The Minnesota Farm Woman

My husband, affectionately known as “HIM”, comes from a large family with six children. He is a wonderful cook, and even though it has been many years since he lived at home with brothers and sisters, he still cooks enough to feed them and the rest of the neighborhood kids. I often come home to the aroma of his fried potatoes, which he somehow manages to get the perfect combination of brown and crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside. I could eat a pound of them sprinkled with apple cider vinegar, and that’s not hard to do, since he fries up at least three pounds of potatoes for just the two of us. Whether he is grilling steaks the size of dinner plates or a simple package of hot dogs (“might as well cook the whole package”), we could feed an army around here. The same thing happened when we planned our gardens. Or should I say, when I planned my garden. HE doesn’t garden. He hates gardening, which probably stems from being made to work in his family’s garden as a boy when he would have rather been playing baseball and hanging out with his friends. Oh, he’ll till the garden until the soil is perfect, and he erected a wonderful fence to keep the deer out, too. When we moved to the country, he asked me how large of a garden I wanted. That was kind of like offering a shopaholic an unlimited budget. I had been planning this garden in my City Girl head for years. Gardening to me is like fried potatoes to him. The more the merrier. The bigger the better. I paced off a large plot, adding a few extra feet just in case I wanted to feed any neighboring countries. What I didn’t know is that he had been planning a garden of his own in the back field “to put in some strawberries and a few pumpkins”. (Translated to mean “for YOU to put in a whole bunch of strawberries and a lot of pumpkins”.) Despite the fact that the weeds take over and the birds eat the strawberries every year just as they reach their peak of ripeness, I don’t mind a bit, because I am in my happy place. Besides, gardening is good exercise. I need it to work off those delicious meals he makes. I hope he’s ready to cook, because I planted a lot of potatoes this year.