Eat your vegetables! It’s a battle cry sounded by parents all across this great land, one that spans generations all the way back to the founding fathers.
George Washington, our first President, took great pride in also being known as America’s first farmer and composter. Like his father before him, good old George was a tobacco farmer. And through the years of farming, he realized tobacco was exhausting his soil. When he asked his wife, Martha, what he should do, she responded with the wisdom she is famous for, “Our children can’t eat tobacco. Why don’t you grow some vegetables?”
Growing them proved easier than getting Martha’s children to eat them.
Martha had two surviving children from her first marriage to Daniel Custis. During George and Martha’s 40-year marriage, their house at Mount Vernon was always filled with children – and fresh vegetables. Corn, carrots, cabbage, peas, potatoes, pumpkins, and turnips, were just few of the many that he grew at Mount Vernon.
George was also known as American’s first composter, but entirely by accident. Martha’s children didn’t like vegetables of any kind. But being a strict disciplinarian, George served them at every meal. Yes, vegetables were even served at breakfast.
All those uneaten vegetables ended up in the trash bin out back, along with eggshells, potato peelings, and even cow manure. Soon there was too large a pile to have near the house, so it had to be shoved, turned, and moved. After a year, the new pile made the perfect fertilizer. To some, he is also considered to be the Composter-In-Chief.
Not to be outdone, another founding father, Thomas Jefferson, planted over 330 different varieties and species of vegetables and herbs at his Monticello home. Why so many? Historians believe he conducted extensive experiments with different soil mixtures, rotating crops, situating his garden to face the south, and even the grafting of plants. But I know the real reason he spent so much time in the garden. He had two daughters who were picky eaters. He grew so many varieties of vegetables just trying to find something they would eat.
I certainly can relate to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson’s battle over the vegetable. With our two granddaughters, Little One and Sweet Caroline, to say it’s been a challenge would be an understatement.
One week they love Brussels sprouts, the next they don’t. Then they love carrots, then tomatoes, then not. Okay, I know tomatoes are really a fruit, but try telling that to a soon-to-be 4-year-old. Their newest liked/disliked vegetable is the green bean or “snap” bean.
The girls loved snapping the beans in preparation for cooking, but when it came to liking them after they were cooked? Not so much. Let’s just say there were so many beans left under the table I’m now thinking about getting a dog. Or starting a compost pile out back.
Thomas Jefferson also brought us the tomato. Although he credited Dr. Sequeyra, a Portuguese doctor who visited Williamsburg around mid-eighteenth century, with first bringing the red globe to the new world, he took gardening to a whole new level with his 1,000-foot-long terrace. In it, he grew tomatoes, sweet potatoes, peanuts, and lima beans, cauliflower, celery, and endive. Now I don’t know what an endive is, what it looks like, or how it tastes, but if it’s a vegetable, I’ll probably like it. At least that’s what I’d tell my Dad if he made me eat it back on Flamingo.
Like George Washington, Dad was a disciplinarian when it came to eating our vegetables. His view, “I planted it, grew it, you eat it.” One evening I pointed out that he actually didn’t plant the vegetables that spring. Us kids did. My comment didn’t go over too well.
Not only did I have to eat all my vegetables that evening, but starting the very next day, I had to weed his garden. For the rest of that summer, I had to eat all my vegetables at dinner and was the only one who weeded the garden.
This weekend I’m gonna do two things. First, I’m gonna dip whole green beans, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, and squash in buttermilk, corn meal, and then deep fat fry them. I bet the girls will eat their vegetables then. Frying vegetables – a delicious idea I wish my parents thought of when us kids were growing up back on Flamingo Street.
What’s the second thing? I’m going to start getting my raised beds ready for the spring planting season. Just like Mr. Jefferson, me and the girls are gonna plant tomatoes, sweet potatoes, peanuts, lima beans, cauliflower, celery, and endive. That is if I can ever figure out what endive is.
[Rick Ryckeley has been writing stories since 2001. To read more of Rick’s stories, visit his blog: storiesbyrick.wordpress.com.]
