Come spring it’s been tough to drag me indoors to work on this blog; so much to do around the house and farm.   At the house it’s the normal weeding, pruning, mulching, and vegetable planting needing to be done.  Slowly over time our yard has become more ornamental though, only a 10 by 15 foot area dedicated to some beans, squash, cucumbers, and tomatoes now.   Oh, and I planted peas around our fountain figuring the nitrogen they fix will help a subsequent crop of decorative zinnias.   We will see about that…

My vegetable garden pales in comparison to the one my father used to tend.  Gene Bater, who passed away a few weeks ago, used his green thumb earned through farming and ran a very fine garden indeed.  This picture, taken twenty years ago, shows my daughter holding some of his bountiful harvest.   Perhaps in some small way that was influential in her becoming the trained chef and food writer that she is now.   I wish that I too had spent more time with him during that time in his life, but I was busy “saving the world” through radio engineering.  Unfortunately there was no other opportunity; later on Alzheimer’s took dad away from us bit by bit, a process that lasted five diagnosed years, probably more like seven, maybe even ten years, when we think about other subtle changes in his behavior as he got older.  

Fortunately, without the ties of a full time position this past year, I was able to visit dad a bit more often.   Take him for a ride and answer his repeating questions about what kind of car I was driving.   Even bring him out to lunch a few times, quite the experience as near the end dad would only eat peanut butter sandwiches, and had other bodily challenges too.   Dad would also always ask how things were on the farm too.  He didn’t mean the farm my wife and I own in PA though.  He was asking about the upstate New York farm he used to work on when younger, parts of that are still worked by our family to this day.  That was a part of his memory that was still intact, and I am sure that is where his spirit is now.

One thing I was able to tell my father about during his last few days was our purchase of a “crawler-loader”.  It’s a John Deere to boot; so much for sticking to my “red” heritage, but we needed a better machine to clear land on the farm, and more importantly to help thin out broken and misshapen trees left over from when our timber areas were “highgraded”.  Those bum trees have a nasty tendency to not fall the right way when you cut them down.  So it’s a lot safer to push them part way over and then use the chainsaw on them.  Then the John Deere can pick them up and cart them over to our pile of logs too.   It’s no log skidder, but a very useful tool nonetheless.   I wish dad could have seen it.

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