My Grandpa and Grandma Matthews raised peonies for Memorial Day as a cash crop.
They had two one-acre plots that they would plant with peonies in March. They’d harvest at the end of May, cutting the blooms for bouquets, uprooting the plants and wrapping the roots to replant the next year.
Then he would plant his vegetable garden in the same soil — corn, tomatoes, beans, eggplant, beets, summer squash, peppers, etc, which would get et when fresh, but which Grandma would also put up for the winter, in the same cellar where they stored the peony plants.
Such bounty from the earth! Those two plots will always be the configuration of my fondest Memorial Day memories.
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