It’s that time of year
Mmmmmmmmm…. Yep! It’s that time of year. Take a drive anywhere around here and behind most homes, especially in the country, folks have a garden growing.
Corn is tall, beans are ripening up their stakes, tomatoes are so big that their vines are almost on the ground. Cucumbers are picked and working in the brine on the countertops along with ripening tomatoes. Purple hulls, Lady Fingers, sugar snaps, yellow squash, okra, you name it. Crops are coming in.
I grew up with a father who always had a garden. With him being an Air Force officer, he always found a way to have a garden no matter where we lived be it in Kansas, Louisiana, Morocco — it didn’t matter. In my teens, he retired from the Air Force and we settled in East Tennessee in Knoxville. He was only 37, so, of course he went on to another career with the Post Office and selling real estate on the side. But he planted a garden every spring.
I loved his garden. I loved to go out and pick a ripe tomato fresh off the vine, brush it off a bit, and bite into its lusciousness, savoring the succulence of it, warm from the sun and so juicy its liquid dripped off my chin. I’d get a cucumber and gnaw off the skin to get to the sweet flesh inside. I’d eat the yellow squash raw when no one else did. I loved raw green beans.
Dad never said one word to me when I pillaged his garden except when I overindulged on his strawberries. He’d always warn me about eating too many and causing my mouth to break out. I sometimes listened, but most times I didn’t and paid a price for it.
When I left home to follow a career in education, I eventually met and married a man who also planted a garden. We planted it together every spring and especially listened to our elderly neighbor tell us one time that we wouldn’t get a good crop because we planted “agin the signs.” He was right and we always planted with the signs every year and always had a good crop of just about everything.
One time, Bill was out of town for a job and the corn came in. I pulled over 300 ears of corn off our rows. This was great corn, Silver Queen, that I planned to shuck to cream style it.
I piled all of it on a big sheet in the middle of the kitchen floor and our three oldest kids along with my brother-in-law, John, commenced to dig in and shuck it. My mother-in-law helped me get the silks off each ear and prepare them for a wee bit of blanching before we creamed each ear.
This was quite an operation with lots of family help. The thing is, we all loved cream style corn. I’m not talking about the gawdawful canned stuff you buy at the grocery store. That is an insult to real creamed styled corn.
For those of you who don’t know, this is how to make real cream styled corn. After it is blanched, it must be cooled. After it is cooled, I always use a really sharp knife and score it down through each row of kernels. Then I take the cob and scrap the kernels into a pan making sure I get the “milk” of the corn. This is what makes it cream style.
The final product is warmed a bit and you have to be careful not to scorch it. Let it cool and then freeze it. Our children used to think it was dessert. I’d prepare it with a little added milk and maybe a little sweetener depending on how sweet the corn was. It was a favorite of our family and still is.
Years ago, my sister-in-law Mollie and I used to plant a garden together behind Bill’s and my little house out on the farm. We loved to plant sugar snaps. The only problem was that when they started to ripen, we would raid the vines, shell them and eat them raw like candy. I’m not sure whether we ever got enough for a meal.
We ordered some broccoli one time (my favorite food of all time) and when the plants arrived, I think there were over 200 of them. We had enough broccoli for all of the surrounding area!
Yes, the gardens are coming in. I didn’t even mention fresh fruit. Bill just brought me in a bowl of fresh peaches we got at a little stand the other day. Now I have a hankering for fresh peach cobbler.
I just love this time of year.
Coleen Brooks is a longtime resident of Gordon County who previously wrote for the Calhoun Times as a columnist. She retired as the director and lead instructor for the Georgia Northwestern Technical College Adult Education Department in 2013. She can be reached at coleenbrooks1947@gmail.com.