Tommy Collison

Today’s post is a guest post from Dad, who reminisces on his own dad (my grandfather) and gardening.

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All the children’s tales begin with “Long, long ago” or in the Irish Storyteller way “In my father’s time”, so maybe its appropriate that I start some reminiscences about my childhood and my parents in this way.

Yesterday morning “I took a notion” to do some gardening/outdoor work. I have to admit, though, that what I mean by this is not what my father would have called gardening. Nevertheless, I think that if he were still around, he’d approve. It was just a general tidy up outside – sweeping paths, raking stones on the driveway, collecting leaves and pulling grass that grows on the paths (but strangely, is prevented from growing in the lawns by winter frost).

But in his case, gardening was about vegetables. He dug and re-dug the plots allocated to the different vegetables with steady determined ease. It’s not accidental that quite a few of the photos we have of him are with spade in hand.
Why spade? He used both spade and fork for digging. The fork, if the ground had been recently tilled and the “going was easy” but I do remember a lot of use of spade also, probably due to heavy soils which would compact quickly between growing seasons. Also, grasses and weeds – which don’t seem constrained to growing seasons – crept in, requiring the cutting action of the spade to break the ground.
And of course he was a good judge of a spade. I found it intriguing to listen to men used to gardening speak of the qualities of a spade. Lightness of course came high on the list, but also the length and thickness of handle, not to mention size and shape of base which in turn affects the weight of the soil lifted.

In fact, I saw and experienced evidence of the same phenomenon with pitchforks. (For the uninitiated, this is a two pronged fork – or “two grained” as we used to say – used in “saving” hay. Once when I asked one of my sons to bring me the four grained fork from the shed, he asked “why, what other kind of fork is there?” and I, amused, had to explain about the hay fork.)
Making hay the traditional way requires a lot of manpower since, due to the vagaries of Irish weather, time was always of the essence. A “meitheal” of men would come together from neighbouring farms and set about “saving the hay” a term which itself expresses the urgency of the task in hand. When the men would return to work after a break for tea or sandwiches and pick up their forks again, they would do so carefully, picking “their own”. Often it might actually be their own, which they brought with them, but even if not, they would have begun the day measuring the the feel of it – especially its weight and the thickness of the handle – before claiming theirs for the day. I’ve even seen men restart work only to stop, look down and say “this isn’t my fork” and go looking for the “thief” who had theirs.

But back to my father and his spade. It was long handled. None of this modern short ‘D’ top handle… I’ve never quite figured out how one could use this latter short spade for any length of time since it involves bending the back continually. Of equal or even greater importance was the flattened protector part of the base where the foot pressed to drive it into the ground. If this wasn’t flat enough it would hurt the foot, or damage valuable footwear.

I was commenting to Tommy recently how my Dad tried hard but failed to get me interested in vegetable gardening. While I did help him periodically, in particular if anything interesting was being sown, the bug never really bit me and in my mid fifties now, it seems I’m permanently immune. At least to that particular variety of gardening bug. However, alas, a different strain has taken hold and I have found myself looking forward to the simple jobs in the yard and garden and, unlike many people for whom trimming hedges and maintaining lawns is a necessary evil, I actually enjoy it.

Tommy and I were pondering whether it’s an age related condition… “late onset gardening bug”, or the likes but most importantly, he also feels quite immune at this stage of his life. We’ll just have to see how he is in forty years… perhaps medical advances will protect him, but if not, he’ll feel that invisible hand drag him out, and then before you know it, he’ll be reminiscing – “in my father’s time”.