It Runs in the Family

 I've written before about my gardening roots.  I literally grew up in a greenhouse.  My parents owned a commercial retail nursery where they sold vegetables and bedding plants and started all of their own stock from seed or cuttings.  My grandfather also had a commercial greenhouse and even developed his own variety of tomatoes.  I remember these greenhouses very well, but oh to be able to go back now 20 years into my gardening career.

My PaPaw and I in Mom and Dad's geranium house. 
Dad background left.

My PaPaw taught high school shop and math, but he also farmed.  Afterall, there were 16 more hours in a day.  And PaPaw never did things by halves.  If he wanted to grow plants, he needed a greenhouse.  If he wanted an apple, he planted an orchard.  Then he needed a cider press.  And so on and so forth.

Hoeing Tobacco June 1973

Every time my Dad and I talk about our gardens, I find out some other little tidbit that proves that gardening skills are inheritable.  For instance, I did not remember my grandmother growing dahlias.  One day, a couple of years ago, my father wandered into my garden to find me pruning dahlias.  "Oh you're growing dahlias now.  Your MaMaw showed dahlias.  She belonged to the Dahlia Society."  I did not know that.  

Last fall, when I told him I was developing a knack for growing sweet potatoes "Dad sold sweet potato slips by the thousands.  One Cent a piece.  He had a forcing bed with heat flues running along it under the soil where he would force the slips."  I didn't remember that either.  My grandfather puttered in his greenhouse until he was 90, so I did get a chance to ask a lot of questions, but a lot of the commercial aspects of the farm had dwindled over the years.

A few weeks ago, after talking to my Dad again, and debating the different methods of storing tubers, it occurred to me that I actually have Ye Olde Family Greenhouse Album.  I wonder what I could learn from those pictures if I looked again.

Photography has changed a whole lot in fifty years.  Things were a lot different when you had a finite amount of film and you never knew what you had until you picked them up at the store.  But there it was, running westward from the house in front of the apple orchard.... maybe 75 feet of dahlias.  That's a lot more dahlias than I grow!  

The nice thing about computers is that you can scan a picture in and fiddle with the color.

Yep, them are dahlias

So where would the forcing bed have been?  Dad said it ran up the slope so that the heat would rise...

Here we go.  A whole cold frame system.  I wonder what else he had in there?

You wouldn't think a school teacher would have a whole lot of time to grow things in the spring.  I always thought that the greenhouse really hit its stride after he retired.  Here is the first greenhouse.  It predates the tomato hot house.  It was torn down and replaced before I was born.

If I had a greenhouse this size I could get ALL my vegetables in it.

Below the tomato hot house in the background as Dad and PaPaw move the greenhouse furnace out of the way so they can build the new greenhouse on the same site.

A bigger better greenhouse!  Twice the length and wider as well.

You can see from this picture the grade that would have made the heat rise through the flue in the cold frame.  The cold frame would have been on the far side of this new structure running half the length.

Below is how I remember the greenhouse.  This is the view from their back yard.  

1975

So that is where my gardening instincts come from.  Apparently, it was inevitable that I would grow dahlias and master sweet potatoes.  And, one thing that greatly interests my Dad, I am finally figuring out how to grow a decent cantaloupe.  In New York no less.  It requires some experimenting and some fussing, but my ancestors will not rest easy until we've figured it out.