Grandma Lill's Gardens

Grandma Lill's Gardens

Grandma Lill had grown up in the country and had lived through the Great Depression.  She knew that to put a lot of food on the table she had to have a big garden.  In this effort, she had a good partner in Grandpa Lee, who saw to it that a large area was tilled up between the house and the old basement foundation.  It was probably an acre in size and Lill planted it with green beans, peas, beets, carrots, parsnips, radishes, turnips, potatoes, squash, and sweet corn.

Most people would consider this to be a large garden, but it was only the opening salvo of Lill and Lee Hanson.  In later years, they abandoned this zone and tilled up about two acres across the road in the corner of a field and planted a half acre plot just short of the pond, in addition to planting potatoes and sweet corn in part of the field west of the house and across the driveway.

I would toddle around in the yard, watching Grandma Lill weed in her garden and in her flower beds in various spots around the exterior of the house.  The large, bald hill across the road had a nice apple orchard on its side and she would gather bushels of them.  She would tirelessly cut them up and boil them down to make apple sauce, which she filled dozens of quart canning jars with.  In addition, she would store baskets of apples in the large basement room, the farthest one in.  It was the coolest and driest.  Ultimately, beets and potatoes would also fill bins down there, spread out on top of newspaper and separated to reduce the spoilage.

Once garden crops started maturing, Lill would begin preparing wonderful meals.  She would be very judicious in purchasing meat, and a few chickens or a ham would provide wonderful initial meals, followed by days of delicious stews and soups.  She quickly identified a neighbor who sold eggs and used these both for bacon-and-egg breakfasts with pancakes or waffles, and in her baking.  She was always either making bread, cakes or pies, and homemade noodles.

She would mix the ingredients for a pie or cake with device that she cranked by hand.  When she was done with that and ready to move on to the baking, she would hand you the mixer and you could push off the sweet batter with your fingers and eat it.

I fondly remember her making homemade noodles, rolling out the dough on a wooden board with a rolling pin and dusting it with flour.  She would then take a knife and slice the large, thin, dough into narrow slices about a half-inch wide.  Then she would fold the noodles back on each other a couple of times and let them dry.

I am sure that none of our family have ever forgotten those delicious noodles in a chicken soup or beef casserole.

Dinners were soon augmented by popcorn bowlfuls of green beans, fresh peas, mashed potatoes, or corn on the cob.  If I or another grandchild turned his nose up to a new vegetable, perhaps beets, Grandma Lill would plop some on the plate and tell us, "put salt and butter on them and they taste just like sweet corn."

She knew we loved sweet corn and she was right.  One of the greatest gifts Grandma Lill gave us little ones was that we loved eating vegetables.

She had hundreds of fruit jars and would can as much as she could for the coming winter.  She would also go on expeditions across the road and beyond the pastures and fields, picking raspberries and gooseberries, gathering hickory nuts and hazelnuts, and pear-apples that grew in the wild.  There were always jars and jars of canned jellies and sauces down in the cellar, waiting patiently beneath their paraffin seals.-

She and Lee would husk the hickory nuts and walnuts until their hands turned brown.  I can remember Lill filling a gunney sack three quarters full of walnuts, still in their semi-mushy husks.  Lee would then drive the car over the bag several times and they would pour the contents out and the nuts would be plucked out of the mush.  Then they would be dried in the sun in the driveway, but quickly transferred into metal milk cans to protect them from the squirrels and mice.  They had to dry all winter in these cans before they could be cracked and the nut meats removed.

A lot of work, but who could ever forget biting into one of Grandma Lill's many varieties of cookies and tasting walnuts!  And, once in a while, a piece of a walnut shell!