Dad's Garden

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Dad loved to garden. When we lived at the farm, he had a large garden south of the house. Every year he planted the regular garden vegetables; peas, green and yellow beans, beets, carrots, onions, lettuce, radishes, cucumbers, squash and pumpkins. One year he added a strawberry bed, and the next year he put in rows of raspberry bushes. He planted rows of potatoes and set out tomato, cabbage and green pepper plants.

Dad could grow the best tomatoes I have ever tasted. I wish I could remember what variety he planted, as I have not tasted any better since. Sometimes I would grab the salt shaker from the kitchen, go down to the garden, and just sit there eating tomatoes from the vine. He would join me now and then, and we would eat tomatoes and talk. He always said that he had to plant twice as many tomato plants as anyone else so he would have enough left to can in the fall.

And every year he tried something new. When the catalogues from garden seed companies arrived in the wintertime, he would pour over them, looking for something interesting to try in his garden the following spring. One year he added a couple of rows of Indian corn. Another year it was popcorn. When the stalks had dried, he harvested his ears of popcorn, and we shelled them. Then he set several old window screens on sawhorses on the front porch and spread out the popcorn kernels to dry. Finally we tested the popcorn, and it was really good.

Other experiments weren't so successful. He tried several varieties of watermelon and muskmelon to find some that would ripen in our short growing season. We had a couple of years of melons the size of a softball that stayed too green to eat before he found watermelons that grew to basketball size and ripened before the first frost in the fall. He never did find a good muskmelon variety.

And then there was the year of the blue potatoes. He found these seed potatoes in one of his catalogs and ordered some. When fall came, he dug up his blue potatoes and when cut open, they were indeed blue on the inside. However, when boiled like a regular potato, they became a mass of something gray and sticky. Looked kind of like gray oatmeal. Nobody would touch this mess. Not even the dog. But Dad still had fun trying new things in his garden.

Dad's love of growing things wasn't limited to vegetable gardening. He loved all sorts of plants. One year he ordered what he called a "sensitive plant." It was a houseplant that, when a leaf was touched, all of the leaves would close up tight. Left alone for about a half hour, the leaves would gradually open up again until someone touched a leaf, and the whole process began again.

He put up a trellis on the front of the house and planted clematis and morning glories that climbed the trellis as they grew. He always planted gladiola bulbs in one corner of the garden on the farm. He enjoyed planting new colors each year just to see what they would look like. When he and Mom lived in Funkley, he grew some of the most beautiful dahlias I have ever seen.

I think Dad's love of growing things came from being raised on a farm in Beltrami County. He used to tell me about helping his mother with her large garden that she planted every year to help feed their family of nine kids. Dad was the youngest child, so when the older boys were out in the fields working with their Dad, he would be helping his Mother with her garden. He once told me that she taught him to have an appreciation for all growing things and for the land. He came to enjoy working in the garden and he said that the added bonus was being able to spend time with his Mother.

I think I get my love of growing things from my Dad. Living in the city, I no longer have a garden. I only have a couple of house plants, kept up high on shelves, away from Chuck the cat, who is apparently an herbivore, and eats any living plant he can get to. But there was a time when I, too, had a large garden that helped to feed my family. I enjoyed planting and watching the vegetables in my garden grow and especially the taste of homegrown produce. There is a certain satisfaction that comes from seeing row after row of homegrown vegetables canned in glass jars, sitting on the basement shelves. Maybe some day I can have growing things around me again. If I can get Chuck the cat to change his evil ways.