Sharing the CropA Right Neighborly Garden
by Wendel Potter
April 3, 2005
"Strawberries? You want me to pick strawberries?"
As most movie-watchers know, that famous line was uttered in the film "On Golden Pond", by Henry Fonda portraying the doddering retired Professor Norman Thayer and tartly delivered as a cranky riposte to his wife's insistence that he occupy his time at their lakeside summer home by picking a bucket of wild strawberries.
The movie quote came to mind the other day when a former neighbor from my Fullerton, Nebraska stomping grounds called me out of the blue. He was shrinking the size of his garden this year and had a strawberry patch that could stand to be reduced.
Gary said he was planning to dig up some of the strawberry plants and immediately thought of me, seeing as how the patch had sprung up thirty years ago with some plants my mother had given him from her garden so he could get his own field of strawberries started.
That was always the way things worked in small communities like Fullerton. If you had plenty, you shared. Everybody did.
That was especially true when it came to gardens and orchards. Growing vegetables and fruit and sharing the yield with friends and neighbors could nearly darken the produce section of the local supermarket for the summer.
And now Gary wanted to share with me, so I could take back some of what my mother had given him and keep the strawberries in the family.
Unfortunately, I had to turn him down. We don't have a garden.
Our back yard has a dog. We used to have a picnic table in the back yard. Nice, sturdy redwood picnic table. The dog ate it. Actually gnawed it to rubble. We can only imagine what he would do to a garden.
But a garden is no stranger to me. Mom and Dad always had a garden. Since it was spread out over the entire lot next to our house, I called it "The Farm".
Peas, green beans, tomatoes, carrots, onions, potatoes and sweet corn sprang up and took over the tilled earth. In time there would be food galore. More than enough.
The same was true for Mom's strawberries. She began the patch with a few plants, then they developed what we called "runners" that spread throughout the patch, giving birth to more plants. Before we knew it, Mom was ankle deep in strawberries.
The strawberry patch was Mom's pride and joy. She was out there every clement summer morning, before dawn, attacking the weeds with a hoe. She proudly watched the plants blossom, knowing that soon the berries would appear.
We never saw such a multitude of fruit. Mom's strawberry plants produced like rabbits. Catholic rabbits.
We had fresh strawberries at the dinner table daily, in a bowl with sugar and cream. Mom would put up batches of strawberry jam. She would bake shortcake and we would slice strawberries over the cake and top it off with whipped cream.
But we couldn't keep up with the bumper crop. So Mom would offer bowls of strawberries to anyone we knew who wanted them.
Sometimes she'd just let them bring a pail to the patch and pick their fill themselves. There wasn't much chance of running out of strawberries.
It would have been nice to take my friend Gary up on his offer and put in a strawberry patch with plants that my mother had given him. But then there's the matter of my dog.
Maybe I could just get another sturdy redwood picnic table to distract him.
Copyright 2005 Wendel Potter
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