Archives: 5-10-02, Wild Kingdom | 5-17-02, Part Two | 5-24-02, Blue Grows Up | Trainer Dreams
Copyright, Doris Eraldi, 2002
Gardening Traditions
My great-grandmother, Sarah Ardalia Flewharty Ladd, traveled from Texas to Southern Idaho at the turn of the century in a wagon. She and her husband and children homesteaded along the Snake River, a harsh and unforgiving land. My grandfather told me that his mother carried a short-handled hoe whenever she worked in her vegetable garden, to kill the rattlesnakes that were drawn into the shade and cool of the plants. He described her quickly swinging the blade to lop off the offending serpent's head, then replacing the hoe into her belt and returning to harvesting or weeding or carrying buckets of water.
The first summer we moved to Potter, I planted tomatoes next to the deck, in a planter area more suited to flowers or shrubs, simply because it was the easiest location and we had not been in the place long enough to prepare a proper garden spot. The tomato plants were hardly more than scraggly starts when I spotted the first rattler lazily coiled between them. It was small, fat, and doing its best to not be noticed. That time, I summoned reinforcements, as we had company visiting, and with five people staring at the snake, commenting “It's a rattler all right!” the diamondback decided to leave and slithered under the house, never to be seen again. 
Since then I've done business with two more rattlesnakes, not exactly the daily occurrence dealt with by my great-grandmother Sarah. Still, when we finished our grand new garden enclosure (deer are much more formidable pests than snakes, when it comes to raising vegetables), I put my hoe in the corner. It seems an appropriate addition to the first real garden on our 'homestead.' I don't have the fortitude of Sarah, though. My hoe has a long handle. But I never pick tomatoes that I don't think of her.
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