Gardening with Dad: A Father's Day Note from the Patch
By Autumn Prairie Pumpkins
The coffee was still too hot to drink when I noticed the first squash blossom had opened overnight, a small gold trumpet pointed straight at the sunrise. I stood at the edge of the patch in bare feet and thought about my father, the way I do most mornings this time of year. Gardening with dad is the reason I am out here at all. He never called it a hobby. He called it keeping the family fed, and he meant it as a kind of promise.
Father's Day is coming this weekend, and the patch always brings him close. He was not a sentimental man. He showed love the way a lot of fathers do, in the work. A row hoed straight. A trellis built to last longer than the season. A coffee can of seeds on the shelf in the garage, each one folded in a square of newspaper with the year written in pencil.
What gardening with dad really teaches you
I did not understand, as a kid, that he was teaching me anything. It felt like chores. Pull these weeds. Check under the leaves for eggs. Water at the roots, not the tops, and do it before the sun gets high. Only now do I see that every one of those small instructions was a lesson in paying attention. A garden asks you to notice things. The way the soil smells after rain. The first leaf that yellows. The bee that finds the blossom before you even knew it had opened.
He worked with the land instead of against it. He never reached for a quick fix when patience would do. He built the soil with whatever the kitchen and the yard gave back to it, and he trusted that good ground would carry the rest. I think that is the truest thing he handed down, more than any single skill. The belief that if you take care of the small living things, they take care of you.
That patience shows up most in the seeds. He saved them every fall, the best fruit from the best plant, and he gave them away to anyone who would plant them. If you have never tried it, our guide on saving pumpkin and squash seeds walks through how simple it is. There is a quiet magic in holding a seed your father once held, and putting it back in the ground. I wrote a little more about that feeling in the small act of saving a seed, if you want to sit with it a while.
The seeds we keep, the people we keep
This is why heirloom varieties matter to me in a way that goes past flavor or yield. An heirloom seed is a story that got planted again. Somebody kept it going, year after year, hand to hand, because it was worth keeping. The Seminole pumpkin we grow has been passed down for generations through some of the hottest country in America, long before any of us were here to write a growing guide about it. When I plant a row of Seminole pumpkin seeds, I am joining a line of people who decided this was worth carrying forward. My father would have liked that idea.
If you are lucky enough to still have your dad around, maybe this is the weekend you ask him to walk the garden with you, or pour two cups and sit on the porch while the morning warms up. I keep a coffee sampler on hand for exactly those mornings, the slow ones where there is nowhere to be. And if your father is gone, like mine, you can still plant something he would have recognized. A garden is a good place to keep company with the people you miss.
For anyone just starting out here on the prairie, our Kansas planting guide is a gentle place to begin. Start small. Pull a few weeds. Check under the leaves. Let the work teach you the way it taught me.
The coffee is drinkable now. The blossom is still open, still pointed at the light. Whatever gardening with dad looked like in your house, I hope this weekend you find a reason to get your hands in the soil. That is where he is, for me. Right there in the dirt, telling me to water at the roots.
From the patch in Newton, Kansas.