BRONSON — The secret to a bountiful garden may not be so secretive after all.
“Patience and time, a willingness to spend extra time, weeding and cultivating, watering,” are the secret, said Robert Lamb, a veteran gardener and canner. “A good garden doesn’t grow by itself. It takes a lot of time, a lot of care.”
But with so many “secrets” to gardening, maybe the real secret is a gardener must have a passion for his work.
“It’s fun,” Lamb said. “I enjoy it.”
While gardening and canning is enjoyable for Lamb now, it was not always that way.
“(Gardening) gives me a chance to stay involved with agriculture,” Lamb said. “Ever since I was old enough to know what I was doing, I was helping in the garden. I didn’t always like it. I’ll be honest about that … When someone tells you to do something, it’s a lot less fun.”
Lamb, 64, and a foreign language teacher at Labette County High School, tends the garden at his parents’ family farm eight miles northeast of Bronson.
“I’m a little bit younger (than my parents), and I get up a little bit earlier, so it makes it easier for me to get up and get it done … because the sun gets so hot later on,” Lamb said.
His day in the garden usually starts between 6 and 6:30 a.m. He never pays much attention to sunrises, though; only whether or not there is enough light to work.
“I like to do my garden work in the early morning or late evening because of the heat,” Lamb said.
While Lamb uses some chemicals on his garden, he sticks to “barnyard fertilizer.” He also uses a hose hooked up to their pond to water the garden instead of water from the city or the rural water district.
“It’s usually better for the plants anyway because it doesn’t have that chlorine in it,” Lamb said.
Lamb grows most of his plants from seed. When postage was lower, Lamb would receive over 200 seed catalogs from several companies and countries. Now, he mostly orders seed from a few Amish companies.
Corn, potatoes, tomatoes, onions, cucumbers, okra, hot peppers, chard, beets and kohlrabi all find space in Lamb’s garden. Dill, garlic, rosemary, sage and parsley fill a tractor-tire spice garden. The oregano and basil died from a freeze.
There are also apple and peach trees. And to top it all off, flowers hang in baskets from an old cultivator wheel, and a wheelbarrow holds its own flower garden. Begonias are planted, Lamb said, because petunias can’t take the heat of summer.
“This has been kind of a weird summer,” Lamb said. “Nice, rainy weather one week and the next week is hotter than blazes.”
