One sunny day in Spring, I, Charlie, woke up and leapt out of bed. Did I remember? Yes, it was today that we were going to plant a REAL garden! Of course, I knew all about gardens because Grandpa took me to Uncle Sam’s farm every Summer and told me all the news of the place, but I never had a garden of my own before.
As I dressed, I heard Mamma talking to somebody. Who could it be? And then she came to my door.
“Yes, he’s up, and I guess most every other little boy and girl in the neighborhood is, too, so as to help,” she said. I wondered what for?
So did my father, and he was just about to ask when Mamma finished dressing and appeared too.
“Well,” she said, “the garden man has promised us fresh vegetables every day if we get our garden in today.”
“But you surely don’t mean to say that all those little children of the neighborhood, your backyard neighbors, too, are going to plant vegetable gardens today, do you?” asked father.
“Yes, it’s children’s gardening day, and if we put in our gardens today we get for presents, fresh vegetables for him regular every day except Sunday, while they last.”
“It doesn’t sound as if there were very much fun in all that work,” said father. “Maybe there isn’t,” said Mamma. “Maybe the work is the fun.”
So father said, “Come on upstairs and have breakfast.”
I was so good to my surprise and delighted I nearly ate all the breakfast that was set before me.
When breakfast was over we poor people went down from our flat to the little backyard. Everybody else was there too. I supposed they all got their gardens so as to have the fresh vegetables all summer. Mamma smiled at all the little boys and girls and as all the fathers helped, of course, so there was plenty of strength and everybody got smiles and pats when things went right.
First, two greenhouses came up to the house, and I didn’t see it done nor know it until I slipped out after being busy and hot. Then father told me my mother had got them. Next, plants and seeds began coming. So many came that even people at other houses thought it was too much in the cut flower line.
Before sundown our yard with flowers was alive with diggers and cutters and people who sprinkled seeds after large sackfuls of seed had been opened. Then we watered our seeds, dug and watered them, and everybody’s mother had borrowed one of us to help. As there seemed to be room for everybody to work somebody thought of seeing what vegetables everybody had got, so father put us all in a row and the plants and seeds were compared. Then the line was broken and people rushed everywhere and made new gardens. So our row grew again to see what they had.
Then everybody went home and left us tomatoes and peas and corn and carrots. Practically all late vegetables, so when “Fresh Vegetables To-day” billboards mushroomed in everybody’s backyard in our backyard neighboring tendency neighborhood we had been very careful to attend to our own tomatoes, of which I had the spirit of a cute little vine in mind at the time.
The garden man gave us myriads of carrots and later there used to be boatloads of tomatoes from our place. They used to scare me at first, but after I got attracted and knew they wouldn’t hurt me, then I worked hand in hand with Mamma in all my doings in my vegetable patch. We carried the heavy weeds so much myself that we and everybody else had got so thick with his carrots people began to think Father and Mother must be getting a beach paraphernalia supply somewhere from the deep dark woods of No Man’s land. It was so evenly distributed that old Father Christmas used to occasionally shake his glass sceptre at me here and there until something metal of a musical nature emerged from something with which I encumbered myself to drag the thing from out of something he luckily sat over myself something and some other things, boxes of green tomatoes.
So our yard, while apparently gone, was stored to ensure us extra surprises most early every Sunday morning; but what I did in the backyard was nothing to what I used to see to my advantage at Uncle Sam’s farm. There even a grown up man, which was Andy, thought it would be better to pickle the great surplus of about 5,000 quarts of extra gooseberries then cure them if really hard put to it later—but the women wouldn’t hear of it.
The pickling, although a very uncomfortable feat because they were a very dangerous full of prickles, and low and behold, the pickling worried Mother in the end something dreadful. I, myself up to about this one’s existence, remembered no even extra hairy gooseberries as squishy gooseberries changing color, although the actually experienced at which I helped right at her own gooey pickling seemed that as it should be mentioned—the fact.
Meanwhile, while that kept Mother busy, Father was there in the center of it all and let very few grow up without scholarship in one form or another resulting. Even Aunt Matilda was heading the foreign tourists and summer boarders up to Homer’s tomb she had a summer boarder yelling in Italian Good Night in chorus—and because nobody else could understand their own language afterwards.
Getting back with the very indifferent rose-bugging—well, anyhow we all passed a very nice quiet Summer there altogether.