Chasing History: Exploring My Ancestral Roots - Blog Post #57
By Tonya Graham McQuade
Caption: Dotty Graham of Antioch picks her ripest vegetables from her backyard in order to begin canning. Photo originally published in Antioch Daily Ledger.
In my last post (Part III), I described the work my parents did to landscape their front and back yard after finishing with building the house on Minta Lane (see Part I and Part II). A big part of that landscaping involved planting trees and a large vegetable garden so they could grow a lot of their own food – but maintaining that yard took a lot of work, as you might imagine.
Before moving to Minta Lane, my parents had a small garden at our house on Kendree Street. As my mom got more interested in canning, though, we started to go places to pick fruit and nuts. Mostly, we went to Brentwood, back when it used to be primarily farms and orchards, but I also remember going to Sepastopol to pick apples. My mom made a lot of apple sauce since we all liked that. She also canned peaches, pears, and apricots; made various jams and jellies; and made delicious candied walnuts, which we all loved.
My mom’s “food preservation” efforts only increased after our move to Minta Lane – at least once my parents had the front and back yard planted. At one point, according to my dad, they had eighteen fruit and nut trees. These included different varieties of Lemon, Apple, Orange, Walnut, Almond, Grapefruit, Nectarine, Kumquat, Cherry, Apricot, Peach, Plum, Tangerine, Pear, Fig, and Persimmon - and if you know anything about how many of these crops come in, you know you have to be ready for them.
My parents also had a large vegetable garden that produced tomatoes, string beans, fava beans, snow peas, squash, pumpkins, zucchini, beets, turnips, garlic, onions, peppers, lettuce, kale, Swiss chard, cucumbers, carrots, broccoli, and corn – and that’s just what I remember. Of course, what they grew varied somewhat from year-to-year. Sometimes, those vegetables came out in interesting shapes, as you can see in the photos below.
My mom holds up an especially large carrot.
My dad shows off a very unusually-shaped carrot.
Andy holds up a piece of Swiss chard large enough to make a salad!
The trees and garden required constant attention, more so at certain times of the year, which sometimes made it difficult to get away for long periods of time. I remember one particular time that the burden of caring for the garden fell on me. The summer after my sophomore year of high school, 1982, my parents and brothers went on a trip to Mexico for three weeks. Though it’s hard today to believe, I (only 15 at the time) stayed home alone since I had a summer job. That’s right – my parents were more than 1,500 miles away, in their car, during a time without cell phones, and I stayed home alone. I’m thinking that’s quite the opposite of “helicopter parenting.”
Since I would be staying home, I was put in charge of the garden – which mostly meant watering and picking vegetables. Friends and neighbors checked in on me, and I gave them lots of tomatoes and zucchini, as I recall. At least once someone drove me to a grocery store since this was before I could drive, but I mostly just rode my bike everywhere. I survived. The rest of the family had a fun time in Mexico. I sometimes regretted missing out, but I also enjoyed that brief period of early independence.
In our family now, my husband Mike is the gardener. Our garden is not nearly as extensive as my parents’ was, but we have grown zucchini, snow peas, tomatoes, butternut squash, pumpkins, peppers, cantaloupes, kale, garlic, rosemary, basil, and mint over the years. Some of those have been more successful than others. Mike tried growing watermelon, and twice we planted avocado trees, but those never worked out. Our two orange trees in the back yard, though, give us LOTS of oranges. We mostly juice them, then freeze the juice into cubes to use in smoothies. Neither of us have ever tried canning.
For my mom, though, “canning, freezing, and drying the food picked from her plants” became a favorite hobby, as this news article from the Antioch Daily Ledger points out. “Canning … [was] her way of relaxing and a nice contrast to her job,” which by then was serving as a teacher at Live Oak Continuation School in Antioch. The article, written by family friend and Daily Ledger staff writer Pat Kratina, also points out that my parents’ garden was “totally organic” and produced “an abundance of fruits, vegetables, and nuts.”
This article by Pat Kratina originally appeared in the Antioch Daily Ledger.
As the article states: “Graham … spent many hours pouring through books learning how to can. She also had some assistance from her previous neighbor, Sara Sheetz, who introduced her to buying fruit in the Brentwood area to can before Graham had a garden. Her current neighbor, Badia Chapman, often advises her on canning and taught her how to can olives….
“In her pantry, the shelves are lined with canned pickles, peaches, applesauce, apple pie filling, plums, and pickled beets. Very little food is wasted for Graham who also dries nectarines, apricots, and figs and makes fruit leather. Besides drying fruit, she freezes the vegetables from her garden…. This year she froze 234 ears of corn and some green beans.”
