Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
My dad was a championship gardener, as was his father. Grandpa grew his watermelons, cantaloupe, tomatoes, onions, and peppers in eastern Arkansas. To a Wyoming gardener battling the wind, drought, frost, and hail, that’s almost like cheating.
When we lived in Arkansas while dad was stationed at Blytheville Air Force Base, he grew a huge garden behind the house.
The most memorable crop came the year he decided to bring up 50 pounds of cured chicken manure from grandpa’s farm, mix it with corn cobs and the deep, rich, black soil in our backyard, and plant tomatoes in it.
The plants grew seven feet high. The woven wire hoops barely contained them. Surprisingly, they didn’t produce nearly as many tomatoes as the traditional vines just a few feet away, but they were impressive in a “Jack and the Beanstalk” sort of way.
One of my earliest Arkansas memories was plowing the watermelon patch with my grandpa. He had a John Deere tractor that he used to plow the cotton fields, but he kept a mule for the garden and the watermelon patch.
I was just five years old when we went out on a warm April morning in 1962. The mule was harnessed in front of a two-way plow, meaning it turned a straight furrow in both directions. I walked beside them for a while before Grandpa stopped the mule and told me to stand on his feet. I matched his step as he guided the mule with the reins or just a few words, I remember “hee” and “haw” as the most common ones.
In the space of a couple of hours, he’d plowed an acre or so of new melon ground.
We went back to the barn and he hooked up a disc to the mule. He wouldn’t let me go out with him, telling me the disc was too dangerous, but I watched from the shade of a Granny Smith apple tree nearby.
The field was flat, smooth, and ready to plant.
I helped for a while until I got tired.
Grandpa had a bag of watermelon seeds in a pouch over his left shoulder and what looked like a long shovel handle in his left hand. He’d poke a hole in the dirt, reach across his chest with his right hand, and drop a seed in the hole. He’d cover it with a swipe of his shoe and move on to the next hole. I dropped seeds into a few rows, but once again ended up under the apple tree.
We didn’t have to worry about corrugating, or ditch banks, this was Arkansas, Mother Nature took care of the irrigation.
When the plants came up, they were in straight rows, identically placed six feet apart.
A few months later, watermelons covered the ground.
My great uncle Fred, grandpa’s brother, won the Arkansas State Fair with the largest pumpkin in the contest one year, 220 pounds. That’s nothing in today’s world of hybrid, GMO seeds, but it was remarkable at the time.
Uncle Fred was 6-4, and the melon on its end reached his shoulder.
A few years later, when I was eight, I helped gather watermelons to sell.
My grandpa had a great sense of humor, but when he started laughing, his bald head turned bright red, and if it was really funny, he started coughing from laughing so hard.
Most of the melons I was gathering with him were 15 to 25 pounds, easy enough for an eight-year-old boy to pick up and carry.
One big melon, over 50 pounds, was sitting in the middle of the patch. Grandpa teased me, telling me it was too big for a skinny kid like me to pick up.
Challenge accepted.
I rolled the melon up my legs, then balanced it with both hands underneath. I would have made the 75 yards to the truck if I hadn’t tripped on a vine. Yep, splat, boy, chunks of watermelon and seeds flying everywhere. Grandpa had to sit down, he was laughing so hard.
Now the fun began.
Grandpa had a narrow box, cream colored Ford pickup truck. We loaded it until the bed was full, and we had watermelons balancing in the back.
We stopped at a country store a mile or so from the house and sold them a couple dozen melons. Grandpa bought me an RC Cola, the big 16-ounce size in a glass bottle. I was the king of the world.
In 1960s Arkansas, the main highways were clearly marked with road signs, the side roads were not.
Grandpa knew every gravel or dirt road, from county-maintained to narrow, overgrown two-trackers.
We started down each road, sometimes driving through overhanging brush so dense that you couldn’t see the road ahead of you.
Invariably, we’d emerge through the brush and there would be a house, really more of a tar paper shack. Every one of them, no matter how small, had a covered front porch. The siding on these uninsulated little houses was asphalt, styled and painted to look like red or yellow brick.
There were both Black and White people living in these houses, and every one of them knew my grandpa.
In the tradition of southern hospitality, they all referred to him as Master Forrest, (Forrest Tucker) and all had the same question: “These melons sweet, Master Forrest?”
Grandpa would say yes and sometimes cut a hole in a melon and hand it over for them to taste test. No one ever turned us down.
The magic of those days was the way they paid. Silver coins ended in 1964, but this was a year later and the people were still paying with Mercury dimes, Standing Liberty quarters, and Walking Liberty half dollars. There were plenty of almost-smooth Barber dimes and quarters dating back to the 19th century in the change we received.
Grandpa sold the melons for 15 to 25 cents, with a discount for people buying five or more. I didn’t think about it much then, but with just a third-grade education, he was a master at marketing.
We emptied the truck and went back to load it again for another run. We did this for several days, then waited for the next round of melons to ripen.
In almost 50 years of trying to garden, I’ve raised a few small melons, honeydew and cantaloupe, mostly with only a couple of years growing small, three-pound watermelons.
We grow the world’s best alfalfa. Great Northern and Pinto beans, oats, barley, and corn aren’t bad around here either, but melons take a strong hand.
Gardening is an art. I harvested my first tomato on August 5, after starting the plants from seed back in April.
Diligence and perseverance.