Dad’s Gardens
It’s a few days following Christmas, 2019, and I’m here at home on Phillips Street in Attleboro peeling a few old potatoes with sprouts –
Aunt Nancy is cooking a small roasting chicken in the oven and we plan to make a few mashed potatoes for fixin’s.
The memory of Dad Doucette’s vegetable gardens crossed my mind – his primary acre at the back of the Pelletier Farm off Thurber Avenue in Attleboro and later after we moved to Franklin Street, Uncle Joe and Aunt Ida (Dad’s sister) Hearn allowed Dad to plant behind their house on Thacher Street next to the Ten Mile River.
I remember one year at the Hearn garden, Dad tried a patch of celery closer to the river and it surprisingly did exceptionally well – so much so that Dad crated the lot and sold it to Bobby Goulet who used that celery at the Ice Cream Shop restaurant on Bank Street.
As I recall, that was the only time Dad planted celery.
As for potatoes, Dad always planted potatoes and I recall his purchasing seed potatoes at Conlon and Donnelly in Attleboro – by the pound, placed in a paper sack with the top twisted and tied with twine.
Dad cut the spuds into seedling eyes with his old chicken killing knife, planted the eyes in hilled rows and always had grand success with the potato crop.
For us kids, harvest time was the most fun.
The turning of the dry vines exposed the mature potatoes – caution always practiced not to injure or mishandle the crop to ensure for proper storage.
Another product Dad repeatedly purchased at Conlon and Donnelly were small cans of liquid tar – placed his seed corn kernels in a bucket and mixed the corn seed with that awful smelling tar and then planted the corn into evenly spaced hills.
The tar kept the crows from eating the seed prior to germination.
Dad’s Ten Mile River Watershed gardens always produced bumper crops as well as bumper memories.
Happy New Year all as we begin our new decade.
Don Doucette
Ten Mile River Rambles