A Garden Grows in Sharptown

Beautiful exotic flowering plants or farm fresh produce might come to mind when one thinks of a garden.  In reality a garden offers so much more.  A garden is a lesson in history, economics and science.  A garden teaches patience and offers rewards.  It heals the soul and provides a means of expression. For many a garden brings nostalgia and serves as a reminder of the heritage that so many have shared.

A Sharptown Garden

Golden sunflowers reaching towards heaven, orderly rows of corn standing at attention, tomato vines clinging on supports, along with peppers, lima beans and other assorted vegetables have thrived in Jim Sparks’ Sharptown garden more than 60 years.  Those who regularly drive down County House Road in Salem County may have noticed that the garden contours have moved from year to year but each spring Dad’s 1946 cherry red Farmall Cub tractor chugs on. 

The antique tractor was the smallest tractor manufactured by International Harvester in Louisville, Kentucky from the late 1940’s through 1981.  Today International Harvester has become part of Case IH.  Dad explained once that J. P. Morgan merged the Morgan Harvesting Machine Company with the Deering Harvesting Company and some other smaller companies to form International Harvester at the turn of the 20^th century.  Jerome Case began his Chicago Company in 1863 and introduced the first steam engine tractor.  Case purchased International Harvester a little over a century later in 1985.

Jim and Tom Cleary Planting

At 82, the quintessential gardener walks among the rows somewhat thinner and a little more stooped than in years past.  Up at dawn he heads out to the garden that has beckoned him for as long as I can remember. One of my earliest memories was of Dad showing me how to train the fragile shoots of lima bean vines around the baling twine and cedar pole supports.  The poles are now permanent iron pipes and the twine has given away to a heavy gauge steel wire.

 Last week I arrived to find Dad kneeling with a five gallon bucket picking burp-less cucumbers and tomatoes.  He had pulled a few weeds that were threatening to take over after the copious amounts of rain earlier this summer.  The weeds competed with Dad’s precious crops for nutrients and water.   As we moved down the row of cucumbers clinging upright on poles that gave way to the lima beans, I bent on the opposite side of the row and began pulling weeds from the moist wet soil.   The sun kissed our faces and backs as we slowly moved down the row shaking and beating excess soil from the roots of the weeds as Dad taught me as a child.   “You have to get all the dirt off so the plant will die and not get a second life,” he explained as he did so many years ago. 

Towards the end of the row Purple Martins chattered and scolded as we moved closer to their home above our heads.  “The babies are flying and they are ready to go,” Dad told me.  “It’s time.”  Dad knows his birds.  In the spring he will say the “Martins,” will be back any day now.  A week later I stopped by to pick some Silver Queen corn. The garden was quiet.  The graceful swooping birds that, according to Dad, eat their weight in mosquitoes every day were heading south again.

I hated pulling weeds when I was young.  Most mornings Mom would send us out after breakfast to clear the weeds before Dad came home from work.  Today, as I weeded down memory lane alongside my father, I realized that Dad’s garden now offers a healing balm to stresses he faces as he becomes more and more of a caregiver to his wife.  The garden is his oasis where worries can disappear for a little while. It takes him to a world that he knows and challenges that he understands.  He has solutions for the bean beetles and potato bugs.  The weeds he can eradicate.   He can make his garden grow and share the bounty with his children, neighbors and church family, but he can’t stop his wife’s gradual and steady loss of memory.

Grandson Sam and  Great Granpa Sparks

The garden nurtured us as children.  We learned to wait the 85 or so days it took from the time some seeds germinated until produce was ready for harvest.  We sold strawberries for vacation money when we were younger.   In winter we enjoyed tomato sauces, strawberries, lima beans, corn, green beans, pickles and other vegetables that we shucked, peeled, stemmed, cut or sieved under the summer sun.   Vegetables were either canned or went directly to the freezer. 

From early on we could identify a weed from a plant.  I know that dandelions are a bear to eradicate because you have to get the entire tap root.  I know my chickweed from the common mallow and the plantain from the sorrel.  Crab grass and clover are tricky to pull as they send out trailers and are rooted in several places.   Thistle is never easy to pull.  Morning glory, purslane and lambs quarters also seem to show up in a garden.  If nothing else, weeds teach patience.  They never go away. It is a battle to be won each day.

Dad’s Sharptown garden will never leave me.  The smell of fresh turned soil, or the unique smell of the tomato and the lima bean vine with its leaves that stick like Velcro will take me immediately to that place.  Walking along a Bahamian road, I spotted corn growing in clumps among a soil too rocky to toil.  I couldn’t help returning to the place of my childhood and to the lessons in science, history and life that I learned in a little garden off the beaten path.