Beech Tree News Network

Because I had a lot taken from me at an early age, I have always understood that very little is eternal.  I don’t mean material things.  I mean knowledge, information and relationships.  History and day to day life teaches each of us that lesson throughout a lifetime of living. 
    The library at Alexandria burned around 30 BC and with it knowledge that was gathered by the great minds of the time.  There is no telling how many wheels we’ve had to reinvent with the loss of that information.
    War has always been the great destroyer of collective information and entire cultures.  I don’t know if you’ve read the book, The Monuments Men or seen the movie, but both are worth the time.  The story involves a group determined to keep the Nazis from looting and destroying the great works of art during WWII.  Thank God, for those men.
  I worry about what we’re losing with the destruction of the city of Aleppo in Syria.  The Middle East holds some of the world’s oldest cultures and with it, their art and writings and artifacts.  It is one of the most volatile places on earth, and those people are losing more and more of their history, every day the wars continue.
I’ve said before that I am so thankful to have the platform of this column to tell my family’s story.  Long after I’m gone, my granddaughter will be able to read about her grandparents’ antics.  There is another thing I’ve started doing to preserve some of my family’s history.  I’m putting together a garden journal.  It will be entitled, “Just In Case You Need To Know.”
The Just-In-Case journal will contain information about planting and gathering garden vegetables.  I don’t really expect either of my kids or my granddaughter to raise a garden, but you never know, and my husband, Garey, is a wealth of information.  He was taught by both his dad and his granddad in the fields of Alabama.
There will be information on how far apart to plant your seeds—corn and beans, eight to ten inches in between plants; information on how deep to plant seeds—1 ½ inches if the soil is moist, 2 ½ inches if the soil is dry; and how much fertilizer to put to the row—2 to 3 quarts every 50 feet. 
There will be tips like, tap the soil over the seeds once they are planted in order to secure the soil around the seed and keep it from drying out.  It is difficult to get okra seeds to come up, so sow them in the row then thin the young plants to 10 inches apart.  Always plant your seeds and wait until the plants come up before you fertilize then fertilize out to the side of the row 3 to 6 inches, and till the fertilizer in or work it in with a hoe.  Put your sweet potatoes in a shallow bed of good soil in the early spring, and make sure you mud the roots of sweet potato plants before you put them in the ground.
Garey is a wealth of information, and although I’m sure there are countless books that could teach my kids how to garden, they wouldn’t be as accurate for our little patch of the earth as Garey’s tried and true methods.  My favorite bit of information involves watermelons.  Watermelons have a curl where the stem attaches to the vine.  It looks like a little pig’s tail, and starts out green.  When that curl turns brown, the watermelon is usually ripe.  You don’t even bother to thump the melon unless the curl is brown.  When you thump the melon, it needs to make a dull thud.
Once, in our early marriage, Garey sent me to the local farmers’ market to get a watermelon.  In order to help me understand what sound I was listening for when I thumped the melon, he demonstrated on the interior of our car. 
“If it sounds like this, it’s too green,” he said, as he thumped the dash.  He thumped the steering wheel.  “If it sounds like this, it’s too ripe,” he said.  He thumped the gear shift.  “If it sounds like the gear shift, it’s just right.” 
I spent the entire trip to the market thumping the gear shift in order to get the sound in my head.  I returned with a perfect watermelon.
You can’t buy knowledge like that, but you can get it for free from your family patriarch, and I really hope my kids pay attention.