One of my very first goals in gardening was to be able to make homemade pasta sauce. Unfortunately, my first year of planting was hugely unsuccessful, barely giving me enough tomatoes to slice atop a couple of burgers. Well, this year I’ve gotten a little better at it. Not perfect, but better. The other day I harvested enough tomatoes, basil and oregano to make that first yummy batch of sauce!

My first harvest of tomatoes weren’t the best. They were a bunch of misfits really. Far from picture perfect.

It’s hard to get those perfect looking tomatoes down here in South Georgia. But that’s ok, I had just enough for dinner. I trimmed off the stems and rough bits but left the skins. Some recipes call for removing the skins but that sounded like a heck of a lot of work. Turns out it wasn’t necessary.

After doing my research into sauce, looking up several recipes on various websites, in the end I opted for the super simple method of roasting that first batch. I quartered the tomatoes, peeled a handful of garlic cloves, and cut up some onion. I arranged it all in a baking pan along with a good bit of fresh basil leaves and a little oregano. Then I drizzled on a generous amount of olive oil, sprinkled on some kosher salt and ground pepper, tossed it all together and popped it in the oven (375 degrees).

It wasn’t long before the whole house smelled like a scene out of ‘The Godfather’. After about an hour of roasting I pulled the pan out of the oven to discover those maters, onions, garlic and basil all caramelized and ready to become sauce! Yum yum.

From the pan my lovely roasted tomatoes went straight into the food processor. I pulsed them a few times to get the consistency I wanted, then I added a drizzle of balsamic vinegar and gave it one more pulse.

Result – super easy and beautiful looking sauce! I poured the sauce into a small saucepan just to warm it up before ladling it over a bed of ziti noodles. There it was – dinner was served!

The sauce tasted delicious! Far better than what you get in a jar from the grocery store. Being so easy I’m sure this basic recipe can be added to with fresh peppers, zucchini, or meat to make a sauce of your liking. I’m looking forward to the continued experiments! Hopefully those green tomatoes in my garden will ripen soon. Otherwise I will get a chance to make another Georgia favorite – fried green tomatoes! Stay tuned…

Charles and Ellen, also known as Ching and Louise, Mom and Dad, Grandma and Grandpa. The McCrackens were the folks who lived next door in the white cookie cutter house with black shutters and a perfectly manicured lawn on Clearwater Street. They were ordinary folks with an extraordinary sense of responsibility, pride and good old-fashioned values. What they valued most was their family.

The McCrackens didn’t come from means. Born of Scotch-Irish decent in the coal country of western Pennsylvania, they were working class folks with working class dreams. Those dreams were centered around the home and carving out a little piece of the American pie that they could call their own.

For Charles that meant sharing a piece of the pie with five siblings – Clarence “Cracky”, Elsie, Francis “Short”, Jonathan “Mac”, and Laura “Lippy”. As Ching would say, “They were real winners.”

Ellen, born Nellie Louise Bryan, spent much of her childhood in foster homes. Abandoned by their father and given up by a mother who couldn’t afford to feed them, Ellen and her brothers Carl and Melvin, were the only family each other had. These children of the Great Depression knew what it meant to go without everything except love.

The McCrackens put their faith in God and Roosevelt. The Depression would eventually end and America would return to work. But soon the coal mines would go silent once more as the young men of the Greatest Generation would answer the call of duty.

The McCracken home would have four stars embroidered on its service flag, as it was off to war for Ching and his brothers.

The McCracken boys would experience both theaters of war – Europe and the Pacific. But after a great deal of prayer and a little Irish luck, each one would return home and that four-starred banner would get tucked away into memory.

The end of the war would mark the beginning of Ching and Louise. My grandparent’s worlds would become one and the rest would become history. They would eventually move to Ohio where Ching would find work in a steel mill and Louise would take up her career as a homemaker raising four children on a laborer’s salary.

