Free Plain Wisdom by Cindy Woodsmall Page A

and I’ve enjoyed a cup of coffee and a chat with each group.

    Every spring Amish women plant gardens that produce enough vegetables to sustain the family throughout the year. The gardens are tilled by hand or with horse-drawn equipment. If a garden yields too much of any one thing, the women may set up roadside stands and sell their extra produce. If there’s a food they don’t grow themselves, they’ll buy bushels of it from a farmers’ market and can it.
    I hadn’t realized that people even can meat until I became friends with Miriam. Her husband and five sons hunt according to the season and bring home meat that she cans for the winter.
    Even with all their gardening, farming, and hunting, the Amish do purchase items like toiletries, cereal, sugar, and flour from local grocery stores. Although many homes have the means to make butter, not every family chooses to do so. Whatever they don’t make, they buy.
    Miriam has a sister-in-law, Maryann, who bakes dozens of loaves of zucchini bread each week throughout the winter for a famers’ market. So Miriam gives her all her leftover zucchini, and every year Maryann cans between two and three hundred quarts of fresh zucchini.
    Here’s Maryann’s zucchini bread recipe.
    Z UCCHINI B READ
    3 eggs
    1 cup oil
    2 cups sugar
    3 cups grated zucchini
    2 teaspoons vanilla
    3 cups flour
    1 teaspoon cinnamon
    1 teaspoon baking soda
    ½ cup nuts (optional)
    Grease and flour two 8″ × 4″ pans. Preheat oven to 325 degrees. In a large bowl, beat eggs until light and frothy. Mix in oil and sugar. Stir in zucchini and vanilla. Combine flour, cinnamon, baking soda, and nuts, and stir into the egg mixture. Divide batter into prepared pans. Bake for 1 hour or until tester inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool in the pan on a rack for 20 minutes. Then remove the bread from the pan, and cool completely.
From Miriam
    After my garden is fertilized, plowed, and tilled—which is around the last of March when all chance of frost is past—the fun begins.
    Potatoes are the first items I plant. I take a twenty-pound bag of potatoes and cut each potato into fourths, making sure every piece has an eye in it. If the piece doesn’t have an eye, a potato plant won’t grow. Twenty pounds of “potato seed” will feed my family of six all winter long.
    Onion sets are planted early too.
    Between the middle and end of April, I plant green beans and sweet corn, two fifteen-foot rows of each. A few weeks later I’ll plant a few more rows of corn. Staggering the planting allows us to have fresh sweet corn on the cob throughout the season as well as enough for freezingfor winter use. I don’t can sweet corn because it spoils too easily in jars.
    At the beginning of May, I buy my tomato and pepper plants at the local greenhouse. My daughters-in-law start their tomato and pepper plants from tiny seeds. I haven’t had the patience for that art yet. I’m not the aggressive gardener that some of our people are, but I do enjoy gardening. This year I have twelve tomato plants. That should be enough to can dozens of quarts of plain juice and dozens of quarts of both pizza and spaghetti sauce.
    Planting and harvesting red beets and cucumbers are a must since we serve them at our church dinners. It takes about eight quarts of pickled beets and eight quarts of pickles for each church meal we host at our home, plus I can extra for our own use.
    About that same time in May, or sometimes toward the middle of the month, I plant carrots and zucchini.
    Throughout the growing season, the garden requires a lot of weeding, hoeing, cultivating, and more weeding. I like to do the weeding first thing in the morning while it’s cool and I have the most energy.
    When there’s a dry spell, I take time each day to water the garden. Our water supply comes from a well on our property. It runs into the home through pipes and out using faucets and spigots. I pull the sprinkler into the garden and let it run for an hour