I don’t know why I remembered the other day that Dad had a garden diary. He added to it each year for about six years. I wish I still had it, but twenty years ago, I couldn’t think of a reason to keep it, so I threw it away. All that knowledge and magical pen scratching gone to the winds.

Today’s diaries, sold online and in stores, are often elaborate with fancy covers. Dad’s was the everyday notebook, which he copiously filled with his fountain pen. In his diary, Dad would begin in earnest each spring, recording such things as the temperature of the soil when he was first able to get turning over the soil following what was hoped to be the last snowstorm. Winter in those days stayed long after April, and often until the end of May.

When the ground had barely made a showing, parsnips were harvested. Soon, the kitchen table became a laboratory where he and my mom would sit with pen and paper and plan the garden. They had long before worn the print off the seed catalog that had arrived in January. Newly arrived seed packets joined the soil testing kit.

Mom would add gladiolas and dahlias to the mix of vegetables. Dad’s specialty was building the teepee poles for the Kentucky Wonder beans. Dad would record which varieties were pest-tolerant and which areas of the garden they grew best. My mother, a woman ahead of her time, refused to allow DDT or other insecticides. She got her “pest control” advice from her seasoned gardener friends. At the end of the season, when all the canning and preserving were finished, Dad would record how many pints of this and quarts of that were to be shared and bragged about to his city friends.

My dad’s diary didn’t record the hours I was assigned to weeding and culling tiny shoots of carrots and beets. Boy, did I love the young beet green shoots when mom steamed and served them with salt, pepper, butter, and vinegar. The adult me hates eating carrots. I detest them with every fiber of my being. However, as a little girl, sitting on the ground and pulling the tiny carrots out of the earth to give others a chance to grow bigger, I would wipe them on my clothes and pop them in my mouth to savor like candy. They were sweet and tender and the best treat ever.

Dad also didn’t record what he thought about in the evenings when he’d go up to his garden and perch on his rock in front of the grape vines, staring off into the distance, chewing the stem of his pipe, and considering “stuff”. I saw him while out playing in the clay or my doll house in the nearby trees. He’d sit there quietly and watch the world go by. The last summer he was alive, he spent more time sitting and chewing. I can’t help but think he knew it would be his last.