August is one, long garden feast

On the southern Illinois farm of my youth, August always meant heat, humidity and the best food of the year.

While we rarely suffered silently through August’s steamy weeks, we usually ate our noontime dinners in delighted silence as we enjoyed my mother’s exceptional meals.

What made them so exceptional were their simple ingredients. Two basement freezers held the day’s main entree, usually a beef or pork roast.

Chicken was for Sundays and our limited supply of hams, from two winter-butchered hogs, was reserved for either special occasions or supper sandwiches.

Mom had an almost foolproof method to prepare any roast. If pork was on for dinner, she’d put a just-out-of-the-freezer pork roast in a roaster, shake a large amount of salt and pepper on its concrete-hard top side and then add an inch of water and two peeled onions. For it to be ready for our noon meal, it had to be in the 350-degree oven by 7 a.m.

A day’s beef roast got the same freezer-to-oven treatment only it went into the oven at 8 a.m. And, like clockwork, the roasts were always ready for my father’s carving knife at noon.

Nearly everything else on our August dinner plates grew barely a stone’s throw from our dinner table.

Most days featured just-picked cabbage for my sister’s vinegary coleslaw, slabs of juicy, just-picked tomatoes, a steaming bowl of homegrown and home-harvested potatoes and — you got it — just-picked green beans or peas.

Other garden goodies would come and go as their seasons peaked and ebbed: Swiss chard, spinach, field corn — we never ate sweet corn with 80 acres of perfectly fine, long-eared Pioneer field corn growing on two sides of our garden — beets, sweet potatoes, turnips, wax beans, kohlrabi, zucchini, onions, carrots, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower and whatever else my parents thought we needed to remain healthy and growing.

But as hot and sweaty all that hoeing, planting, hilling, weeding, picking and preparing those garden-to-dinner plate meals might have been, that was the easy part.

The hard part — canning all that goodness to enjoy year around — often began as soon as dinner ended.

And we canned almost anything that didn’t move or moo; every vegetable, every fruit and several meats like baked pork sausages and roast beef.

My mother’s rationale, especially for canning 10 or so quarts of meat most years, was simple: “You never know when you might need a meal heated over a camp stove.”

No, we could never know, but now, more than 60 years after her yearly admonitions, I can report that we never found out either.

My father mostly watched us hoe, harvest, cook and can from the sidelines. His major contributions were made each spring when he planted all the tomatoes, cabbages and other bedding plants.

After that, like his children, he often let someone else monitor and manage their growth and future.

Throughout the long garden season, however, we did absorb a working knowledge of agronomy, botany and biology.

We also learned that our often sweaty hours in the garden could deliver more than just fresh vegetables to our back door.

In fact, it brought a special kind of satisfaction that bicycle riding or playing baseball just couldn’t.

We discovered that some types of work — the work that people depended on you to do — brought its own reward, its own level of silent satisfaction.

And now, when I see the worn hickory handles of my parents’ garden tools that hang in my daughter’s garage, I see my brothers and me hilling potatoes and all of us sitting down to an everyday August dinner that no king could now afford.