Gleaning Stories, Gleaning Change

Organic Plum Gleaning — Childhoods in Maine

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With three of the gleaners today growing up in Maine — all on family farms, all in families where at least one parent worked at some other job for cash income, all with wonderful stories — we decided to present their stories in an extended format on a separate page.

You can hear nearly the entire conversation Rusten had with each of the three.

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Julie Logan and Manon Lapointe-Pratt

Julia and Manon both grew up in Maine (Julie in Cumberland, Manon in Greene, both just north of Portland) but didn't meet until college. They've remained fast friends and Julie visits often. She's now a 6th grade teacher in Yarmouth (near Cumberland) and remembers their family farm well. Her parents had an antiques business, but income was spotty and the large family gardens were important for the family livelihood, not for cash income but for the family's food, sometimes supplemented by "welfare food". Julie remembers long hours of weeding in the evenings, when her father gave each of the children a lighted cigar to hold to keep the swarms of mosquitoes away. They put up carrots in barrels for the winter, and she recalls that sometimes the carrots they pulled out of the barrel late in the winter were less than appetizing. There was no real gleaning in the context of subsistence family farms in Maine, though they did make everything they grew count. When Manon suggested they come gleaning, Julie was puzzled but curious.

Like Julie, Manon grew up on a family farm that provided much of the food the family ate. Also like Julie, Manon's parents (French Canadians) had other work (he was a sheetrocker, she worked in a shoe factory), but relied on the farm for food and for continuity with their own farm backgrounds in Quebec. Her mother grew up on a dairy farm. Her father's family raised chickens and pigs and made hay in the summer, maple syrup in the winter on a 20,000 acre farm. When Manon was growing up, the family's regular Easter vacation was a maple tapping and syrup making excursions in Quebec. And they had to clear their 20 acre farm of wood and rocks to grow more food ... and for the horses that were and are her father's passion. Manon remembers mixing and spreading the horse manure "Kool-Aid" before planting acres of tomatoes and other vegetables. Manon lives at Stevenson School in Pebble Beach, where her husband teaches. She talks about meeting Julie, about her parents' French Canadian roots and big families, and about their farm and all the planting, harvesting, canning, and scrounging she did as a kid.

Dave Poulin

I'd talked to Dave at the fennel glean last November, but hadn't remembered that he, too, had grown up in Maine. Also with French-Canadian roots, his family's 50 acre farm was in Augusta, Maine, a bit further north than where Julie and Manon grew up. Ten to fifteen acres of vegetables, wild berries growing nearby along the Kennebeck River, and a canning room in the basement meant food for the winter. A special container his father, who worked in a shoe factory, designed kept carrots fresh through the winter by layering carrots and sand at just the right temperature. They also put up salt pork from their pigs and fished the river. The family did a lot of bartering for other foods and firewood as well. Dave, who retired from managing Longs Drugs stores, still has gardens and puts up vegetables for the winter.

Radio Stories

Julie Logan & Manon Lapointe-Pratt's story "Waste Not" produced for radio

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