IN THE SPRING OF 1956 my days as a Cub Scout had come to an end, and my parents suggested that I consider either joining a new Boy Scout troop the American Legion was organizing or the local 4-H club. I had really enjoyed my Cub Scout activities, and I was initially inclined to continue scouting. On a cold February night my Dad and I went to the Legion Hall, sat around a table with several other boys and their fathers, and listened to ideas for starting a scout troop. Before I made any commitment to the scouts, my parents urged me to observe a 4-H meeting and see what it was like. So in April, a few weeks before my 11th birthday, I attended a meeting of the Howard Go-Getters in the back room of the County Extension Office, across the street from the Legion Hall. Whatever had been my initial scouting inclinations were blown away by the 4-H group. The meeting was run by older high school members, several of whom I admired, and I immediately knew I wanted to become a 4-Her.
Of course, joining this organization meant I needed one or more personal 4-H projects. Since I was already tending our duck flock and helping with the family garden, it was a natural evolution for those activities to become my primary projects. Truth be told, the ducks were always my first love. Although we had a few Pekings and one venerable Muscovy, the majority were home-grown mallards–friendly, docile fowl who never strayed far from the farm. Requiring minimal maintenance, they spent most of their waking hours hanging out with the chickens, eating whatever mash or grain or kitchen discards we threw their way. Although mallards can thrive in terrain without a river or body of water, most years I would dig a shallow pond so they could maintain their swimming and bottom-feeding skills.
The continuation of our duck colony did depend each spring on my Dad and me discovering eggs the female mallards would hide all over the farm. Whenever an egg was spotted, we would place it under a nesting chicken in the hen house. As soon as a duckling hatched, it would be deposited in a cardboard box in the kitchen, the warmest room in the house. For 2-3 weeks, all our meals would be serenaded by the exuberant quacking of fuzzy ducklings. By late April, these adolescents would be released into a temporary duck pen, followed a month later by their liberation into the unfenced barnyard. In November we would place a notice in the local newspaper, informing the Courant-Citizen’s subscribers we were selling young ducks, 25 cents a bird, for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. According to my green 4-H record book, we sold 5-15 ducks per year, a welcome monetary reward that would periodically enable me to purchase another $25 U. S. Savings bond. I should add that in all the years we were providing local families with the centerpiece of their holiday meals, we never ate a single duck. My Mom thought they were greasy and difficult to dress. The first duck I ever ate was in China, thirty years after the end of my duck-raising adventures.
As for my 4-H garden project, the work and responsibilities were notably more burdensome and unrelenting, particularly in the spring and early summer. My Dad took care of the initial preparation in the fall, plowing up and discing the garden after covering the soil with fresh cow manure, readily available from our milking shed next to the garden. My Dad also chose the seeds to be planted and where they were to be sown. My job was to do the planting and hoeing and weeding and watering and bug killing and harvesting and whatever other tasks would ensure we had something to harvest. Once school ended in late May, most of my garden work occurred in the morning after breakfast. To help make my garden time more palatable, my Mom bought me a small, red, transistor radio. I would set it in the middle of the garden and turn up the volume full blast, listening to Wichita DJ stations while digging up weeds and squishing grasshoppers. In my Iowa garden I ignore the grasshoppers. The numbers are small, and I’m not aware they do any notable damage. In our garden in Kansas, the grasshoppers were legion and could inflict serious damage.
My 4-H record book indicates that in the spring of 1956 I planted greens (lettuce and chard), radishes, carrots, cucumbers, onions, beets, bell peppers (which my parents called “mangoes”), innumerable hills of potatoes, a few hills of muskmelons, and many long rows of sweet corn. Sixty-five years later, the core of my vegetable garden in Iowa has remained unchanged, perhaps 70% of the garden composed of the same primary vegetables. The one notable missing vegetable is sweet corn, which I don’t plant because of the difficulties in protecting the just-ready-to-be-harvested ears from raccoons. My record book also confirms that during the eight years of my 4-H garden project, we never planted peas or pole beans, no lima beans or cabbage, no summer or winter squash, no herbs or garlic or okra or strawberries or raspberries or blackberries–all items that play a substantial role in my current vegetable garden. After I left for college, Dad substantially reduced the size of the family garden; however, he did start growing strawberries, planted in old, rusted oil barrels cut in half and placed on wooden frames to make the beds easily accessible when weeding, mulching, or harvesting his berry crop.
My 4-H project required I maintain detailed notes concerning what was planted in the garden, relevant expenditures, harvest income (if any), and the size of the harvest. My hand-written records indicate that in 1959 the garden was 7,200 square feet (120' x 60') and I used only seeds and plants recommended by the Extension Service. The year’s total expenditures for the garden came to $6.34:
Seeds: $1.89
Plants (tomatoes and bell peppers): $2.25
Plowing and discing (paid to my Dad): $1.00
Insecticide dust: $1.20
The expenses were basically the same each year, though some years did not record any insecticide expenditures and one year I supposedly paid my Dad $1.00 for “watering.” I was fortunate that we had a fresh water faucet along the fence on the north side of the garden.
