Chester Chatter: Fill the garden, fill the pantry

By Ruthie Douglas
©2020 Telegraph Publishing LLC

As the seed catalogs arrive, my mother-in-law and I would start to plan the vegetable garden.

The kitchen table would be filled with our open catalogs. Selecting our seeds was a three-day project.  Our vegetable garden was large and awarded us just about everything we would need to feed the household for several months.

The rows of vegetables needed to placed in a particular order, usually planting about two rows of each vegetable. We canned at least 52 pints of each vegetable to give us good variety to chose for the dinner table. We did not plant corn because it attracted deer and raccoons.

Along the border of the garden, we planted flowers. If we had room, we would plant two rows of flowers. Those flowers could be picked to take to sick friends and for dining table arrangements when guests came to dinner.

Peas were first to be harvested for the freezer. And during the summer we would stir fry fresh vegetables. At the end of the season we made apple sauce, canned peaches and pears.

Once we had our seed order ready, we  had to wait for the milk check to arrive on the first day of the month.

Scene and heard

Glen and Edie Bryant of Barnard were down to visit his sister Edith Bonneau of Springfield. Edie Bryant was a classmate of the Springfield Class of 1959.

Mike Bodi was my plumber for quite a long time. I am sad to learn of his death. My thoughts are with his family.

Hildagarde Jaquith died earlier this month.  She has three daughters: Andrea Wilson, Sue Jaquith and Joan Benton.

Veterans were honored at a lunch at Springfield Health and Rehab. Homemade lasagna was served to the group.

The first time we celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. Birthday. We didn’t know exactly what to expect. We found out quick enough with a mass of skiers that any other winter weekend would have come up.

---

Answer to last week’s trivia question: In the 1950s, Chester had 14 working dairy farms.

This week’s trivia question: For several decades from the 1940s to the 1980s, what brothers picked up milk cans from area dairy farms to take to Bellows Falls Creamery?

---