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The only time the word "garden" was ever used in my family as an adjective to descried the type of salad for dinner, and when my father had a fried of the family come to our house in late may with his industrial strength tractor, I knew something was up. The tractor made short work of a plot of land adjacent to our house, tilling and disking a perfect square. My father thanked him and informed my brothers and myself that tomorrow we were going to be farmers. The plot was only about the size of a basketball court, but in my eyes at age 10, it might as well been the size of Iowa, this was going to seriously cut into my summer plans.

My father is now a retired school teacher. He has been a school teacher for as long as I can remember with the summers off. My summers were also typical growing up, baseball until the sun went down, camping at night and just a general celebration of life with no cares or responsibilities. When he decided we were old enough to take directions, he decided to allow us to contribute to the family by growing assorted crops.

The next day a semi truck showed up at our house and delivered a roto-tiller. This was a beautiful piece of machinery, bright red with a bush guard the metal beast seemed to be in motion even without being on. The advertisement on the side of the truck said this machine was "So easy to use, you can do it with one hand." I could not wait to get my hand on this machine. I was mesmerized.

My father must have had the same thoughts. For the first month, my father would not let me near this mechanized work horse that tore up the ground with the greatest of ease. For the first month, my dad has me and my brothers sitting on the edge of the creek bank and just watch him work. I suppose he wanted us to observe him as he worked so we could understand what was going on, but a 10 year old's attention span is only as long as the minnows in the creek at our feet. We spent more time in the creek than we did in the garden that first month.

The second month saw the beginnings of his garden. The corn, green beans, pumpkins, squash, watermelon and cantaloupe all began to emerge from the ground. In mid-June, a potential disaster struck, a drought engulfed the land and my dad's first garden started to die. My father however was not one to give up that easily, he bought several bales of straw and sprinkled them all over the garden and then watered it every day. The straw kept the moisture close to the ground and he fledgling garden. By the

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