Life lessons learned at an early age
Philip Potempa says his first employers taught him the important qualities of work dedication, responsibility, time management and pride for accomplishment — plus a few other lessons.
While looking through photo memories on my cellphone, I noticed on this same April weekend in 2017, the rooms in our family farmhouse were overflowing with vases of cascading fragrant blooms of old-fashioned white and purple lilacs. At this same time, I had also been busy in 2017 helping my dad collect the bright yellow blossoms of dandelions to make our annual stone crocks of dandelion wine in the farm cellar.
What a difference a few years (and a change in April weather patterns) can make for us all.
This season, while dandelions are starting to pop up in the yard, and our asparagus has broken through the ground, all of the lilac bushes that surround our farmyards along the ditch banks are boasting tight leaf buds with little sign yet of any emerging bloom clusters. Given last week’s odd April snowfall, the delay is a blessing in contrast to frozen flowers and potentially a year without blooming lilacs, which has happened in the past.
I know our neighbors to the north in Michigan spent last week hardat-work protecting the delicate buds and branches of acres and acres of fruit orchards.
As mentioned in previous columns and my published cookbooks, Dee and Jerry Spenner, who are now happily retired and living in Holiday, Florida, were my first employers and helped instill the important qualities of work dedication, responsibility, time management and pride for accomplishment. They also taught me an early lesson in the art of “frost and freeze protection” for field and garden vegetation.
I was 10 years old when I first joined my siblings in the summer of 1980 working at the neighboring 60-acre Spenner Farm in North Judson, which yielded strawberries, blueberries, sweet corn, tomatoes, (wild) asparagus, pickles and peppers among the fresh harvest of produce sold to customers at their seasonal farm stand.
My pay rate was 22 cents a pound for picking strawberries and a $1.50 an hour for weeding and general field work, all of which taught the true value a dollar at an early age. I worked for the Spenner Family for 10 years, and by the summer of 1988 when I was preparing to leave for college at Valparaiso University in the fall, my hourly rate had doubled.
Anyone who has already planted onion sets, potatoes and cabbage plants were safe from last week’s temperatures in the mid-20s.
As for delicate vegetables like fruit trees and strawberry plants, the same inventive techniques used by the Spenner Family a half century ago are still just as effective today. Lighting “smudge pots,” a metal container of oil and rags lit on fire to create a low-drifting smoky haze of heat, carbon dioxide and water mist is one way to insulate fields of precious crops from the cold.
However, more often, Jerry Spenner relied on activating his sprinklers — operated by tractor power, pumps and ground wells — to keep his strawberry fields water coated to stave off cold temperatures. The key to starting the pumps in time, when threat of a cold night was predicted, was in itself, a carefully timed and precarious formula to maneuver, all based on human alertness and manpower at the right time.
Jerry and Dee creatively devised a wire, which ran from their house (likely their bedroom window) and attached to an electric thermometer staked in the ground in the lowest section of garden/field landscape. Up at the house, the wire was attached to an electronic appliance, a clock radio if I recall correctly, which would TURN ON in the middle of the night to rouse the family if the temperature dipped to low. Jerry, Dee and team would have to quickly dress and “man the pumps” (or at least the sprinkler equivalent) to get the irrigation started in time.
So far this season, my dad has waited out the cold weather of April before garden planting. He has some partially sliced yams, sitting inside his heated shop in trays of water to root before planting. Amazingly, we still have yams (snuggly wrapped in old newspapers to help preserve them) from the last fall harvest in our basement onion and potato bins. As for the ages’ old question about whether sweet potatoes and yams are the same? They definitely are NOT.
While both are starchy and delicious, yams are a different branch of the root vegetable family, and similar to the yucca in texture and flavor. While sweet potatoes have a smooth pinkish skin and bright orange flesh, yams have a duller exterior skin which is also more tough and brownish. The flesh of yams are less sweet than sweet potatoes. The plants of each also look different when growing, with sweet potatoes more vinelike.
During my last Caribbean trip to Jamaica in November 2006, yams were a popular side at every meal. Walkerswood Plantation, one of my favorite destinations, prized yams as a key ingredient for a delicious dessert pudding, which can also be made with sweet potatoes.