Granny
The other evening I asked Granny what she remembered about Spring of the year when she was a girl.
When the state built the four-lane highway that runs through Cherokee County it went right through Granny’s family’s garden so Granny didn’t have a whole lot of memories about gardening in the spring. Although, she did share one funny garden memory from the days before the four-lane.
She was just a little bitty girl and they sent her out to the garden to pull up onions for supper. Not knowing the difference, Granny pulled up a bunch of garlic and took it inside. She said her family got a good laugh out of that mistake.
Granny said every spring her mother, Gazzie, would get out and hunt poke salad to fix. Being a picky eater, Granny never cared for it, but she said her sister Fay and her husband Woodrow just loved it. She said they’d cook it with eggs and eat it like it was the best thing around.
There was one thing Granny dreaded every spring.
Gazzie’s annual spring tonic for all the kids was a spoonful of castor oil. Granny said “I couldn’t take it with nobody looking at me so I’d have to take mine around the side of the house where no one could see me.”
I asked Granny why she didn’t just pour the castor oil out when she went around the side of the house. Granny said “I knew better than to try that trick.” 🙂
—April 30, 2019
I hope you enjoyed the post from the archives about Granny’s memories of spring of the year.
She never made my brothers and me take any sort of spring tonic. It’s a good thing she didn’t because we are all awful particular about what we eat and drink.
Like Granny, I was often sent to the garden for something when I was a girl. I usually drug my feet the whole way about having to go get this or that, but today those are some of my best memories.
Enjoying garden bounty from Granny and Pap’s kitchen table was mighty fine eating for sure.
Last night’s video: New Garden Areas & Mowing the Yard for the First Time.
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HI,
We never ate Poke Salad (salit). But, we ate enough plantain salad to make up the difference. It is ready in the early summer around the edges of the mowing field. Aunt Pauline would get us out of the house so Grandpa and Grandma could take their afternoon nap. She enjoyed wildflowers so we would hunt for wildflowers especially Hipatica’s (spelling) and Bloodroots in the woods behind their house. After we gathered them we would make flower pots out of them. Grandma and Grandpa always had empty medicine bottles around so we would clean them out and use them as a flower pot. One year we planted a touch me not seed in the dirt in the medicine bottle. It came up and grew. Finally, we broke the bottle and set out the plant in Grandma’s flowers. When my boys were little I would take them to the woods in the spring and we would hunt wildflowers, make a small flower pot for the dinner table, and enjoy being outside exploring the woods. They still talk about those days and I still remember them with a big smile.
It sure is getting about gardening time and I can’t wait. love the story about granny.
Thank you for sharing Granny’s gardening memories. We I was a child in the early seventies, my friend came over to spend the night. Mama asked us to go to the garden, she needed some “new potatoes”. We went to the barn and got a shovel and a bucket. My friend acted very confused. When we got to the potatoe plants, she was looking around curiously, but said she did not see any. I grabbed the shovel and removed a shovel full of dirt from beside the nearest plant. She was amazed to see those potatoes, even though small, come from that red earth. Later, she could not wait to tell her Mama where potatoes actually came from! Growing up the way we did was such a blessing, even if it did seem like a lot of work at the time. Thanks for stirring up my remembrance!
When I was a young wife in the early years of gardening my little sister came after school to visit. When I was proudly showing her our garden I pointed out the Dill plants. She innocently asked, “is the dill pickle at the root when you pull it up?” She has never lived that down!
I remember those first warm days of spring when we would kick off our dime store white tennis shoes and run through the grass. If Mama caught us she would tell us that there’s too much winter in the ground and we were gonna “take a cold”. I don’t hear that much anymore.
I haven’t seen any comments by Miss Cindy lately. I hope she’s doing well
Today is the anniversary of the beginning of the War of Northern Aggression, 162 years ago. My paternal grandmother was 5 days old, living in the Brushy Creek Community of Swain County.
