Sharing Memories Week 12: Gardening

Hubs planting some of my herbs

Sharing Memories is a series of weekly writing prompts to help all genealogists (including me!) with writing up memories of our ancestors and our childhood. 

We all love to find a diary or letters written by great grandma or grandpa where they talk about their lives and share their memories. Think how excited one of your descendants will be to read about your memories and your stories! These stories will be lost after a few generations unless we preserve them. And what better way than in a weekly themed post. 

The prompt for today is Gardening. What kind of gardens did your parents have? How about your grandparents? Did they grow vegetables? Maybe your grandmother had a prize flower garden? Did any fruit trees or edible plants grow on your property or nearby? Did you garden as a child? Some families might just have had indoor plants.

My father loved African Violets and he grew them inside the house. I remember him using milk to wash their leaves. He also planted marigolds outside in our tiny planter on our front lawn. There may have been other flowers but I don't remember them.

In our back yard we had a pretty lilac tree that smelled really good but there were tons of bees around it all the time. I don't remember my mom or dad with any kind of vegetable garden but we did have a huge clump of rhubarb which my mom used to make stewed rhubarb for us.

My Aunt Rose was an amazing gardener. Her backyard was almost all vegetable garden. She always had used tea bags drying on the heating ducts because she used the leaves to fertilize her plants. 

I'm not a gardener both because of physical limitations but also because I just don't enjoy it! I do however grow my own herbs which I use in my cooking. Back in my late 20s and early 30s I tried my hand at a vegetable garden but the day I picked lettuce and made salad for company and didn't notice the little green worms crawling in the lettuce was the last time I had a vegetable garden.