THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 16, 1996 TAG: 9606140075
SECTION: HOME & GARDEN PAGE: G1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MARCIA MANGUM, HOME & GARDEN EDITOR
LENGTH: 219 lines
AH, THE MEMORIES of gardening with dad. Working the fields from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mowing the grass until you passed out in the heat of the day. Weeding strawberries and selling the berries for spending money. Planting dill seed and being disappointed when pickles didn't come up.
We asked readers to tell us about gardening with their dads.
Some hated the chores, others relished them. But all who called cherished the memories of working with Dad.
Earl H. Odell comes from a long line of farmers. His father, Frank C. Odell, was a truck farmer in Princess Anne County, what is now the southern end of Virginia Beach.
``I was 10 years old when he first got me started taking care of the vegetable garden for the family,'' Earl Odell recalls. ``A mule was assigned to me, and many days I was out in the field from 7 to 6 with the other men, working on the farm.''
They raised many vegetables - lettuce, spinach, tomatoes, beets, carrots and more. Parsley was their winter crop, and Odell remembers picking it and tying it in little bundles for restaurants.
The lessons Odell most cherishes from his dad relate to working with his hands and knowing how to use and care for tools.
``I can spread my fertilizer and seed (by hand) here in my yard more evenly than with any spreader I've ever used,'' he says.
He learned about the use and care of tools, including the importance of putting them away cleaned and oiled - ``so it's like a new tool when you start working with it again,'' he says. ``And one of the things he taught me was, to save time, do it right the first time.''
Frank Odell insisted his son get an education. During Earl Odell's senior year in high school, his father told him to learn bookkeeping or some other skill that could earn him a living, which he did.
That year, when Earl was 16, his father died. ``I wanted to stop school and operate the farm,'' he recalls, ``but thank goodness I was talked out of it.''
Earl Odell went on to work various bookkeeping, accounting and business jobs but never lost his love of the land. Now 76, he keeps a neatly manicured lawn and precisely pruned shrubs in the Bayview section of Norfolk. His wife, Margaret, plants some annuals for color and usually a few tomatoes.
When his four children came along, they would work and play in the yard with their dad. They had to rake the giant leaves from two large magnolias and sometimes earned a little money for each bag they filled.
Although his two sons didn't carry on the gardening tradition, Odell's twin daughters have.
Maggie Odell, a professor at a college in Minnesota, keeps a small flower garden. She recalls planting her first vegetable garden in northwest Pennsylvania in 1979.
Her parents went to visit, and when her father saw the beat-up hoe she'd been given by her father-in-law, he bought her a new one, sharpened it and showed her how to use it, a skill he'd learned from his father. ``He went through about half a row and stopped,'' she recalls. ``I said, `I think I need to see a little more, dad.' And he just kept slicing those weeds.''
Mary Odell Keeling, who lives in Newport News, doesn't share her dad's passion for the perfect lawn, possibly because she remembers mowing the grass at mid-day. Despite her dad's warnings that it wasn't the right time of day, she'd put on her bathing suit, trying to get a suntan, and sometimes mow until she fainted from heat.
Her gardening style now differs from her father's. He likes precise lines and edges; she prefers plants spilling into each other. He has a lawn that looks like a golf course; she isn't interested in grass and prefers lush, colorful flowers.
But like her father, Keeling connects with the land. ``It's just a feeling, like I have to do this, that it's in my blood.''
She's hoping to pass it along to her children.
There are no magnolia leaves to bag in Mary Odell Keeling's yard, but the children get a penny for each inchworm picked off her Japanese maple.
Linda Boyce, who owns a landscape company with her husband in Suffolk, also credits her father's farming roots for her passion for plants. Her dad, Howard Seymour, was raised on a farm and learned early to help with the cattle and the crops.
When he married, he planted a vegetable garden. Boyce remembers picking corn, tomatoes and watermelon, sometimes eating the tomatoes or melon while they were still warm in the garden.
Her dad will soon turn 69, but he still gardens in Bowers Hill in Chesapeake. Even though it's just him, his wife and mother-in-law, ``He still raises a garden like he was going to feed half the neighborhood - and he does,'' Boyce notes. ``He has food for all the neighbors and family. We just put up poles for about a 40-foot row of beans.''
Boyce is proud of how her dad grows almost everything from seed. Usually each February, he gathers his seeds, seed trays, grow light and popsicle-stick markers and sets them up in the bay window of the living room. ``He worries over them like they were babies,'' she says.
Every time Boyce goes to visit, the first thing her dad says is, ``Let's go check the garden.''
``For my dad and me, the earth has always been kind of a healing thing,'' she says.
Boyce also shares a love of gardening with her youngest son, Rob. The 20-year-old started working with his parents' Kleen Kut Lawn Service when he was 13. Recently, he and his mom became certified master gardeners.
Boyce keeps a small vegetable garden at her house and a large flower garden.
``Dad didn't grow flowers for years,'' she says. If you couldn't eat it, he didn't see the point. ``But as he's gotten older, he sees that having pretty things to look at is good too.'' This year he's added a wildflower garden and some impatiens.
Boyce says her father taught her ``a real love and respect for the earth and things that grow.''
``When things are not going well, I can sit for hours and hours and hours and pull weeds and be happy, because I'm close to the earth.''
When Hubert Rash Sr. introduced his daughter to gardening, it didn't cost him much. Back then, one of the major seed companies offered to send a child's packet of seeds for 1 cent when an adult placed an order.