What a great memory from Granny as a little bitty girl in the Spring. If I hadn’t planted the garlic and onions myself to know which patch was which, I’d probably have pulled the wrong ones too. When they first grow the greens do look kind of the same. My husband gets them mixed up all the time with the Leeks. My mom gave us kids Castor Oil every year in Spring until she heard from our Doctor it was causing more harm than good. We were thankful because that was the nastiest tasting stuff we ever tasted. Even before my mom stopped giving it to us, I had done decided when I grew up if I had kids I’d never give them that nasty Castor Oil. I only had one child, but I never gave her any. I kept my word.
Tipper, your mother (apparently) has been a sweet soul since she was born! I think it’s wrong about her garden being took away for a 4 lane road. As I understand, it’s called imminent domain and there’s nothing that can be done about it. You either take their “fair” price or lump it. I knew a little boy who said cabbages were “ little Christmas trees.” I had an aunt who was quite wonderful. She could outlook, outclean, outwork any woman and she got cancer and died at 47. I remember swinging and swinging outside so as not to be under foot. Mommy was in no mood for bother with her oldest baby facing certain death and I knew it. Anyway, before she got sick, it was Fletcher’s “castoria” as I called it and she’d push it on you if you were at her place and got sick. Well I threw it right up and she made me take more declaring I’d drink it til it stayed down. It was a terrible night and one I still recall as child abuse. I cried and gagged but no one was there to help me. I’d never push drugs or concoctions on little kids and I never have. I hate that poke salad. It can send you over the moon going to the outhouse… icky icky icky. Lol
I believe it was Fletcher’s I was thinking of in my comment when I said Vem Herb. I liked the taste of whatever it was. When my uncle was a small child he got into his Mother’s old time pure vanilla flavoring and got passed out drunk. Grandmother thought he was dead, but the country doctor said he would be ok after he slept it off. We never ate poke sallet.
Oh Tipper, You’re near an area of Alabama where I’d love to be! A man who holds my heart lives in DeKalb County and I’d dearly love to be there. It may sound silly but I bought a lottery ticket today after seeing 2 houses in Mentone that I’d dearly love to buy. I had to do that as my home here has a lien on it from Revenue Canada due to the disorganized nature of my late Mother’s estate. I dearly would have loved to have known some of the people you talk about in your newsletters. My paternal Great Grandmother was a healer of the old country sort. Mustard plasters and such for chest complaints and herbal remedies she taught my Grandmother, Aunts, and Great Aunts. Those remedies were taught to her by her middle half-sister, who learned them from her First Nations mother. I have a cousin by marriage who is a Medicine Woman for the Cowichan Tribes and effected healing in a dear friend of mine who has MS. I am learning a few of her remedies and will put them to good use.
Take Care
I remember a spoon of sugar with turpentine. I think Matt’s pine needle tea would have been just as effective.
You all reminded me again (I’ve posted about this before in other years.) of the castor bean plant. My Grandma always had them in the garden when I was a boy. Lots of people did then. They were for a mole repellent. I do not see them anymore, but then I do not see many gardens either.
Justin Metcalf https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfL5xkT20SehAuS6TSKIRrw had castor beans aka mole beans for sale the other day. He had a limited supply so I don’t know if he is still selling them.
I was raised in Wisconsin and spring brought so many memories with it. The curtains blowing gently as Daddy took off the winter storm windows and replace them with screens. The smell of fresh cut grass coming through to ‘cleanse’ the house of old air. The spring flowers pushing up through the snow. One spring day I even found a lost friend. While visiting family during winter vacation, a neighbor came to our house and took care of the animals, including my pet, a painted turtle. When he thought it had died, he buried it outside along the flower bed wall. Next spring, while I was looking for spring violets and daffodils to take to my 1st grade teacher, I noticed something pushing up the ground. It was my painted turtle, not dead but had been hibernating! We decided to take him to the lake and let him be free.
