|
 On the January day I visit, Wilda does have food in the house. Food from the garden. She sets out potatoes, carrots, her famous sweet pickles, store-bought bread, and meat loaf, the one thing I don't eat. For dessert we share tea, cookies, and raspberries, frozen last July, and thawed that morning. In summer, Wilda likes to "have a bit of beans and lettuce, stuff that you can go and pick enough for your meal and you don't have to have it in the fridge or someplace. " When winter comes, they open the freezer or make a trip to the root cellar. "I saved jars and jars of anything I could get my hands on," Wilda tells me. Much of it was from their garden. Things they didn't grow, they bought once a year, like apples in the fall. "Bought those and put them in the cellar," Wilda says. "I peeled all the apples, when it looked like they were starting to get soft. Peel them all and cut them up the same as you would to put in your pie and put them in bags in the freezer. I've still got apples there sliced for pies." At one time, they froze beans, squash, corn, turnip, raspberries, strawberries, pumpkin, and beets. They canned tomatoes, pickles, pears and peas. The cellar, with the steepest stairs I've ever known, held onions, carrots, cabbage, potatoes and squash, and all the canned stuff too. Compare my experience to theirs: I've been gardening for two years to their hundred-odd years of combined expertise. Do they have any gardening secrets to share with the next generation? "Nooooo, I don't think so." That's Lois. "Hard work. That's about all I did as far as gardening goes." That's the way Wilda learned too. "I didn't know anything about gardening when I started. Just kept going and doing it. Kept growing okay and if it didn't I guess it died. I'm better than when I started because I didn't know anything...couldn't be worse than that." She laughs.
|  |