by Stacey Mcclure

Created on: November 24, 2009   Last Updated: December 03, 2009

Yankee Gardner

It was early spring 1989. I was a single mom, and had just settled in to my first house in east Tennessee. It was small and in disrepair, but it was mine. The house sat on top of a little hill on the main road. I had an acre of property and was already making plans on how beautiful I would make it. I was feeling pretty confident. After all, I had proven everyone wrong by getting this far.

Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, a vegetable garden was not something you saw every day. I was a country girl now, and country girls have vegetable gardens, right? I called around to see if I could find a tiller to borrow. Of course, my good friend Bud had one in his garage full of goodies. Some people laughed at the thought of me tilling my own garden, but I was going to show them how us city girls do it! I got the tiller over to my house and fired it up. Slowly, I lowered the tines until they grabbed on to the rock-hard clay dirt and took me for a nice ride. After awhile, I got the hang of it and finally got my little patch of earth ready to sow.

The next day, I headed down to Lowe's to pick up some plants. Now, you can't ask about planting vegetables in Tennessee without getting an earful. Some say plant when the moon is full. Others swear by the almanac, but one thing is for sure...they all have a different system and they are all "the only way to do it"! I knew better. All of this lore, all of these wives tales, who believes that stuff anyway? I was going to do it my way. So I bought my maters and my taters and my cukes and peppers; my cantaloupes and watermelons and even some cauliflower and broccoli. I was going to have the best garden ever!

I brought my plants home and set them on the kitchen counter. It wasn't quite time yet to plant, so I would keep my plants safe in the house for a couple weeks. Everything was going fine until one day when I woke up and noticed that one row of my plants was dying. I didn't understand because they were fine a couple days ago! I looked at the stakes and it seemed that it was only the cucumbers that were wilting. I tried everything to bring those cucumbers back to life, to no avail.

I proceeded to plant everything else. All of my little plants looked so pretty in their perfect rows. After a few weeks had passed, I was so excited to see all of the little buds here and there! As time went by, all of my vegetables were developing nicely. I could almost taste those juicy tomatoes.

One night, I was visiting a friend and we were talking about my garden. I mentioned how all of my cucumbers had died. Her neighbor piped in and asked if I had been menstruating when I planted the cucumbers. I told him they had died before I could get them planted. He said "You can't go in the cucumber patch if it's that time of the month". I just laughed and told him that was crazy. I thought back to when I had bought the plants and believe it or not, it actually was during my cycle when I bought the plants. Still not believing all of this folklore, I just brushed it off as coincidence. The same neighbor also said "I hope you at least planted some marigolds around to keep the critters out. Of course I hadn't.

It was almost time to reap my beautiful harvest! I looked so forward to eating all of my homegrown veggies! Unfortunately, upon closer examination, it seems that the "critters" had gotten them before I had the chance!

20 years have passed since then, and you can bet your sweet cornbread that when someone tells me to plant my green beans standing on one foot, three days after the full moon at exactly 8:27 in the evening, by golly, that's the way I'm gonna plant 'em!

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