December 20, 2016 – Daddy’s little garden helper        

          I’ve been gardening for the last 40 years and it truly is my passion.  I love all of it.  I enjoy the planning, the planting, the watering, and the weeding whether it is flowers, vegetables, shrubs, or trees.   I’d rather be in my garden than any place in the world.

I started as a child under my Daddy’s instruction.  My Daddy was a gardener and I honestly classify him as having a “Green Thumb”.

          The family vegetable garden could be seen from the kitchen sink window and the kitchen door and when Mom was cleaning she’d send me out to be watched by Daddy in his garden.  I was about 4 or 5 at the time and loved to be with my Daddy.

I’d watch him turn the vegetable garden by hand with a spade, then rake the soil smooth and finally with his hoe deftly set out rows to be planted or hills created for his cucumbers and squash. 

It was fun being with Daddy.  He let me plant the big shiny bean seeds in the furrow he pulled back magically with his hoe. Then Dad would come along the row and deftly use his hoe to cover the seeds with soil and tamp down the furrow.

          A few days later the bean seedlings would break through the surface of the soil and I would be at his side as he surveyed their progress.  A week or so later I’d watch him bend over the row and thin the plants so that they had enough room to grow. I watched and learned everything he did when I was a child.

On more than one occasion at the end of his gardening session, Daddy would find me curled up sound asleep on a patch of moss near the garden in the shade. 

          During the heat of the summer, he would be cultivating or pulling weeds, bare chested and sweaty and I helped then too.  He would cultivate or pull weeds a while, then reach for his pint bottle of beer that was set a few feet behind him, have a swig, set it down again, then turn back and continue to cultivate the row.  AND, as his little helper,  I would walk over and pick up the bottle and have a swig too, just like Daddy.

  

One afternoon Mom happened to glance out at the garden to check up on Daddy and me.  Mom saw Daddy pause his cultivating, reach for his beer, have a swig, set it down again and turn back to his work.  She saw me get up from my seat on the mossy patch, and pick up his beer, have a swig, set it down and go back to sit down on my mossy patch.

Mom and Dad put a stop to my under age beer drinking, but not to my gardening.