A full-page table reveals that in 1959 I planted 50 tomato plants and 5 bell peppers; normally I also would have had a row of onions but for whatever reason not that year. The information on seeds sown is rendered in terms of the length of the rows:
Lettuce: 20' Chard: 15' String Beans: 115'
Carrots: 15' Iris Potatoes: 240' Corn: 500'
Beets: 15' Cucumbers: 50' Radishes: 30'
My 4-H record book provides almost no information about varieties planted, though in 1957 I wrote that we used the following improved and resistant varieties: "Golden Cross hybrid corn, Improved Long greens, and Rutgers and hybrid tomatoes."
Our choices on seed varieties would have been very limited–in contrast to today when on-line seed companies offer an incredible diversity of options. In my 4-H garden, all our seeds and garden supplies came from the Western Auto store on Main Street, three doors down from the County Extension Office. As far as I can recall, we would plant one or two varieties of tomatoes (all indeterminate red slicing tomatoes), and one variety of everything else, including potatoes. For example, the only lettuce we planted was black-seeded Simpson; I suspect the cucumbers were Straight Eights or a comparable slicing cucumber. The beans would have been a basic bush green bean, perhaps a Kentucky Wonder or Burpee’s Stringless.
In 1959 I estimated the garden produced 1,095 pounds of produce–of which 635 pounds were consumed fresh from the garden and 360 pounds were canned (tomatoes, cucumbers, and beets) or frozen (corn and string beans). One hundred pounds of cucumbers were sold, earning me $8.00. Another year I sold 2 pounds of bell peppers, 3 pounds of string beans, 25 pounds of cucumbers, and 150 pounds of sweet corn. Once I entered high school, my primary 4-H project became a herd of registered Angus cattle, and I no longer filled out a detailed garden report. From my annual record book narrative, however, I learned that one year my potatoes received a blue ribbon at the county fair, and for two years I planted a large field of potatoes in a neighbor’s field.
Although I have no recollections of the purchase of seeds or the selling of sweet corn, I have no trouble recalling the tools of the trade. Nearly all my 4-H gardening was accomplished with five tools: a rake, hoe, pitchfork, spade, and shovel. Over sixty years later, the pitchfork and shovel are the same tools I use today, and it’s the same spade, though now with a new ash handle. My primary rake and hoe have been purchased within the past ten years, but their design is virtually identical to my tools in 1956. A notable satisfaction about gardening derives from work being done by hand tools that have remained fundamentally unchanged for centuries.
We never would have used the word “organic” to describe my 4-H garden, but it was in most respects an organic operation. I doubt that my Dad had any problems with “chemical” applications, but he would never have spent money on chemical fertilizers or herbicides unless he thought they were absolutely necessary. We did occasionally dust our tomatoes and cucumbers with a pesticide–which I suspect was rotenone. After I had left the farm, my Dad became frustrated with moles and started planting castor beans around the garden–a practice that he claimed was an effective deterrent. But he also wore a copper bracelet that he believed protected him from arthritis. Although I do occasionally use commercial fertilizers, I probably would not do so if I still had such easy access to tons of cow manure for my compost piles.
Our 4-H club would occasionally organize tours of gardens and livestock operations, and thus it was important that the garden looked good, in case other Go-Getters and their parents might be walking around the garden on a morning in July, assessing my skills as a gardener. Since the garden was plowed up every fall, we had no permanent raised beds and the twelve 100' rows were resurrected every March. Each row was as straight as I could make it. A taut string guided me in creating the rows that always ran east to west, from the garden gate to the ancient asparagus patch across the west end of the garden. The straight rows of single vegetables made the weeding with a hoe relatively simple. I learned from any early age that my primary duty was to make sure there was no pigweed or cocklebur or velvet weed or barnyard grass or Johnson grass or any other weed growing near any vegetables. We could not control the wind or rain or temperature or unwelcome acts of God, but we could kill any weed that dared jump over the fence and enter our garden.
On occasion I wonder what I learned from those years taking care of the family garden. While I spent hundreds of hours within those 7,200 square feet, I’m not sure what it meant to me. Once I left for college, I did not miss working in the garden, and I don’t recall thinking about the garden and its impact on my life. Gardening was simply a job that needed to be done. I doubt I considered any cultural, social, environmental, philosophical, spiritual or aesthetic values one might associate with gardening. I never asked about the history of our garden or what my grandmother planted when my Dad was growing up on the farm. I never questioned why we planted what we planted. I just tried to do what my parents wanted me to do and to do it without too much complaining about the heat or the grasshoppers.
But somehow the Kansas dirt that got under my fingernails never got washed away, and hidden in that dirt were a few small seeds, tiny seeds that would eventually germinate and insist they be planted and watered. When we moved back to the Midwest in 1978--after having lived in Washington and Georgia and Germany and Texas–I knew one thing: whatever home we purchased, it would have space for a vegetable garden. And thus at the age of 33, I started all over again. While I recalled a few “tricks of the trade” (such as my Dad teaching me to wrap the stems of young tomato transplants with strips of newspaper to protect them from cutworms), I had to re-learn almost everything from scratch. Fortunately for me, the resources and information about vegetable gardens have dramatically expanded since the 1950s, but that garden on a small farm in Kansas provided the key ingredients. Now, over 40 years after our arrival in Iowa, gardening has become the center of my professional and vocational life. Needless to say, it’s not something I foresaw on that Monday night in April when I walked into the Elk County Extension Office and attended my first Howard Go-Getters 4-H meeting