Baldy offered little help in achieving dream garden

It is that time of year when people start dreaming of starting a garden. Some will lovingly caress the packets of seed just purchased hoping to impart to said seed the desire to grow to a lustrous adulthood. Some will visit their mail-order shrine consisting of little cups of dirt in which a seed has been poked to await the light generated by an artificial sun. No matter what method is used, present is an undying hope that this year will be better than last year.

Now folks, I have been a member of the North Idaho “poke them in a little cup bunch and the pop them in the ground gang” for almost 30 years. I consider myself somewhat knowledgeable about the subject and I want to share my experience with you. I truly want your garden to be a bountiful thing of beauty - so pull up a chair and let me tell you about my gardening experience. I hope it will be of some help to you who are just starting your first experience in local gardening.

When I first moved here to God’s country I listened to the suggestion of the old timers when they said, “Do not plant until all the snow is off Baldy.” Now that made sense to me until I tried it. I religiously peered over my fence toward Baldy and just as the last white dot disappeared I planted. While I was putting the stakes in for my beans another white spot appeared on old Baldy and kept getting bigger until it ended up in my back yard. The first year I had about a 36-hour growing period.

The following year I planted when the snow was half off that old mountain. For a time the garden looked pretty bad but all of a sudden there was a tremendous growth spurt. The vines and leaves would grow and grow — but they forgot the fruit.

See GUNTER, Page 3

GUNTER

Continued from Page 2

I had tomato vines that old Jack would have liked better than his beanstalk, but no tomatoes. My beans resembled the growth of the deepest rain forest, but no beans. People would walk up the alley and say, “Oh, you have such a beautiful garden.” I would manage a weak “thank you.” I did not have the nerve to say that I had miscalculated Baldy again.

I have figured out that the Baldy thing is a joke the locals use to see how dumb the new people are that move to the area. From my experience, I suggest that you refrain from even giving Baldy a glance. It may be completely white on the mountain but over your garden there might well be a heat wave making your plants twist in agony and drop over, dried and dead.

I recall one year when things were different. I did not even think about whether there was snow or no snow. I bravely planted and watched as my beloved garden had one early heat stroke, two cases of frost-bite, one near freezing, and several Noah type washouts. In fact, just around the fourth of July I spotted a gaggle of Blue Lake beans merrily floating down the alley and I recognized every one of them. What the rain and cold didn’t get the aphids enjoyed. I did have two jalapeno peppers - they were on the plant when I bought it - and I figured I would have to sell them for $175 each to break even.

I have always liked old Bill Shakespeare. I wonder how his writings would have changed if he had taken his mind off those haunted castles and moved to North Idaho in the shadow of old Baldy. I think Hamlet’s famous soliloquy would have been something like this:

“To plant, or not to plant, that is the question;

Whether ‘tis Nobler in the mind to suffer

The rains and hail stones of outrageous weather,

Or to take tools against a Sea of weeds,

And by opposing end them: To cry: to weep

No more; and by a deep determination, say we end

the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

that a gardener in North Idaho is heir to …”

My last words of advice are to see your gardening as your entertainment of the year.

If you have to be serious, and are success oriented, plant half of your garden in rice and the other half in cactus. This assures you a 50 percent return — maybe.