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Today is Cinco de Mayo, the Fifth of May, commemorating the Mexican victory over the French in the Battle of Puebla in 1862, when 8,000 well-armed French troops were routed by 4,000 ill-equipped Mexican soldiers.  And a beautiful day it is.

Years ago, I got interested in gardening because of my brother-in-law, Jackie Rudie. Jackie grew up on a farm and gardening was not a hobby, it was a matter of survival. In 1970, Jackie’s grandmother Mary Heisick died and my mother-in-law Irene Rudie inherited the old parsonage that had been built in 1892 by members of the Swedish Mission Church in Upsala. When they sold the farm in 1971 and moved to town, Jackie convinced the members of the church next door to let him till up a plot of ground west of the old parsonage so he and his parents could continue growing the fresh vegetables that they were used to enjoying.

Jackie had bad knees and so he bought a Yamaha three-wheeler and he did his gardening from that. By June, his garden was overrun with weeds, but it still produced. As his arthritis got worse, I offered to do some tilling for him on a weekend. The next time I came by, he growled something about how many vegetable seedlings I had destroyed. My only defense was that the rows were not straight and as a “town kid”, I was not schooled in knowing which were weeds and which were plants. The next spring, I introduced the idea of planting stakes spaced three feet apart and using string between the stakes.

Soon, my daughter, who now owns the parsonage, will plant the first two rows in the garden with Yukon Gold potatoes. Love those Yukon Golds, in rows exactly three feet apart.

“You will never find a better sparring partner than adversity” Golda Meir