I have referred to the fact that mother provided a table of good food and my recollections are that this food was not always easily come by. Very little fruit grew in Bear Lake, as we called this region, but each "Fall" or nearly every Fall, fruit would be imported from Utah. Sometimes it was shipped in on the train and sometimes we would make a trek with team and wagon to Utah and bring the fruit back. We referred to going to Utah as "going below." The phrase referred only to elevation.

Because the fruit came all at once, there would be a short season of intense bottling of the fruit as well as a season of over-indulgence in eating the luxury, with the expected uncomfortable result. The fruit that became too ripe to bottle was made into preserves. Usually it was peach or plum preserves or tomato, ripe and green. I think I can remember (and Rhoda confirms) that these preserves were in five gallon cans and they were not to be touched unless they had been opened.

Mother, like the other women in these high valleys, had learned to utilize the wild fruit. There would be both green and ripe goose berries, black and red current jelly and more plentiful was the Service berry eaten raw with cream and sugar or stewed and bottled. Best of the wild fruits, perhaps, was the Choke-cherry jelly. The cultivated fruits consisted of rhubarb or "pie-plant," raspberries and perhaps some garden variety of currents as well as two or three varieties of apples raised "up-the-lane" where there was less frost.

More important than the native fruits was the home garden. Walter refers to very little garden when he was young but my time as a youth the home garden was substantial. I can hear mother asking almost daily in the early spring, while the snow was still covering the ground, about getting the barnyard fertilizer on the garden. When Spring came, which it did almost overnight, the garden was plowed and raked and planted. Mother and the girls, and I when they could manage it, did most of the weeding and cultivating. When this chore got behind, the older boys and perhaps some hired help would fly in and bring the task up to date.

The garden produced radishes, turnips, beets for beet greens and later the mature beet, lettuce which was prepared with cream, vinegar and sugar, and later head lettuce like a fruit market dreams about. Then there was the twin delicacies, new potatoes and green peas, ready for the twenty-fourth of July. Then of course string beans and cabbage. We had a substantially built root cellar to store potatoes, cabbage, and various root vegetables.

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