I enjoyed your Mom’s childhood memories! That is a very pretty picture of her when she was little! I will have to ask my mom if they were required to take castor oil in the orphanage she was in from the age of 6 to 12. I vaguely think she told us they did take it. I know she has said they mostly had raisin pudding, oatmeal, and peanut butter sandwiches. My mom has an allergy to peanuts, so she always felt so deathly sick during those times and they thought she was making it up. No one thought, or cared to investigate, that it was the peanuts making her sick. When she was 12, she and my two aunts went to live with my Dad’s aunt. My Mom was there with my foster grandparents until My Dad and Mom were married when she was 19 (they had met at a family reunion when my mom was 16 and Dad was 21. Dad and his parents lived in Washington state, and my Mom was in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania). My Dad’s aunt and uncle were strong, humble and hard working Christians with two children of their own, and they opened their hearts and home to three very young girls that had been separated from their family at such young ages. My Mom and aunts never saw their biological family again once placed in the orphanage, until they were adults in their thirties and their court records were unsealed.
It’s funny how the things we dreaded doing in our childhood lives become some of our most cherished memories as we walk through our adult lives, like you being sent to the garden to get fresh produce. I forgot to mention in my comment on your video last night, how when you were showing where your radishes, lettuce, etc was already planted – my mouth was watering for fresh spring salads!
Donna. : )
Poke salad!!! My Aunt Estelle believed in cooking some poke salad every spring. She was the only one who partook. I saw the first ones, young and tender, in the pasture yesterday.
I watched the video last night where the girls were talking about grinding their teeth. I had just gotten home from the dentist earlier in the day where I had to have 2 teeth repaired where I was grinding in my sleep and cracked 2 of them! I’ll be mowing the yard for the 2nd time here in a day or two. I love this time of the year when things are waking up fresh and new.
My mother said when she was a child her mom gave all her kids a spoonful of sugar with a drop or two of kerosene in it to get rid of worms.
I don’t remember being sent to the garden to get any one thing, but remember having to work in our garden helping with the planting, hoeing and harvesting. We started learning to do this at a early age -about 3 years old hoeing the grass out in the middles or dropping seed. My parents along with the parents of the neighborhood children of my generation would give reluctant children some encouragement with a dose of hickory tea. For the uneducated, this is a whumping with a keen, limber switch from any available bush. After a dose of that, you were glad to work. I never was given castor oil but would be given something else that I liked the taste of. I don’t remember but have a faint memory of something called Vem Herb or something similar to that name. Just for fun, I worked 38 years at Michelin and they would use castor oil as one ingredient in their rubber mixtures-at one time around 700 different mixtures or qualities as the mixtures were known to us. When someone would come to work feeling bad, we would tease them and say we were going to give them a dose of castor oil.
I never liked working in the garden either. Getting up taters and picking half runners were my least favorite things to do The thing that made potatoes so bad was just when you thought you had the last row done, daddy would go back and start over. He always wanted every last tater he could get. Usually by about the 3rd time of going over the rows and we were only finding two or three in a row, my brother and I would start pitching them in the woods before daddy would see them. We knew if daddy saw two potatoes in a row he would want to plow it again. We were just ready to go to the house. Wonderful memories.
I love Granny’s garden memories. I also watched your first mowing and planting video last night. I love the way you all pull together❤ Our family still does also. God bless you and yours.❤❤
Wow…such beautiful memories. I have had ramp once and went to a ramp festival over in west Tennessee, just east of Delano. They are awesome and have a wonderful taste. I was informed however, it is illegal to hunt ramp without a permit. At least that was suppose to be the way it was in the late 90’s. The wonderful flavors of a home-grown garden are the best. I hope to be able to share some of our currently growing garden with my grands this year. Also, Gazzie is such an interesting name, do you have any idea where the name came from, if your know?…Have a Blessed day you guys.