by Edward Malone

Created on: May 29, 2008   Last Updated: June 09, 2008

Growing up on our farm in the 1960's was an adventure. There were seven siblings in my family, two boys and five girls. Every year we planted several gardens. In 1958, when I was seven years old, our mother encouraged us to learn how to grow and cultivate the best gardens.

Everyone always thought of me as being the most manner able of the family. I was the quiet one but at times I was a regular "Dennis the menace". If I could play a joke on someone and get away without being caught so much the better.

Mom decided to make a contest out of gardening to decide the winner. The winner would get three gifts for Christmas that year. Normally, each child received only one gift. During the spring of 1958, we each planted a garden. The gardens consisted of a row of the following vegetables: corn, squash, cucumbers, tomatoes, carrots, lettuce,onions, sweet potatoes and cantaloupes. I switched my oldest sister's packets of carrot seeds and replaced them with radishes seeds. When the vegetables were ready to pick, my sister couldn't understand why her carrots were radishes. I told her that she didn't read the planting instructions and laughed about it. But as the saying goes, "two can play that game". My sister had also played the switch game on me. She replaced my onion seeds with garlic seeds. Now I know why I never like garlic.

My sister gave me another surprise later that year. Remember the sweet potatoes? During the fall harvest, we all built sweet potatoes banks. For those who are not familiar with the term, a sweet potato bank is nothing more than a mound of dirt, pine straw and dried corn stalks piled in the shape of an Indian tee pee. During the Thanksgiving holiday, imagined the look of surprise on my face when I dug a hole to extract some potatoes for baking! My sister had replaced all of my potatoes with rocks!

Even to this day we joke each other about that gardening (mis)adventure and funny at that. I am still trying to imagine how baked (potato) rocks taste(ugh)!

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