Childhood memories: Gardening

I grew up in a house with a huge garden in the back. For a very long time, my Mum felt obliged of gardening and making preserves, just like her mother and grandmother had done.
But the garden was too big for her to cope with. There were always huge amounts of berries, and the juice was extracted and cooked to jam. I still remember the strange smell of warm juice, combined with warm rubber emanating from the kitchen (because of the rubber tube with which the juice was transferred to bottles). I remember glasses being collected to preserve the juice. I remember vintage jelly preserves (glasses covered with cellophane sheets) residing on old dark shelves in the basement, with the jelly shrinking from year to year, because we weren't that fond of jelly...

My Mum preserved beans, peas and carrots, she made our own mixed pickles (YUM!).
Thank God for the chest freezer.
We even had some home-grown potatoes in the cellar.
Mum grew tomatoes and peppers, asparagus, cucumbers and zucchini.
And the old plum trees provided with hundredweights of plums. With our lack of enthusiasm concerning the jelly and the juice, my mother considered winemaking. That was wonderful (except for the explosion of one 50-litre-balloon filled with sweet blackberry juice in the kitchen...)!

I still love fruit wine. I mean, made of other fruit than grapes.
(If I come to think of it now, it's funny we didn't have grapes then. Hm...)

Actually, all that preserving was not really necessary. I guess my Mum was very, very busy and not too fond of that inevitable work. So, when it got too much for her, she reduced the amount of work and just went for experiments with unusual vegetables and recipes. Which was big fun, too!

When I was very small, I got my own piece of garden, only the size of a towel.
I grew daisies, strawberries and forget-me-not.
Later, I began to experiment, too. I had read of several plants and wanted to see what they looked like, so I sowed the seeds and watched the plants grow.
I grew spearmint, hyssop and other herbs.
After having read the books of John Seymour, considering gardening and living in the countryside (and with my mother's winemaking efforts in mind), I grew pastinaca, a kind of white root. Seymour said that he'd made wine of almost every fruit and even vegetable, and
I felt adventuresome, so I tried to follow his recipe *).

Different from my Mum's attempt to an almost sterile process, I just chopped the cleaned roots, cooked them according to the recipe, and filled the cooking water (which smelled like a carrot stew) into a glass bottle of 10 litres. I added some sugar and freeze-dried baker's yeast, put a wad of cotton in the bottleneck and waited. The wine resulting had a very fine aroma of nuts, and reminded of a dry sherry. My parents were quite fond of it ;-)

Me in our garden, approx. five years old.

*) Seymour's recipe for wine from pastinaca:

Take 2 kg of Pastinaca, chop and boil in 5 litres of water with some lemon peel. Pour through a sieve while still hot and add 1,5 kg of sugar. Stir. Add some lemon juice (acting as a starter for the yeast). Fill in a suitable glass bottle and add yeast after the juice has cooled off to room temperature. Let ferment. Important: At least a wad of cotton should keep flies away. After fermentation, transfer into smaller bottles, store for some time before drinking.

We were quite fond of Seymour, who was a kind of pioneer in self-supporting. I loved the idea to make wine of nettles and whin or broom... (never tasted those, though.)