An Old Fashioned Summer
An Old Fashioned Summer. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.
Like many people, I grew up in a small midwest town with a whole lot of the Mayberry attitude. Everyone knew everyone. Kids played outside until dark and a couple of times a year the whole town would turn out for a local celebration like the 4th of July. Hank Will, editor of Grit magazine says they try and capture that in the pages of their magazine.
WILL: You know that’s really completely true and I certainly grew up in the small town experience. There’s so much sort of wonderful community, kind of a nurturing environment if you will. It’s easy to romanticize it but parts really, truly were safe and romantic. So we try to extract that really positive community support thing and infuse pretty much everything we do in Grit magazine with that.
Not only does the magazine show off the splendor of times past it helps bring some of those joys forward to the present like making homemade ice cream.
WILL: That’s absolutely the case. There’s so many sort of wonderful either home-based or yard-based activities that folks can do that will bring people together and making homemade ice cream is one of them. I can remember anticipating it with great delight as a child. There was absolutely nothing like homemade ice cream but I think it was the anticipation for us, the turning of the crank and everything that made it so exciting as kids.
Everyone in the neighborhood took turns cranking it so it was a community effort just like a 4th of July celebration.
WILL: It was just one of those parts of summer. Really in many cases parts of the Independence Day experience that was a big part of my life growing up and I think plenty of folks as well. There were other things, too. The Fourth of July picnic - that was always a blast, the three-legged race or the sack race and of course the firecrackers and stuff. Pretty fun. Do you remember pie-eating contests?
Boy, do I. Maybe a little too much. Well if you haven’t picked up a copy recently, Hank give you a brief preview.
WILL: We’ve put together a nice package on trying to increase your garden harvest using slightly more benign pest control methods than necessarily bringing out the big, heavy chemical guns which you sometimes might need to do but we’ve also got a really nice piece on 5 good homemade ice cream recipes. We’ve got some pieces on fishing that local farm pond or freshwater stream. You know, some really good summertime stuff.
That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.