My mom picks fruit from the tree.
My dad picks a beet from the garden.
Mike and the kids and I were often the beneficiaries of my mom's efforts, especially when it came to fresh fruit pies and jars of plum jam and pomegranate jelly. Of course, we also frequently brought home fruits and vegetables from their garden – especially onions, kale, grapefruits, lemons, apricots, persimmons, and pomegranates.
My parents’ pomegranate tree eventually produced a LOT of pomegranates, as you can see in the photo below. If you know anything about pomegranates, you know they’re not the easiest fruit to eat. It took a lot of work for my parents to seed all the pomegranates so my mom could make them into pies and jelly. My son Aaron, who liked the pomegranate seeds a lot, was frequently given the job of seeding the pomegranates at our house, and he would often become rather sticky in the process. This became an outside chore - lol.
My dad needed lots of containers for all the pomegranates!
Aaron and Anna also benefited from the pumpkins my parents grew, and they used to enjoy each year getting to pick one out for Halloween. Of course, Grandma and Poppy's “pumpkin patch” also made for some cute photos over the years. Here’s one of Aaron when he was about 16 months old, sitting on an especially bright orange pumpkin. It also looks like he’s got a small squash in his hand.
Aaron, 16 months, sits on a pumpkin in my parents’ backyard.
Both kids enjoyed traipsing through my parents’ back yard as there was always something interesting to discover. During one especially memorable Easter egg hunt, Anna lifted the cover on the compost pile to look for an egg and instead found a mouse. Eek! When Aaron and Anna were the only grandkids, my parents would draw them maps to find their eggs, but once there were more grandkids, the egg hunt (for which we used plastic eggs) became more of a free-for-all.
Of course, there were plenty of hiding places in the yard – and sometimes, my parents would find missed eggs long after the holiday. The hunt was made more enticing as the kids got older by the increasing amounts of money my parents hid in the eggs. Whoever found the Gold and Silver eggs were the big winners. They always had to watch out, though, for the eggs my dad filled, for they might include sawdust, screws, nails, bugs, or other “icky” stuff.
Aaron and Anna in 2003 search for Easter eggs in my parents’ backyard.
In this photo, you can also see my mom’s bird feeder, which she kept well-stocked with bird seed.
Pat Kratina's article also points out that my parents, soon after finishing the house, started grinding their own flour and raising chickens. These were two additional aspects to their health conscious, self-sufficient lifestyle. As my mom said, “We have the convenience of living in the heart of the city…. We can walk to the store and schools and yet we are still farm-like. We try to combine both.”
My parents’ longest-surviving chicken, Henrietta
Last year, I wrote a blog post about Publishing My Mom's Children's Story, Henrietta and Weber Find a Friend, which I discovered in a folder when I was helping to clean out my mom’s sewing room. My son Aaron drew the pictures for the book, and we surprised her with the book for her birthday. If you missed reading that post, I hope you’ll check it out. Henrietta was my parents’ longest surviving chicken, and Weber was another of their chickens. The “friend” they find in the story is a kitten my mom adopted named Scruffy. The family dog, Tippy, also makes an appearance, though he is dubbed “the furry creature” by the chickens.
The post also includes an excerpt from an essay my mom wrote back in the 1990s about raising chickens. I included the entire essay at the end of the book. If you’re looking for a cute story to read to kids or grandkids – or just want to hear more about my parents’ experience raising chickens – you can find the book at this Amazon.com link. It would make a great Christmas gift for someone!
My parents called this row of buildings along the side fence “shanty row.”
In the above photo, you can see what my parents called “shanty row” along their side fence. It included various forts, sheds, a woodpile, and a chicken coop where the chickens could hang out. It was there, most often, we would find their eggs – although the eggs could actually be almost anywhere in the back yard. The chickens typically wandered around the backyard during the day and went back to their coop – the second building from the end – at night.
I want to say a bit more about my mom’s flour grinding. My parents started buying whole grain wheat soon after we moved into the new house, and all of us at times took turns helping with the grinding, which involved a very loud electric flour mill. My mom also bought a Bosch mixer, which she used for her bread making. Of course, she first had to convince us kids to give up white bread.
My mom’s favorite cookbook; it now sits on my shelf – I need to get baking!
In the same folder where I discovered my mom’s children’s story and her essay about the chickens, I found this “article” she wrote about her favorite food: Homemade Whole Wheat Bread. In it, she wrote about how she got us kids to eat whole wheat bread:
Nothing smells quite as wonderful as homemade bread, right out of the oven. I have always enjoyed baking bread, but about nine years ago, I started experimenting with whole wheat. I had taken cooking classes that emphasized the use of whole grains. Since my husband and I were readers of "Mother Earth News," we had become more food conscious and got very involved with an organic garden.
