okay Laurel
so i'd like to know um
what what do you do in lawn and garden what uh what's what's of interest to you and how do you go about it
well i have a town home so i don't do a lot of regular maintenance but i do have a large garden out in back so we do a lot of things with perennials
and uh also a few annual plants uh and then every year i grow a garden
oh you do you do actually uh grow a garden to produce food
yes
uh-huh so how much room do you have
um we have no virtually no room out in front and then in the back i'd say we have about an eighth of an acre
um-hum
and we pretty much fill it up with uh
like i said perennials things that aren't don't have to fool with every year but then i've got uh
a twenty five by twenty area
that i do gardening as far as you know tomatoes and cucumbers and beans and
oh that's what i was uh curious about i was wondering whether you had actually some of the flowers that you had planted were bulb type that you would dig up
and and then put down your garden and then put them back in later or something like that so you
no we have a separate area for the garden
uh-huh you do have a separate area
yeah and last year was the first year we tried two new things we tried corn
and we tried a watermelon
oh
uh-huh well tell me this uh Laurel do you enjoy do you enjoy doing that kind of work and do you have the time to relax so that you can take advantage of it
uh
i enjoy doing it on a limited basis i don't think that if i i the reason i bought a town house is so that i wouldn't i get i'm allergic to grass
so i don't mow grass or anything like that so i think if i had a big home and a big lawn i i don't believe i would enjoy it but just on the limited basis that i do it i do enjoy it very much
uh-huh well i'm a little more fortunate i think from that point of view i'm not allergic to things and i i moved here in State College
quite a while ago and was fortunate to get some land so
actually i have nine acres and uh for many years i grew sweet corn
oh wow
uh and and my kids were there and so we set up a shop there and uh i would uh
collect the corn very carefully ear by ear and it was never more than one to two hours old and people came from miles and miles around to get that corn because they knew it was individually picked
and very very fresh
how about that
so we had a nice thing going there and it was delicious i really enjoyed that and then i also have a a garden oh it's probably uh
twenty five by thirty or forty something like that that i put in my normal food garden things each year
and uh i have a little bit of everything or a lot whole lot of everything in the actually
i love uh broccoli brussels sprouts and i have all kinds of tomatoes kale and
all those good things and i rent out my field that i used to plant in sweet corn to a local farmer
and then he plants about a quarter of an acre of sweet corn for me to use so i get out of that amount of work at any rate
well that's nice
it is it is very very nice i i really enjoy my problem is not having enough enough time to do the job as completely and as thoroughly as i would like i enjoy it very much
that much land requires an awful lot of time
yes it does uh and actually i had a pony there for twenty five years and he had two acres that he had for his own grazing so he had his own backyard garden too
how about that
but that that worked out very nicely too i built him a barn back there where in the part of my corn field and he lived in that
but uh as far as gardening is concerned we do enjoy it my wife is in charge of the flowers
she does all of the flower gardening throughout the whole property and we should have
you know an acre an acre and a half that the house is sitting in the middle of and she has flower gardens and bulbs perennials and things
we have blueberries blackberries i have two or three uh apple trees the Golden Delicious were fantastic this year
my neighbor has pear trees and um
oh blueberries all kinds of food around there if we just had time to take advantage of it
my wife has spent probably
i don't know how many hours in the last two or three weeks canning pears because there were so many of them and i have been totally
engulfed with Golden Delicious apples i just couldn't handle the the amount of them that we got this year it's really been a remarkable year
well i bet you could answer a question for me what's a good apple to bake pies with
i use my Golden Delicious and they make delicious pies
are there many uh there's an enough
