603 INFORMER / FIRST PERSON
Why I Garden It’s more than just tomatoes and peonies BY HENRY HOMEYER / ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOSH YUNGER
I
’ve been messing around with plants and seeds — and getting wet and dirty — for more than 70 years. I learned a lot from my mother’s dad, who I called Grampy. He was a fabulous gardener and we spent a lot of time together as I grew up. One of my earliest memories — I was probably 2 or 3 — is in the garden with Grampy. He was weeding his asparagus bed, and I was hanging out with him, looking at creepy-crawly things — earthworms and beetles, I suppose. Suddenly, thunderheads appeared, but we were quite a distance from the house and barn. Grampy scooped me up and plunked me down on a pile of weeds in his old wooden wheelbarrow. He raced back to the house pushing his wheelbarrow, arriving just before the rain. What fun that was.
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nhmagazine.com | June 2021
Grampy came from the old country, Germany, in the early 1900s. He was a tailor by trade, but a farmer at heart. After his wife died when I was 7, I would take a train from New Haven, Connecticut, to Worcester, Massachusetts — by myself — to visit with him. Sometimes I stayed a week, sometimes a month, and I did so every year until he died on my 21st birthday in 1967. Grampy taught me about gardening by example, not lectures. He gardened and I watched — or helped. One of my first tasks was to stand on a wooden apple crate with a long stick and stir up a wooden barrel full of water and hen manure. Then I was allowed to dip a little metal can that concentrated frozen orange juice came in back then, and to give each tomato plant one serving of manure tea. Stinky? You bet. Great fun for an 8-year-old.
Grampy never asked me to weed. Grampy’s kitchen table usually had a stack of magazines on it, including a little one called “Organic Gardening and Farming.” It was printed on newsprint and had no color pictures, but Grampy loved the articles. Later the magazine name was shortened to “Organic Gardening,” and it still is being published by Rodale Books — though now it has bigger pages, and has lots of color photos. He used it as his guide to better gardening, and I have too. In 1970, as a young schoolteacher, I bought a drafty old wooden building that had been a butter factory in Cornish Flat, The Cornish Creamery. It had no gardens — except for a few common orange daylilies along the front of the house. At first, I was just a vegetable gardener, growing lettuce and tomatoes. Later, when I came back from the Peace Corps in 1982, I started planting flowers. I dug up a peony that my mom grew in Connecticut that had been my grandmother’s — before she passed away in 1953 — and brought a piece of it to Cornish Flat where it bloomed magnificently. I was hooked. I decided to take the UNH Master Gardener program and learned a lot. I’d recommend that 10-week course to anyone who wants to learn every aspect of gardening, from flowers and lawns to trees and disease control. Of course, being a Master Gardener meant that I had to volunteer to help others in my community, which I continue to enjoy all these years later. I started writing a gardening column for my hometown paper, the Valley News, in 1998. I realized that I knew little about trees and shrubs, so I took a course on them at the Vermont Technical College in Randolph, Vermont. We went on plant walks every week to learn ornamental trees and shrubs on the campus and at Dartmouth College.
“Eat what you grow, grow what you love to eat.”