Times continued to be tough, but the McCrackens were tougher. They knew where they had come from, where they wanted to go, and they weren’t afraid to work hard to get there. Work was welcomed, because hard work resulted in dreams coming true. That piece of the pie, remember? They scrimped and saved and eventually were able to tuck enough away to buy that picture-perfect, cookie cutter house on Clearwater Street. A brand new house built just for them! The American dream had come true. And so they went on to raise their kids and grandkids. Ching mowing those perfect lines into his perfect lawn and tending to his perfect little patch of garden. Louise still scrimping and saving and tucking a little away from her grocery money to pay for Christmas and birthday presents. She always had a little something for everyone.

And so goes the story of the McCrackens. A story of hard work and perseverance – a story of answered prayers, Irish luck, and love enough to see through the hard times to the blessings waiting on the other side. Adversity never made them bitter, it only made them better.

So we bought a house with a big yard to match my big dreams of one day having the perfect vegetable garden. When I say perfect, I mean something Better Homes & Gardens would be proud to use as their spring cover. So I ordered a raised bed kit off of Amazon, filled it with expensive dirt and marked off a square foot grid with some twine. Because that’s what I thought would work best based on reading other people’s success stories. So off I went to Lowe’s to buy my first plants to fill that convenient little grid. I had this!

I was quite confident my little garden would grow. And why not? If one person can do it, so can another. That was my philosophy anyhow. That was before I had the joy of experiencing such things as soil nutrient deficiency, fertilizer burn, tomato blight, squash bugs, proper thinning methods, companion planting (who knew some plants didn’t get along?), not to mention the ravaging effect of South Georgia summers. Then there’s hurricane season – something we’ve started to plan around these last few years.

Before I got started I spent some time researching the how-to’s and what-if’s of successful gardening. I educated myself, graduating with the self-proclaimed honor of summa cum laude from the University of Pinterest. As Ching would say “I was a winner!” A phrase of which would take on different nuances of meaning, kinda like the proverbial southern “bless your heart”. Unfortunately, those orderly little boards I had created with all of those clever pins weren’t enough to prepare me for that first year as Farmer Laura, Provider of Sustenance. Sadly, if it were up to me my family would have starved to death. Needless to say, I sucked.

At first the tomato plants shot up to the sky and the lettuce starters provided us with a few good salads. Unfortunately with only four square feet of romaine, a few good salads were all we were going to get. The carrots quickly became over crowded and the pepper plants cowered in the shadow of those giant tomato plants, tomato plants that had not as of yet produced tomatoes. Still I thought “I’ve got this.” So I ordered my second raised bed and filled it with more expensive dirt.

Needless to say season one would turn out a tad disappointing. Those giant tomato plants produced about six tomatoes altogether. The carrots didn’t work out at all and the peppers, who I counted as underdogs in the race, actually brought us several (small) peppers. We won’t even discuss the squash. The squash was a crash and burn experiment. Followed immediately thereafter by pumpkins which, bless my heart, I learned were also in the squash family. After returning to my alma mater I found several pins that went into great detail about something called a squash vine borer bug. What a coincidence – I had just seen a couple similarly marked insects after I ripped up my whole crop (four plants) of zucchini, only to immediately plant pumpkin seeds. Don’t judge. I had 120 days to go until Halloween. I needed to get those Jack-O-Lanterns in the ground!

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With disappointment there would also come encouragement. I soon discovered that my one good crop – my crop of abundance – was basil! Who knew? Effortlessly my basil plants grew, and grew, and grew. Soon my little pest-infested garden started to smell like sweet licorice. Which is kind of weird but who cares, I was growing something! I had experienced success! With my head held high I returned once again to the hallowed halls of academia in search of pins on what I could actually do with all that basil. I discovered, as if for the first time, pesto! Lovely, tasty, creamy and ever so expensive if you have to buy it – PESTO! Suddenly my toils had purpose. My garden had produced.

