In rural West Virginia 100 years ago, families had property, but little income. “Putting up food” was necessary. Both of my grandmothers had huge gardens with rows of corn, pole beans, lettuce, cabbage, potatoes, turnips, Big Boy tomatoes, and spinach.
I have fond memories of my MawMaw sifting through seed catalogs while drinking strong black coffee at the kitchen table. My Grandma, a nurse’s aid, tended her garden, which was located on a half-acre behind the detached garage, a structure made of cinderblock with a dirt floor. Grandma’s basement had a canning station to preserve the food.
My husband’s grandmother also canned, preserved, and cooked from her own land.
Today
Our situation is vastly different. We live in a neighborhood built in the 1940s where workers from the nearby chemical plants lived. The two and three-bedroom homes have basements that house showers to rinse off before coming into the “real house” after work.
We have a double lot, a sloping yard that appears flat in our extremely hilly neighborhood. We feel fortunate. We have room to enjoy our property, while also carrying on our grandmothers’ legacy of “putting up food” if we tend our property properly.
For my MawMaw putting up food meant quality control and necessity. My MawMaw once saw a documentary of a canning factory and worried how many insects and worms were accidentally ground up with the tomatoes, and could never bring herself to use store canned food when she could help it.
Today, grocery stores are more prevalent and property by and large more scarce. Many of our neighbors have three feet between their homes, with a tiny plot of land in the front, a sliver of land in the back, and a herd of deer traipsing through in the early morning and evening hours. And because of that, the way that we landscape our yards will have to evolve. Just because the farmers moved to cities to work in factories does not mean that we can no longer farm. We just need to be more resourceful with what we have, and I bet that we have all inherited resourcefulness from our grandparents.
From Lawn to Table
We plan to design our yard so that we have room to play, grow, and gather together. In essence, this is From Lawn to Table.
Our plans:
- Raised vegetable beds in the front yard with the appearance of an English garden countryside.
- A greenhouse in the back yard
- A living fence/hedge of columnar apple, fruit and nut trees
- Berry bushes
- A pergola, patio, and some yard for children to play
Join us as we document our journey from lawn to table.