Love Story

This love story goes back many years before I was born. It is about my Mom and her love of nature and of the outdoors. She started to garden, looking through catalogs at a young age, and planted her tomato garden in Morningside, high atop Marietta Street. She used to say on a clear summer night she could hear the lions roar at the Zoo. What a perfect environment for her plants in the middle of the city! She always dreamed of living on a farm, to grow her garden and raise a couple of dairy cows. Fast forward now to 1975, when she announced with excitement, that we were moving to a beautiful farm in the country! The huge tomato garden soon arrived with enough Roma tomatoes to provide a winters worth of spaghetti sauce, puree, and whole tomatoes. These were the bread and butter of off season meals. Not to mention, delicious. Her favorites, however were probally Better Boy, Early Girl, and Brandywine. She planted cherry tomatoes, for me in part, because I was the garden "grazer"--one for the bucket, one for me! These were especially good right off the vine. Also with our huge gardens, came Dorothy, Mom's very stubborn, but very loved Jersy milk cow, who provided fresh milk, and enough thick cream to start a gourmet butter business. Mom canned, dried, and froze every veggie imaginable, with great success. She would point out to me, the beauty of every fruit; the color, aroma, firmness of each variety. She took pride in this. It was very important for her to be able to give her family this special gift, even if we didn't understand it at the time. She wasn't always able to express what she felt, but if you read between the lines, you could hear it and feel it. It gave her a purpose, to be able to give to us something that was so dear to her. Since my Mom passed away last year, I have been very fortunate to be able to garden at our family farm, planting tomatoes, along with peppers, onions, and herbs for my husbands delicious homemade salsa! This will be his first year to use all truly fresh ingredients! Plants that we will have planted and cared for together, just like my Mom did so many years before, to provide a special treat for our family. It is only as an adult, with my own beautiful children, that I can fully understand and appreciate the love and effort Mom put into her gardening. It was for her, but more for us. Thanks Mom. Love Peggy