When I was little, my family owned a summer house with a
small plot of land. And we grew a little
vegetable garden and a huge, untamed lot of berry bushes and apple trees. My grandmother planted an apple tree for each
grandchild, in addition to the 50-year-old ones that we already had going, but
of course my own apple tree was too little to give any fruit while we lived
there. Besides waiting on my tree,
though, apples were never exciting to me, because I don’t like them unless
they’re cooked in some way. What was
curious, though, was that the apple crop was cyclical. One year, our twenty or so apple trees would
yield ten apples among them, but the following year, we’d have knee-high piles
of apples rotting everywhere. We ate
them (well, I didn’t, but my family did), dried them on our roof, and made
preserves, but we just couldn’t consume them. We would put them outside our fence with a sign that said, “Please
take!” but no one ever did. I guess
those were the years that other peoples’ apple trees grew lots of apples, too.
Our little vegetable garden was a blessing and a curse to
me. It was a blessing because I did love
me a fresh cucumber or tomato. Store-bought produce just doesn’t taste the same, not like those crisp,
bumpy little green cukes that you could smell from a mile away with their
freshness. I’d slice them in quarters,
sprinkle them with a little bit of salt, and munch them for a snack. I’d do the same with tomatoes, but we had
worse luck growing those, and I ate whole lettuce leaves – also with salt. My grandmother would peel the cucumbers,
because their skin was bitter (which never bothered me) and rub the inside of
the peel on her face to moisturize it. Me,
I never could stand for my face to be damp, but I followed suit to be like her.
It was a curse, that vegetable patch, because I had to weed
it. I’ve never much cared for gardening,
though I don’t mind picking the crops, and I hated weeding especially. The hours I spent pulling out little weeds on
our strawberry patch, I can’t even tell you. Of course, my grandmother would then come along and show me all the
spots I missed. It was frustrating, to
have been squatting in the hot sun for an hour and not even do it right.
Besides the aforementioned cucumbers, tomatoes, lettuce, and
strawberries, our vegetable garden yielded cabbage, a bunch of Russian-people herbs
(mint, parsley, and lots and lots of my favorite dill, which I ate raw by
itself), beets (which I never liked), and potatoes. I did like digging potatoes, maybe because
you never knew what you were going to find in the soil. You could get two tiny potatoes, or a bunch
of big momma ones. My mom would roast
the potatoes in vegetable oil with a generous sprinkling of our dill to serve
with our fresh vegetables, and it was a summer feast.
My favorite part, though, were all the berry bushes. Somehow, we ended up with a huge stretch of
semi-wild raspberries. Every day, my
brother and oldest cousins would go raspberry-picking. The raspberry bushes are vicious with thorns,
plus our particular growth was interspersed with a stinging weed called krapiva, which I’ve never seen in the US and therefore don’t
even know the word for, so they would don long pants and sleeved shirts before
they dove in. They would pick a
basket-full every day for tea. I loved
raspberries all by themselves, but my favorite way to eat them was with
condensed sweetened milk. My mom would
put up jam, or preserves, or whatever it’s called where you boil the fruit with
sugar, and I got to eat the skimmed sugary-tart film that boiled up during the
cooking. She would also make a
delightfully light cake (my mom’s, my brother’s, and my birthdays are all in
the summer) with whipped cream, fresh raspberries, and gelatin that I’ve never
quite been able to recreate.
We had wild strawberries, too, though those were sparse
enough to be precious. They’re tiny, and
have none of the tartness of their domesticated cousins, and I would string
them on stalks of grass instead of putting them into a basket when I picked
them. We had one precious cherry tree,
and a few plum trees with purple and yellow plums, and a mutant pear tree that
gave round, sour pears. We had a tree
called oblipiha, which had narrow leaves, tiny opaque-yellow
berries and lots and lots of very sharp thorns. The berries were far, far too sour to eat as-is, but made a deliciously
tart jam. We had amber-colored
gooseberries, which I loved to eat and to look at (you should buy some just to
see how they catch the light) but hated to pick off their thorny bushes. We had jewel-bright red currants, which were
a childhood favorite with all of us because of their tartness and color. They were easy to eat right off the bush, but
I’d pick a basket and eat them as I read a favorite book. We had pearly white currants, too, which, to
me, taste just like the red, and dark black currants, whose somber,
sophisticated flavor I didn’t appreciate until adulthood.
We never spent a penny on fruit during the summer, and
berries were so abundant that the $4.99/pint price sticker around these here
grocery stores still makes my eyes goggle. Last year, I bought gooseberries and red currants for my labmates to try
at our weekly lab meeting. They picked
at them with utter reluctance. Me? One taste and I was five years old again.
