Working in My Mother’s Garden

I wrote last week that I am not an outdoorsy person. Perhaps that’s because some of my early experiences outdoors were unpleasant. I remember many unsavory tasks in my mother’s garden during my childhood summers.

Mother had a few flower beds around the house that we moved into when I was six and a half. I don’t remember exactly when she planted these flower beds, or if someone planted them for her. But by the time I was nine or so, they were flourishing.

After school let out for the summer, my brother and I had the job of weeding the flower beds. We were supposed to spend an hour outside weeding every day. One day we’d work on one flower bed, the next day we’d do another. We learned pretty quickly that it was better to handle these dirty deeds in the morning, before the sun got too hot.

The largest bed was Mother’s rose garden. It had about ten to twelve rose bushes. Under the rose bushes, she planted strawberries, both to serve as ground cover and to provide fruit for the strawberry rhubarb pies she made (which I detested). I think the birds got more berries than the humans, but the berry plants thrived. They also hid Daddy Long Legs spiders. As readers of this blog know, I hate spiders.

The spiders were worse than the rosebush thorns. The thorns were avoidable, if one was careful. But the Daddy Long Legs hid under the strawberry plant leaves. When a weeder disturbed them, they skittered out from their lair onto the weeder’s hands. When that happened, I jumped and shrieked. The critters definitely slowed my weeding progress. My brother, by contrast, used to play with them, letting them crawl up and down his arms. He got bit, but he had the fun of annoying me, so I guess he thought it was worth it.

Mother had another garden bed with pansies, which she thought “had such sweet faces.” They were pretty, but they were planted on the west side of the house, in full sun any time after about 11:00 a.m. In addition to the spiders (though they were fewer than in the rose garden), the pansy bed had weird-looking bugs. I don’t know what kind they were, and I don’t really care to find out. But watching out for those bugs also reduced my productivity.

Weeding wasn’t the only yard chore we had. Our back yard had several fruit trees. There was an apple tree, a crabapple, and two cherry trees—one sweet cherries and the other pie cherries. The apple tree never really produced, and the crabapples were too small to be worth picking. We left those for the birds. The cherry trees, however, were prolific.

My brother and I were assigned to pick cherries, once they were ripe, at least all those we could reach from the ground or from a two-step ladder. The sweet cherries weren’t too bad. I liked sweet cherries, and nibbling a few was part of the process. But the pie cherries were dreadful—small, sour, and mostly pit.

And then there was pitting the pie cherries. Mother made lots of cherry pies, and she loved the tartness of these cherries. I thought they were too sour, and I preferred canned filling in cherry pies. Still, I got the job of pitting cherries. At least there were no spiders by the time the pitting job came around.

Pitting cherries is a monotonous task. And messy. This chore had to be done outside on the picnic table on the porch, because the cherries were too juicy and sticky to pit inside. After I was done, I came inside covered in cherry juice. And it took a large bucket of cherries to get enough for two pies, because the pits were such a large percentage of the cherry volume.

Then there were the apricot trees. Mother planted those later from seeds she saved from apricots she bought at the store. It was an experiment. I think she planted twelve seeds and six trees came up. I was away at college by the time the trees matured enough to produce fruit. She didn’t get much fruit off the trees, but she did get some. The birds might have eaten more than the humans on these also. I don’t remember being involved in the apricot production.

I complained a lot about these outdoor assignments, particularly the weeding. My brother was more stoic. At some point, I argued that I shouldn’t have to weed as much as he did, because I took piano lessons and had to practice. That meant I was spending more time on chores than he was. Somehow, my argument carried the day, which now that I’m a parent, surprises me. Nevertheless, I was permitted to limit my weeding to 30 minutes, while he had to continue outside for an hour.

A few years later, my brother took over mowing the yard. I didn’t raise a counter argument that I should do more work to compensate for his lawn mowing. By that time, we had younger siblings, and I was doing a lot of babysitting. Also not fun, but at least it was indoors.

What summer chores did you have as a kid? Did you enjoy them, or did you whine like I did?