How one couple reconnected with their roots, went outside to play and realized the full joys of getting your hands into the soil.
Fred and Jill Sauceman
This was the look of the raised beds less than a month after they were built.
I can think of few things in life more noble than planting a garden. It’s good for the environment. It’s good for the pocketbook. It’s good for the waistline. And probably most important of all, it’s good for the soul.
Jill and I both come from a long line of gardeners. While her parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were cultivating the soil of Southwest Virginia, mine were doing so in East Tennessee. The crops on both sides of the family were similar: Kennebec potatoes, Silver Queen corn, half-runner beans, Rutgers and Big Boy tomatoes, and yellow summer squash.
Just as I treasure the people in my life who cook, play music, read books and tell stories, I deeply admire those who till the earth, who live by the rhythms of the seasons. Gardeners are giving people. My father operated on the theory that the more he gave away, the better his garden would produce. It worked.
Fred and Jill Sauceman
Season two in the Saucemans’ new raised beds will include more eggplant.
Often, throughout the course of our careers, the busy lives Jill and I have led have taken us away from that closeness to the earth that our ancestors felt so strongly. I can remember years when I didn’t have a single ear of garden-fresh corn. This from a person who once ate 10 ears one night as a child, long after supper, when my parents and I made an evening visit to the cornfield and found that the crop was “coming in.”
For our ancestors, having a garden meant eternal hope and optimism. Even on the bleakest days of winter, there was always a brightly-colored seed catalog on the night stand, reminding our families of the cycle of renewal that would get going all over again at the beginning of an always unpredictable Southern Appalachian springtime.
We missed those lost days for too long, and last year, we decided to do something about it. We built two raised beds in the back yard. They were completed on June 29, and by the end of the day on June 30, they were just about full of plants and seeds. We watered, and we watched, every day. By late July, the radish seeds we had planted the last day of June were producing radishes. Their miraculous productivity gave us all the confidence we needed.
The Walker Sisters green bean seeds, saved from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and preserved in our freezer for almost eight years, sprouted quickly. They eventually reached a height of well over six feet and produced long, wide, meaty beans. Alongside them we grew Logan Giant green beans, and they were just about as tall. Those seeds were saved for a year, from the annual Lord’s Acre Sale at Hiltons United Methodist Church in Scott County, Virginia. Jill’s late father grew them often.
And last summer, we began doing exactly what our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents had done: figuring out how to make use of the crop. There were lots of ghosts in our kitchen that memorable summer. I can’t think of a better way to memorialize someone than to cook from an inherited recipe.
It seemed that my maternal grandmother, Edith Ethel Koontz Royall, who died in 1971, was right in the kitchen with us in July, when we made her sausage-stuffed peppers. I remember her always insisting that we save the water the peppers were parboiled in.
We made “Posh Squash” a few days later, from a casserole recipe given to us over 18 years ago by our friend Donna Netherland. She was a first-grade teacher in Elizabethton, Tennessee, who died in 2006 at the remarkable age of 101. As those yellow squash kept coming in, I remembered my late mother bringing home a simple recipe from a co-worker at Greene Valley Developmental Center in Greeneville, Tennessee, back in the 1970s. It involved the cooking of squash and onions in butter and finishing off the dish with some sour cream.
Those two raised beds were a constant source of delight for us. Every day brought a new surprise—an overlooked zucchini, an eggplant the perfect shade of purple, and Early Girls nearing tomato sandwich stage.
Fred and Jill Sauceman
Fred’s maternal grandmother was known for her stuffed peppers. He and Jill have kept the tradition going with peppers from their garden.
As fall came on, beans and tomatoes yielded their space in the mushroom-composted dirt to mustard greens, our grandmothers’ favorite. Those greens kept their color through a series of frosts and fed us at Thanksgiving. When we dusted off an early December snow, we discovered that the plants had persisted, as green as ever.
And the cycle continues. Our first seed catalog of the new season arrived two days before Christmas.
We learned some lessons last summer. Our ancestors measured their gardens in acres, but we were dealing in square feet. In our enthusiasm, we overcrowded and overplanted. Some of our plants struggled for sunlight.
We figured out that for a family of two, one cayenne pepper plant is probably enough. Our picture window in the kitchen is completely covered with ristras of drying peppers, strung with needle and thread. We’ll eventually grind them and season our curries with them, for a far better flavor than we could ever buy.
We have vowed to plant more eggplant. We have saved more Walker Sisters seeds.
We look ahead, anticipating a new season, a new start. Even on the darkest days of winter, our modest raised bed garden plots, in a profound way, connect us to our people. They inspire us to continue their ways, in the hope that we can, somehow, match their earthly wisdom.
Fred and Jill Sauceman study and celebrate the foodways of Appalachia and the South from their home base in Johnson City, Tennessee.
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The story above appears in our March/April 2019 issue. For more like it, subscribe today or log in to the digital edition with your active digital subscription.