Gardeners in the family

My father-in-law was a gardener. In those days, people like him were referred to as farmers.

He grew his family’s food stuff and his wife ‘put up’ the fruits and vegetables of their labor for use all year. She wrangled their five little children, baked bread, tended the chickens and churned milk from their cow into butter to trade for Copenhagen, (chewing tobacco, snuff, chaw) for her husband.

When their children were old enough to go to school they sold the farm and moved to town.

They brought the cow and the chickens with them. My mother-in-law made butter until the neighbors complained about the cow. Then my father-in-law had to buy his ‘snoose’ at the store.

The first thing my father-in-law did was plow up the backyard. Then he built a chicken house and planted fruit trees, grapes and berry bushes. He planted sunflowers along the alley and aligned his ‘crops’ in straight rows so he could mow the weeds between the rows. Though times were difficult in those days, the little family was always well fed.

When my husband and I were not quite starving college students his parents would load up the trunk of their car with produce, home canned vegetables, pickles, homemade bread, pie of apple or whatever fruit was in season and homemade cinnamon rolls, always cinnamon rolls.

My parents would send flowers!

Though he never attended Ag School or had a degree in Horticulture I learned more from my father-in-law about gardening than from any professor or class on gardening I ever attended.

He knew how to graft and bud fruit trees and propagate cuttings from bushes and shrubs. He taught me how to root ornamental shrubs by layering. He had worked in the woods when he was a young man and knew the names and habits of trees and native plants which he shared with me. He sowed cover crops before it was a buzz word. He added egg shells to his soil. He told me they added calcium, potassium, magnesium and porosity. He rotated his crops and seemed to know what plants were compatible growing near one another.

The produce from his garden was always better looking than that in the grocery store and better tasting too. I don’t remember him ever using herbicides or pesticides. In the fall he mulched the leaves from his big maples in his front yard into his garden. Then he roto-tilled them with the bedding from the chickens before he planted oats, Dutch White clover, or buckwheat in his rows. In the spring he tilled the mixture before he planted. The soil in his garden after many years of this method was soft and smelled nice. It seemed to welcome anything he put in it.

My children weren’t the only visitors to his garden. I remember my little ones chasing the Swallowtail and Viceroy Butterflies and making pets of the lady bugs that tickled their arms and noses.

I am delighted to report that many of my father-in-law’s traditions and attitudes about gardening have been incorporated into my own children and grandchildren’s respect for the land.

I, however, have never acquired a ‘hankering’ for Copenhagen.

— Margaret A. Swenson is a Washington State University Master Gardener.