Cow’s in the Corn……..

Oh, how I love the springtime!  It’s my favorite time of the year because I love gardening.  I don’t mind getting my hands and feet dirty.  I love putting out or dividing perennials and making little secret gardens and then sitting and admiring the fruits of my labor.  I weed, water, reorganize, look for odd planters or accent pieces for my garden.  It’s a labor of love.  I love flower gardening.  

It’s probably because I’m a city girl and not cut out for anything that would resemble life without an Ingles or Publix for my food supply.    The kind of gardening that means plowing, seeding, fertilizing, picking, shelling, shucking, cooking, freezing, or any of that kind of stuff, just doesn’t make me want to put on my garden gloves and go skipping out to the yard with the Moo Poo.  

At one time we did live on a beautiful farm in rural Virginia, which belonged to a very dear friend.  We were in a bid and needed a place to move quickly because we had sold our house and her lovely home just happened to be available, so she graciously offered it to us.  Five hundred acres of Virginia family farmland that was picture perfect, complete with pond, sheep, cows, original homestead, tenant houses, barns, hay, - you get the picture.  It was gorgeous!    The house we lived in sat on about three acres. 

Since we were now living in the country, we decided it was only proper that we plant our own vegetable garden as we had plenty of good garden soil and space right in the back yard.  After all, we were country folks now.  We already had a June apple tree and a cherry tree that produced cherries so abundantly that every bird that side of the Shenandoah Valley came for those cherries and everybody in town knew about the June apple tree and called to see if they were ripe yet.  So, we proceeded to plant us some corn, squash, beans, cucumbers, cantaloupes, and tomatoes.  We were going to have us some good vegetables to freeze and give away!

 Did I mention that we had sheep and cows on the farm?   The garden was looking good.  Nice and green.   We came home from work one day and hurried out to see how the garden was doing.  We looked in horror at our blank garden plot.  The cows had demolished the garden in one afternoon.  I think the tomato plants were left.  Guess they didn’t like tomatoes.   

We enjoyed the June apples and I made applesauce and I got a ladder and climbed to the top of that cherry tree and outfoxed the birds and got more cherries than they did and made cherry pies, cherry jam, and cherry cobblers.  But we decided to shop local businesses for our food supply from then on and leave the produce growing up to the professionals.  Those cows outranked us on that farm anyway.