and shucking corn helped cultivate her reflective nature. She inhales deeply, and ladles the soup into a bowl. Waiting for it to cool, she mentions she will appreciate coming home from college and having real food to eat. I hear the unmistakable sound of the next generation of apples falling, not too far from the tree.