Keep it Simple: From one gardener to another

Last year my granddaughter Callie, then age 9, caught the gardening bug from me and her parents bought a small, raised bed to plant vegetables. Her pole beans provided the family of four with several meals throughout the summer, the lettuce and spinach performed admirably and she grew a number of cucumbers to sate even her cucumber-loving taste buds.

This year, a sister-in-law donated three more raised beds to feed my granddaughter's gardening Jones, and a trip to the library, where they were giving away free vegetable seeds, has set Callie up for hopeful success in her sophomore gardening season.

Every May, a friend gifts me a bag of seed potatoes from a local grower he once worked for and I have set aside a few for my gardening granddaughter to take up space in one of the new raised beds.

I am heartened this young lady has taken up the art; and it is indeed an art form, of gardening and if you reread the first sentence, seventh and eighth words in — age 9 — you may understand why her picking up a hoe and pack of vegetable seeds strikes a particular note with this old veteran of many, many past gardens.

When I was the same age, I spent a couple of days near the end of June at my grandparents' 40-acre Walled Lake farm north of Detroit. My grandfather had worked as a draftsman at Ford Motor Co. and was semi-retired, teaching a couple of night drafting classes at his brother's small college of science and technology in downtown Detroit. A college which, coincidentally, turned out a couple of fine draftsmen after the Korean War; my father and my wife's father, of all people, who plied their skills as tool designers for General Motors in Pontiac beginning in the early 1960s.

My grandfather raised a few dairy cows, chickens, ducks, geese, had a big orchard and garden and a spot set aside for a patch of strawberries that were ripe for the picking. It was also haying time — first cutting of the year — and I was riding on the green John Deere with my grandfather who was pulling the antique hay baler around the field when it broke down; come to find out later, for the final time in the 20th century.

My grandfather and a much-older-than-me college-age cousin living with my grandparents dusted off the pitchforks hanging in the tool shed and fashioned several dozen haystacks the old-fashioned way. The rectangular bales, which had been made up prior to the mechanical breakdown of the baler, were loaded onto a wagon, which we put in the loft during the hot afternoon.

I believe it was right about that time, playing the part of a farm kid helping with the hay harvest, or maybe it was while picking strawberries which were destined for the hand-crank ice cream maker, that I saw my future as the kind of guy destined for farming, if not an actual career in agriculture, at the least as the guy who was looking at a future of a lifetime of gardens, each one better and more perfect than the last; which is how hobby gardeners the world over think of this growing of food for the pure enjoyment it brings.

Now my granddaughter is on the verge of becoming hooked, or maybe it's just a passing fad in her young life as she concentrates more and more of her time on soccer and basketball. Either course the future brings to this possible budding young gardener will be fine with me, even knowing she took the initiative for at least a couple of summers to grow a little of the food her family uses in their everyday meals will be reward enough to know that at least she had the wherewithal to enjoy getting her hands a bit dirty and the opportunity to wipe the sweat off her brow pulling weeds on a hot summer afternoon down in Midland. That will be rewarding enough for this old gardener.

— Michael Jones is a columnist and contributor for the Gaylord Herald Times. He can be reached at [email protected].