So what did I take away from that first year? What had I actually learned? An infinite amount of little tidbits about what works and doesn’t work for my little patch of garden. You see, not every garden is the same. Some advice might work for me, but not for you, and vice-versa. You might have better (free) dirt that’s richer than mine. I might have a longer, although be it hotter, growing season than you do. In the end the plants will decide. They are the ones that know what they need to grow into healthy crops. We really do have to follow their lead. Oh I still return to Pinterest, daily actually. But it’s with the understanding that growth and change come from trial and error and not so much from banking on the experience of others. We have to learn from our mistakes and keep planting those seeds in spite of the setbacks. Those seeds will pop up when the time and conditions are right and we will find ourselves to have grown by their example. That’s what gardening is all about really. Hoping for a better season than the last, and looking forward to the next season with hope.

So why the title Gardens and Grandparents? Well, I guess it’s because those are two things that bring me a great deal of comfort in a not-so-comforting world – watching my garden grow and remembering the generation whose homes I grew up in. Known as the Greatest Generation, their’s was a world before the internet, cell phones, social media, virtual reality, self-driving cars, streaming television, DNA ancestry profiles, ride sharing, keto diets, vaping, and a myriad of other things that would have probably confused the bejesus out of them. After all, they didn’t need the internet to tell them what the weather was going to be. They could smell the rain coming and could recognize “snow clouds” when they saw them. When they wanted to get fancy they would refer to the the Farmer’s Almanac, (which by the way I started using this year and have found to be extremely helpful in all things garden related). Cell phones would have seemed silly to my grandparents. If they were expecting a call they would have gone home and waited for it. Social media was reading the newspaper while sitting at the bingo hall or beer garden waiting on the next round to begin. They knew who their ancestors were because their names were written in the family bible. And the family’s stories were told to them by their parents and grandparents. The stories were told to them. What a novel idea, pun intended.

In times like these, when so much is uncertain, I cherish those memories of my grandparents and the simple day-to-day things that children take for granted, but never forget. Like the smell of the house when grandma was baking bread, or seeing my grandpa, whose nickname was “Ching”, sitting on the front stoop (he always referred to it as a stoop, never a porch) reading the paper and drinking his coffee after he finished mowing the lawn. A perfectly mowed lawn, I might add. A lawn that he was quite proud of and also quite diligent in reminding you to stay off of. At least on the first day when all the lines were still perfect. The first day was reserved for admiration.

The world is far from what it was in their day. Answers to any question fathomable can be found instantly just by Googling it. I can hear my grandpa now laughing so hard at the word “google” that he starts wheezing. He had a hell of an infectious laugh. If something struck him as funny or peculiar he would say “Now that’s a winner!” He loved slapstick comedy. He would laugh so hard over an episode of ‘The Three Stooges’ that he’d practically crack a rib. “Googling” would have been a real winner in his book.

Ching was a real winner when it came to his garden. It was perfect. Neat rows of tomatoes and corn – even sunflowers all spaced out and properly cultivated. Not a weed to be found. It wasn’t a big garden, from what I remember. Maybe just a 12’ x 12’ patch out by the shed. But it was pretty as a picture and he was as protective over it as he was his front lawn. It was meant for admiring as much as it was for harvesting.

I think the difference between their world and our world of today is the waning sense of pride folks take in a job well done. Things like gardens take a lot of time and hard work. You can Google the definition of work, you can look up thousands of tips and how-to’s and this’s and that’s, but you can’t experience the pride and joy of laboring with your hands to grow that garden unless you get in there and get dirty! A seed grown into a tomato plant that gives you a slicer for your burger is one of the best lessons you can learn in perseverance.

Not everything is meant to be instantaneous. The best things take time, hard work and love to grow into something special. To grow into something worthy of admiration.

Hi there! My name is Laura and I am an amateur gardener. Emphasis on amateur. I’ve been exercising my green thumb for a little over a year now and I can report that it’s a bit more yellow than green. I thought gardening would come easy for me as my grandparents were natural born gardeners. Surely it must be hereditary, right? Not so much. I am, however, inspired by the memory of their garden growing prowess amongst so many other nostalgic stories about their lives. They were after all the “Greatest Generation”! I’m looking forward to sharing some of their stories with you, as well as some of my gardening adventures (don’t worry, I’m getting better at it). I’m sure we can learn something from each other. After all, we’ve only got this one world and we’re all in it together. So we might as well grow something. I’m looking for ward to the adventure!