Henry's Garden
Having been born and raised on a farm, Henry knew a lot of the gardening basics. He also developed an interest in raising flowers and vegetables. When he and Mary moved into their Gilmore Street row house there was a very small back yard, probably large enough for a few tomato plants. Once they saw brother Euclid's new home with a large yard on Hawthorne Road, they started thinking about moving out of Baltimore City.
The lot they purchased in Linthicum Heights was large enough for a house and a garden. The house was placed to one side of the 200 foot wide by 180 foot deep lot. On the west side of the driveway, leading back to the garage Henry created his garden. Across the front of this section they created a 44-foot-wide by 20-foot-deep badminton court. That left an area of about 50 foot by 150 foot for the vegetable garden. The space adjoining the side of the driveway back to the garage entrance was devoted to spring fruits and vegetables. These were perennial plants that emerged each year and supplied asparagus, rhubarb and strawberries. Except for weeding, this part of the garden sort of took care of itself. A three-foot wide grass walkway separated the spring garden from the main vegetable garden area.
Henry was extremely precise in the placement of everything in his garden. The rows of plants and the walking space between rows were staked out with a long tape measure. Solid metal rods, about 3/4” in diameter and maybe 18” long were driven into the ground at both ends of every row. A white cord was stretched between the poles and tied tightly. The row was then plowed, touching the line, with a single-blade hand-pushed Planet Jr™ cultivator. The spacing for each plant was determined by the type of vegetable and its’ fully developed spread. For tomato plants a yard stick was used with a tomato seedling inserted every 36”. Even the watering of these newly planted vegetables was exact. Each baby tomato plant received exactly 1/2 pint of water, measured in a milk bottle of that capacity. For plants such as tomatoes or climbing beans, wooden stakes were driven into the ground beside each plant. These stakes were 2” by 2” and about 8’ long. The white cord was attached to the stake at each end of the row at the height for the top of the stake. Berne would climb on the step ladder and, using a heavy mallet, would begin driving the stake into the soil. Henry, with carpenter’s level in hand, would make certain that the stake was perfectly level vertically in all directions. After all, plants growing on crooked stakes would not form perfect vegetables, and who wants to eat an imperfect string bean. Henry’s answer to my childish question of why did the stakes have to be straight and level was “There is only one right way to do something”. It took me years to realize that there could actually be more that one correct way to do anything.
As the plants grew, they were tied with brown sisal rope that had been salvaged from parcels at the post office.
From year to year the location of each type of plant was changed, sort of crop rotation on a micro scale. Every few years even the direction of the rows was changed from the usual east-to-west orientation to a north-to-south direction.
The crops would be planted starting with spring items like onions and lettuce, and progressing through the season, depending on how long they took to produce table-ready vegetables. Plantings of the same vegetable would be staggered to provide a steady supply of that vegetable for as long as possible.
Every day, once a vegetable was ready to pick, what was needed for that days lunch or evening meal was picked just before meal preparation began. When corn was on the menu, the pot of water had to be almost to a boil before Henry picked the ears of corn. He claimed that corn began to turn to sugar the second it was picked from the stalk, and no time was to be wasted in getting it to the boiling water: another one of those ‘only-one-right-way-to-do things’ examples. When crops matured faster than we could eat them, Mary and Edee got out the pressure cooker and the Mason jars and spent the afternoon canning vegetables that would appear on the table during the winter.
I guess you could call Henry’s gardening semi-organic. For fertilizer we hitched the trailer to the back of Henry’s car and headed to Markel’s farm, located along Andover Road, on what is now Linthicum-Ferndale Middle School and the equestrian center. The horse barn provided plenty of smelly warm and mushy horse manure, mixed with bits of straw. Peter & I got the fun job of shoveling the stuff into the trailer while Henry or Bernie caught up with the latest local gossip with Mr. Markel. On special occasions we got to follow the trailer through the cow pasture, shoveling up individual cow droppings as we went along. Back home we got to reverse the process, this time standing in the stuff on the trailer and distributing it on the garden. This fun time was usually reserved for fall, after the last of the summer’s crops had been harvested. Four legged animals were not the only organic source of garden enrichment. The Paul’s mini-farm also featured chickens. These feathered ladies spent each night on their roost in the safety of the chicken house. Below the roosting area was a panel of Masonite which farmer Paul called the ‘drop board’. Each week farm-child Peter and farm-child Larry were allowed to pull this board out through a horizontal slot door in the side of the chicken house. Directly below this slot was a large square, in-ground pit, covered with a plywood lid. For this fun time childhood activity, the plywood lid was removed, the drop board pulled out and tilted down on an angle to the edge of the pit. Then Peter and Larry, each with a garden hoe, got to scrap all of the chickens week-worth of contributions off the board and into the pit. Unless we were very careful, one of us would end up in the pit along with the manure. This stuff was so powerful that it had to ‘age’ for many months before being diluted with water and use to enrich the soil.