Whole grains seemed to fall right into place for us, but not with our three children. I had to sell them on the idea. There I was grinding my own flour and merrily concocting all kinds of bread recipes. Somehow their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches weren't quite the same on whole wheat bread. They liked to squish up the bread into a ball, and whole wheat wouldn't do it.
I set out on a campaign to show the reasons why it was better for them to eat whole grains. I asked them just to try it for one week and see the results. They all got involved in the baking process, grinding, kneading, etc. When we started adding butter, cinnamon, nuts, and raisins, things started happening.
It didn't take long to wean them from the white, fluffy stuff. None of them even chooses white bread now. Even cookies taste better with whole wheat flour. Try it - you'll like it!
I also discovered a little spiral notebook, which she called “Dotty’s Doodles,” that contained many of her poems and drawings. Fortunately, I was able to rescue it from a box of books my dad had put in his truck to donate somewhere. In the notebook I found this drawing and poem about her garden:
My mom’s drawing: Minta Lane Garden, September 2001
My mom’s poem about their Minta Lane Garden
My mom certainly also fit into that “great gardener” category, and she also put in a lot of work keeping up with all her flowers, plants, and bulbs. They often required thinning, pruning, deadheading, replanting, and replacing to keep them looking in tip-top shape.
My mom works on deadheading her flowers.
My parents also hosted tours of their home. My dad brought his students there on several occasions when he was teaching architectural drawing, and their home was also part of the “Annual Christmas House Tour” sponsored by the Antioch Women’s Club, as the articles below relate. The first article mentions that they are “emphasizing a natural theme in their home this holiday season,” with an emphasis on “do-it-yourself.” It highlights the fact that they built the house and furniture, and that the holiday decor includes homemade ornaments and a dried herb wreath. In another previous post, I wrote how my mother taught me to love the holidays with all of her baking and homemade crafts - you can find that blog post at THIS LINK if you want to check it out.
Articles announce that my parents’ house will be part of the Antioch home tour.
My mom's handcrafted decorations greet visitors at Christmas.
As the years went on, my parents' garden began to shrink, primarily to make it more manageable. My dad took out many of their trees either because they stopped producing, because the amount of fruit got to be too much for them, or because he wanted the space for something else - such as the "sanctuary" he created at the back of the yard, under a tree he trained into an umbrella shape. His book group would meet under its canopy. It was a sad day when that tree split in a storm, destroying his little sanctuary. In many ways, it was the beginning of the end.
It was concern for my dad's health that drove him to take out one tree: the very prolific grapefruit tree. My dad was eating so many grapefruit that he ended up in the hospital. The acidity, it turned out, was inflaming his esophagus. It was primarily my mother's health issues, though, that drove the decision to sell the house.
If you've read this far in my blog series, you know that having a creative, health-conscious, self-sufficient lifestyle was very important to my mom. So, you can imagine how difficult it has been for her to slowly lose her ability to do so many of the things she loved since contracting Rheumatoid Arthritis in her early 50s. For many years she pushed herself and managed to keep up with the the gardening, canning, freezing, painting, sewing, crafting (see this blog post), baking, cooking, cleaning, shopping, laundering, decorating, bird feeding, and party hosting, though at a slower and slower pace – but these past two years, it got to be too much for her.
Back in April, my mom was forced to move to a rehab facility after falling in the kitchen and breaking several bones. My dad, who had already been working on downsizing for a while, began preparing to sell the Minta Lane house. One day when I was there, he asked me to cancel their internet and telephone service, and I ended up writing this blog post: Goodbye to 754-3093. That was our old phone number, and it felt like a big step to me.
Of course, in that post I was also beginning to say goodbye to the house that our family – mostly my parents – built; this house that meant so much to both of them, as well as to my brothers and me; this house that contained so many of our family memories. Just typing that sentence made me tear up. I guess this blog series is my way of finally saying goodbye to Minta Lane.
During my last visit to the house, I did a final walk through after it had been staged for sale. It still included some of my parents’ furniture and decor, but a lot of things had been changed, and most of their treasured artwork and keepsakes were missing. Still, I needed that - and I made a video of it as well. I’m going to post a link to that video here for anyone else who needs that final “walk through,” that chance to say goodbye, and who maybe didn’t get it because it all happened so fast. My mom didn’t get a final walk through. That makes me sad.
So I offer this tribute to my parents, to the house they built with love on Minta Lane and to the life that they built for us there. What an amazing legacy!
This painting of the Minta Lane house now hangs on my bedroom wall.
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