While I was growing up on the farm, our garden put a lot of food on our table. Whether we were eating fresh snow peas in the late spring, summer’s green peppers, fall’s pumpkins and butternut squash, or canned tomatoes during the winter and spring, the produce the garden provided was essential to our lives. Our large garden had almost everything you can imagine: from asparagus and green beans, to radishes and zucchini.
     Sprawling over a sizable part of our yard, the garden took a lot of collective effort from the whole family.  Planting, hoeing, pruning, weeding, and harvesting were on everyone’s chore list. As I was the youngest in the family, weeding (my least favorite garden activity) always seemed to be on my to-do list! I spent hours upon hours bent over in the hot sun, fingers caked with dirt, as I rooted out thousands of leafy invaders from the long garden rows. But nothing was worse than, having finally finished garden chores, being greeted in the dairy barn by my dad’s indignant “What the Sam Hill have you been doing all day?!?”
     My sister Marge was especially helpful with harvest and preservation, working with my mother to make sure the garden churned out its very best. To her credit, Marge always tried to make it fun for us, creating incentives to make even the drudgery of weeding rewarding. She promised everyone who picked two grocery sacks full of green beans an exciting trip to the drive-in movie theater in the evening. When my siblings and I got to the movie, we realized the catch: the green beans had to come with us! While at the movie we had to stem the green beans, dropping the stems out the car window. You could tell where our family’s car had been at the drive-in. There were four sizeable piles of green bean stems where it had sat! I remember stemming beans during the John Wayne classic True Grit. It was so mesmerizing I didn’t get my two bags done during the film! Fortunately for me, my kind older sister recognized I was distracted and completed my bags as well as her own.
     Even though caring for the garden was exhausting and at times seemed endless, the true reward of scooping out fresh green beans onto your plate made it all worthwhile.
Today you can get that same farm-fresh goodness (without the back-breaking work!) by shopping at our Country Cupboard, located on our farm north of Donahue. Or purchase our products at North Scott Foods or the Freight House Farmers Market. Visit us on the web at www.tourmyfarm.com

​     With longer and warmer days, green fields are not far away. As spring gets into swing, these things remind me excitedly that baseball season is coming!
     When I was growing up, many warm days in the spring and summer my older brother Edwin and I would hustle through our evening livestock chores. Baseball beckoned! In the evening light, my brother and I were each a team of one. Though some might say our barnyard field was not ideal for playing baseball, our love of the game sparked our creativity to make it work out just fine. First and second bases were opposite ends of the barn, third base was the lone azalea bush, and home plate was the corn crib, which also served as a backstop for pitches that got by the batter. Everything on each side of the barn was a foul ball. A ball hit onto the barn roof would roll back down and was still in play. We wanted things competitive, so no ghost runners. Hitting the ball over the barn was a home run, but did complicate things, because it was common for our only ball to be lost in the cow yard.  Innings were frequently delayed by ball searches.
      One hot day in July we had no hay to bale, so we hustled through our chores and got done milking with plenty of time. We felt we could certainly get in several innings before dark.  Sure enough, I soon found myself ahead 6-4 in the bottom of the fifth. The previous inning, I had hit a home run over the barn. We were able to quickly find the ball because the cows were standing around it in a cluster. They were taking turns sniffing it, trying to figure out what had crash landed in their yard interrupting their evening grazing. Then, in the fifth, my brother got two quick strikes on me with change ups. And, with the count 2-2, I crouched ready: my brother was bearing down, and I knew a fast ball was coming. As the pitch came in, I got a great read on the ball, and, with a deep swing, hit a towering shot. It sailed high and curved foul, then the wind caught it and carried it further foul towards the house! We were both stunned and stood motionless as it sailed out of sight. All of a sudden we heard the splintering crash of our mom’s beloved front picture window. My mouth gaped, and my stomach instantly turned into knots. My brother was quicker to react, quipping “Game over, We both lose!” and sprinting out of sight into the corn field. Within seconds, my dad came out blaring, “What the Sam Hill is going on here?” and stomped into the barnyard to find me, alone, holding the bat.
      I was tasked with boarding up the window before dinner. I’d just gotten started when Edwin wordlessly appeared next to me to help; we completed the task in silence. At supper that night very little was said, although Edwin once broke the silence to ask “Did you find our ball?” Crickets. No answer was given.
We had to buy a new window, and when it arrived, we had to put it in. But baseball endured: we also got a screen to put in front of the window on game nights!
     With the start of baseball, get the grill warmed up! Check out our mouth-watering beef at our farm store, The Country Cupboard, or stop by and see us at the Freight House Farmers Market.