Henry did use some chemical things to deal with the bugs that found their way into his garden. There was some kind of white dust that we blew out of a spreader on the plants, but most of it, I think, ended up on Peter and me.
Hawthorne Farm also contained a number of fruit trees, and the fruit was selected for cooking purposes. Spring was the time for the cherries that could be made into pies. Picking them was really kind of fun. This tree was right beside the tool house, which has a low sloping roof. Peter & I went up the ladder onto the roof with our little galvanized buckets and picked every ripe cherry we could find. As a reward one of us got to use the cast-iron cherry seeder to remove the seeds, before the cherries were added to the pie crust. There was a damson tree on the other side of the garage which yielded damson preserves in the late summer. The apple tree in the side yard was the source for apple pie and apple cobbler in the fall. Then there was the grape arbor, built of 4” square posts and beams that ran from the kitchen door to the fence at the rear of the property. The grape vines produced clusters of green grapes which we covered with paper bags when they neared maturity, to keep the birds and bees away. At the rear end of the garden, on the east side, there was a concrete outlined hot bed where plants were started, under glass frames, each spring. There was also a miniature hot bed just to supply parsley year-round. Behind the hot beds were several rows of raspberries, both red and black varieties.
Hawthorne Farm required a lot of tools, most of which were operated by hand. To store the tools a tool house was built on the east side of the garage, with a gently sloping roof, perfect for cherry picking. All the tools that were kept in the tool house had their handles painted orange. This was so they would not mingle with the inside-the-house red-handled tools that got to stay warm in the winter. Garden rule number one - every tool would be returned to the tool house the minute you were finished using it. Another one of the ‘only one right way to do it’ things. There were pairs of long wooden pegs projecting from the walls where each type of tool was hung, in a designated order, back to front. After each use the tool was to be wiped clean with an old towel, oiled lightly, and hung in the proper place.
Then there was the rose garden, formally known as Henry’s Rose Garden. This was a rectangular plot adjoining the arbor behind the house. In it were placed Henry’s roses, each positioned the proper distance apart, in several straight rows. A row of miniature roses lined the grass walkway beside the area. These carefully selected roses were Henry’s favorite plants. Each one was marked with a metal tag containing it’s name and the year it was planted. He entered the roses in yearly flower shows held by the Linthicum Heights Women’s Club, and captured many prizes. This garden was not designed as a thing of beauty to be enjoyed as you strolled the yard, it was a cutting garden where roses were cut and taken into the house to be enjoyed in a vase. Climbing roses were attached to this part of the arbor where they could bloom without fear of being cut and taken into the house. By 1946 Berne had a gasoline-powered cultivator to do the heavy tilling, but Peter and I were assigned the privilege of hoeing out the chickweed that tried to live in this garden. I often thought, as we did this, that if is Pop’s (Henry’s) garden, why isn’t he hoeing it? There was a blackboard in the kitchen and every morning there was a chalk-written list of what the farm children were to do that morning.
On the other side of the grass walkway from the rose garden was the flower garden The concept here, like with the rose garden, was to produce flowers to be cut and enjoyed in vases in the house. We had a lot of vases in a lot of sizes and shapes.
No suburban estate was complete without a fish pond with water lilies. The Paul’s had two of them. The original rectangular one was near the back corner of the house, where it could be viewed from the dining room. Later a larger kidney-shaped one was created near the rear property line. While they were beautiful to look at, waterlilies required maintenance. Every couple of years the ponds had to be drained, the layer of gooky rotted leaves on the bottom shoveled out, and the heavy wooden tubs containing the lilies lifted out. They were emptied and then replaced with a mixture of horse manure, sand and dirt. Then topped with flag stones to keep that stuff from floating out of the tub when the pond was refilled with fresh water.
There were two privet hedges on the property. One along the east side between Euclid’s house and ours, and one along the east side of the driveway. When it was time to trim these hedges, out came two metal poles and the ever popular string and level. With a pole at each end of the hedge and the tightly stretched string at the height level for the top citing, Peter & I set to work with hand-operated hedge shears to cut everything back to the required shape.
All of the property not otherwise taken up with buildings, walkways, gardens, or trees was devoted to a grass. The mowing of this grass was divided between Peter and me. We had hand-pushed reel-type mowers. Peter was assigned the area east of the front sidewalk, and I got the west side. To make the lawn as level as possible Henry had originally had a granite roller fabricated at a quarry near Savage, Md. By the time we were assigned lawn duty, the granite roller had been up-ended and converted into a base for the sundial that was located between the rose and flower gardens. It was replaced by a huge iron roller that could be filled with water to make it even heaver. That monster spent most of it’s time parked under the corner of the front porch.
Every winter, just after the Christmas tree came down and our set of O-gauge Lionel trains was packed away in the attic, the seed catalogs would start arriving. A. T. Burpee, Wayside Gardens, and Attlee catalogs would show up in the living room. In the evening, after dinner, Henry would settle into his armchair, pick up a catalog and begin planning what to order for next spring. Peter and I would look at each other and begin planning to run away from home.
