For many people, this week was spent canning vegetables as their gardens began to come in abundantly.

I am sure many people across America were trying to preserve the food from their gardens.

The only bad thing about gardens is once they start producing, they can work you to near exhaustion.

It brought me back to many years of memories of helping my mom and her teaching me to can.

I was canning food on my own by the time I was 14 while my mom worked.

If you were lucky, as I was, this week to have vegetables to can, that was what you did.

If so, you probably know it takes a lot of work to do before the canned food reaches a shelf where you can proudly say, “I canned that.”

I won the Master Farm Homemaker for Clark County one year and I feel sure my canning abilities helped me to secure that honor and title. When the judges from the University of Kentucky extension services came to speak with me, I was able to show them all the food I had already canned that year.

This year I was reminded of something my mom used to say every time we finished a batch of canning: “At least we won’t be eating snowballs this winter will we?”

I will not be purchasing pickles for a very long time. I made sweet pickles, dill pickles, bread and butter pickles, pickle relish and a jar of cherry habanero pickles.

I also canned tomatoes, tomato juice and some canned green beans from my work this week. None of this could have happened without the generosity of our son Keith and a guy named J.D. To them I am so grateful.

If you have an abundance of garden food, instead of letting it go to waste in a garden, please remember there are some people, including our homeless shelters, who would love to have a few fresh vegetables.

I was reminded this week of a woman’s missionary group meeting I had attended many years ago. The lady doing the program reminded us when we peel a carrot or tomato to remember all it took to get that carrot or tomato or any vegetable to the table.

In other words, someone had to plant the seed, someone had to keep the weeds out.

The grower had to worry about the weather. The vegetable had to be picked and taken to the market.  If the farmer himself did not pick the vegetable, he probably had to pay someone else to pick it.

It took gas and farm equipment too.

At this point, she told us to be reminded to pray for the farmer who grew your vegetable.

I decided to say a special prayer for my daughter-in-law Julie, our son Keith and for J.D. who had given us the vegetables.

They had gone through a lot to get their garden to produce.

I know farm life is not easy when it is your livelihood.

I have a magnet that says, “God looked down on his planned paradise and he said, ‘I need a caretaker.’ So God made a farmer.”

It is amazing to know farmers feed the world.

Thank a farmer this week or at least say a prayer for them.

Sue Staton is a Clark County native who grew up in the Kiddville area. She is a wife, mother and grandmother who is active in her church, First United Methodist Church, and her homemakers group, Towne and Country Homemakers.