And they weren't kidding about the munitions plant part, either.

My dad had a victory garden in a vacant lot across the street from where we lived, then, in Downers Grove, Illinois. It was a massive garden, as befitting, he thought, his own farming youth, and my sister and I spent countless evening hours helping haul great tubs of water across the street on our red Radio Flyer wagon in the service of agriculture. We were compensated for these efforts by having our names ceremoniously sewn in carrot seeds in the corners of the plot, producing, in the end, a whole lot of very small carrots with great big green tops.

Big tops, as it turned out, was my dad's particular talent where gardening was concerned. I remember bag after bag of potatoes, all about the size of golf balls, and various other stunted produce - but the tomatoes were big and juicy and lush. My mom dutifully canned the tomatoes - canning being more jarring, in this instance, as the tomatoes were put up in glass jars and stored in a converted coal bin in the basement - where they remained more or less undisturbed until the night they all blew up.

It must have been on a Sunday evening because I remember we were all in the living room listening to the radio - our Sunday evening family ritual - when the first pop occurred, followed by another and another and then a veritable salvo, until it sounded like a full scale war downstairs. Almost every jar of the tomatoes exploded, all that same evening, producing to my delight and my mother's dismay a glorious, pulpy mess.

That was not the end of her efforts at food preservation - there was a flurry of preserves and jams in the early 50s and later in that decade, when freezing became the hot (or would that be cold?) new thing, there were green beans. But she never fooled around with tomatoes again, which was probably a good thing. There were, at least, no more explosions, unless you count the time she blew up the pressure cooker and plastered the kitchen ceiling with pea soup. And the thing with the gas oven, of course.

(Image from Wikipedia, here.)

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