My Dad's Secret Garden

When I was a kid we regularly tilled about a half acre in which we raised most every vegetable we would eat for the year. That meant early peas and lettuce in spring, green onions, and fresh tomatoes all summer long, green beans and new potatoes, cucumbers and squash, early sweet corn, melons, winter onions, late potatoes, okra, beets and turnips for the fall. We ate what was fresh and in season and canned the rest for winter use. Everyone worked the garden, planting, weeding, harvesting. Now, years later I live in the city and try to keep my two anemic tomato plants alive as my neighbors bristle because I don’t have perfect golf course turf in my backyard.

After having success with the tomato plants Dulcinea decided she wanted to plant a few native Missouri perennials. The next thing we knew the bird feeder, the one that no birds ever visited, began to need bird seed. Once the golden finches and red-headed house finches became regulars and began to hang out on the wooden fence to wait their turn at the feeder the human neighbors began to notice. One afternoon as I was mowing the back yard, my neighbor Barbaria yelled over the back fence, “How do you get those pretty yellow birds to come in your yard?”

But I digress. When my brothers and I matured and left home the garden shrunk. Although we continued to relish the canned tomatoes my mom doled out at family dinners and as gifts at Christmas. After she died the garden got very small. Lettuce and onions in spring, no more new potatoes or Kentucky Wonders, but always fresh tomatoes.



Over the years Dad has aged, receiving bionic hips, etc. The garden has gotten very tiny indeed. But it has never gone away. To this day, he is nursing fresh tomatoes on his front porch, that will bloom and bear until first frost.