``Every year dad took my penny and taped it on, and we planted our garden,'' says Debbi Haddaway, who was about 5 when the tradition began.
The packet usually contained a mix of vegetables, annuals and perennials. ``It always had corn - I remember that,'' Haddaway says. ``Dad had a little square in one of his flower beds that I dumped my seeds in. I remember the corn coming up, because it was sort of off-the-wall to be mixed in with flowers.''
Rash, who now is retired and lives in Norfolk's Ingleside section, was such an avid gardener that he built a greenhouse in the backyard.
In addition to having ``the greenest grass on the street,'' Haddaway says her dad continues to grow a variety of vegetables and other plants, many of which he got from her after she became a horticultural student at Tidewater Community College.
Although she lives in Glengarif, not far from her dad, the two rarely garden together but continue to give each other plants. ``Whenever we get plants, we always get two,'' she says.
``We have a competition on tomatoes, which is useless - he always wins.''
Tomatoes were king in the Manville, N.J., neighborhood where Joseph Kinal raised his family. ``It was always a neighborhood contest who had the biggest tomato, the best tomato,'' recalls Kinal's daughter, Josephine Letts of Virginia Beach.
At least in her eyes, her dad was clearly the winner. Her father grew up in the farming communities of Poland and immigrated to the United States after World War II.
``Although he worked in a factory all his life I always knew he was a frustrated farmer at heart,'' she says.
Kinal grew many kinds of vegetables, but tomatoes were the real test, the thing that decided who was the best gardener. And the thing the three children always identified with their dad.
``We were always out there with him, either planting the tomatoes, watering the tomatoes or picking the weeds. Or making sure we didn't step on the tomatoes when we played ball,'' she recalls.
Kinal died of a heart attack on May 8, 1983, two days after planting his yearly garden of tomatoes, Letts says.
``My dad has been dead 13 years now, but every spring I don his old black garden gloves and plant tomatoes,'' she says.
Some years she may not plant anything else, but on the anniversary of her father's death, she always plants tomatoes. ``And he needs to watch over them,'' she says.
``I can't say I ever have the biggest, best tomato in the neighborhood, but I do have tomatoes. There's not a time that I feel closer to my dad than when I'm in the garden planting those tomatoes or eating tomatoes.''
Alisa Shannon grew up in a small town in Iowa, the youngest of three sisters. Her dad, Dave Van Zant, kept a large garden, a grape vineyard and a small orchard.
``I followed behind my dad planting seeds, and I was always out there working in the garden,'' she says. ``When you're a little girl, your dad is just the best person in the world. I thought that whatever he did, I had to do too.''
She remembers picking vegetables and fruit, shucking corn and helping her dad with the yard work. But, unfortunately, she doesn't remember much about how it was done, having lost interest during her teen years.
Her father now lives in New Hampshire, not close enough to be of much help with his daughter's yard in the Baycliff area of Virginia Beach.
``The people who lived here before had these beautiful little rose bushes, and I had to call dad and ask what to do,'' she says. ``I didn't know you had to prune them and give them rose food. I guess I just thought they were kind of like wildflowers - that they just grow.''
She hopes someday to learn more about gardening, but, for now she's just glad her 1-year-old daughter likes dandelions.
Growing up in Ohio, Deborah Gallagher remembers having to weed the strawberry patch for her dad, Nick Gallagher. She hated it.
``There were five kids in my family, and we didn't get to go on very many vacations,'' she recalls. ``One year my parents decided we could afford a vacation to North Carolina, to the Cherokee village in the mountains. And they said if we'd sell the strawberries down at the end of our driveway for 35 cents a quart, we could keep the money and could use it to buy souvenirs on our vacation.''
The children earned enough money to get tomahawks, Indian head dresses, moccasins and more - enough for themselves and their neighborhood friends.
``I still love strawberries, but I'm willing to pay for them at the grocery store these days,'' Gallagher says. She prefers to tend flowers in the yard of her Churchland home in Portsmouth.
Catherine Salmon was about 7 years old, growing up in the Bayview area of Norfolk when her father, Everett Yates Jr., introduced her and her two younger siblings to gardening.
``He dug up a row right next to the garage, divided it into thirds and took us shopping to buy our seeds,'' she says. ``My brother planted lettuce; my sister, tomatoes; and I chose dill.
``We planted our seeds, and everything was growing. Although the garden flourished, dad noticed my disappointment.'' He asked his daughter what was wrong, and she told him she didn't have any pickles yet.
``I'm sure he was holding back a laugh,'' she says. ``The next day he took us out to a farm, and we picked cucumbers and brought them back and made pickles. That's how I found out where we get pickles, other than buying them from the store.''
The children continued to plant their row of vegetables in the years following - minus the dill.
Now 76, Yates keeps a healthy garden at his Larrymore Acres home in Norfolk. ``He's always told me to feel free to come on over and have some tomatoes and cucumbers,'' Salmon says.
She doesn't garden, but she remembers what she learned about her dad from growing dill together.
``It always touched me that he went that extra mile in showing me a little more about gardening.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by Lawrence Jackson\The Virginian-Pilot
When Linda Boyce visits her father, Howard Seymour, in Chesapeake,
they nearly always walk out to see how his vegetable garden is
doing.
B\W photo
Debbi Haddaway and her father, Hubert Rash Sr., still share a love
of plants and gardening.
Color photo by GARY C. KNAPP
Working in the yard is a family affair for Earl H. Odell, his wife,
Margaret, and their daughter, Mary Odell Keeling, who also is trying
to instill a love of gardening in her two Children. by CNB