Gardening With Mom



I would classify my mom as a Master Gardener, among the many other “Mom skills” she clearly mastered. Early on, it was surely a necessity in order to feed the family and I can remember the hours she spent canning and preparing her harvest to feed us over the winter. When us kids were older, she went back to school at the local community college culminating in a move to the Twin Cities to get her degree in Horticulture at the U. During her time in college she worked with some people working on developing hybrid blueberry varieties that could withstand the Minnesota brutal winters. After graduation she got a job with the USDA as a food quality inspector. But a dream had been born.

While she was working, even while out of state, she started working on starting her own blueberry farm in northern Minnesota on land she had inherited from her uncle. She and my dad worked at clearing the land (totally forested) and creating an environment for growing blueberries. They hand planted 7000 plants of a few varieties in 4 different “meadows” over the next few years. With a lot of help from many extended family members, a very successful “Pick Your Own” blueberry business was born. I went up every opening weekend, as did a lot of extended family to help out my mom and dad with all the customers. It was always a great time hanging out with family, and we all had our jobs to do. I usually worked the checkout with my dad’s cousin and even the kids were put to work hauling pails of blueberries for customers. It was so successful for many years, that sometimes we had to turn customers away to wait for the next picking. Some customers wanted to make sure they got in and they were lined up down the road in their cars way before the 8:00 opening. One year, the line of cars was still there and there was no more room to put pickers in. So, my mom gave me the job of closing the gate and telling all those customers that we were full and they would need to check the phone line to see when they could come and pick. Since they had been waiting in line since before 8:00, they were none too happy about it. I guess she figured I was enough of a badass to handle it, but confident that I would be able to smile and manage the difficult conversation with some finesse and not piss off any customers. I took one for the team quite successfully.

At age 69 she cleared another field and planted another 2000 blueberry plants in order to extend her business of growing and selling blueberries. She finally retired at age 82, only because she couldn’t physically keep up the amount of work necessary to maintain the business in the manner she was devoted to. The years of weeding, pruning, mulching, and the other multitudes of tasks required to maintain the beauty of her meadows had taken a toll.

Being raised by this inspirational woman with a passion for growing, my own gardening experiences took many forms. It started with my eagerness to help mom as a young girl. My mom tells me she has a picture (somewhere) of me in the spring before my 3rd birthday all geared up to help her with transplanting. Apparently I had appropriated my dad’s knee high rubber boots to wear. Obviously way too big for me, but I wore them proudly. I’m not sure how I was even able to walk in them, as they swallowed me in whole. I hope she can dig up that picture someday.

But, as I got older, I was less anxious to be mom’s helper, as I had more important things to do, like playing and running around with other kids. But, I clearly remember my younger brothers and I being required to weed in the garden daily before we were set free to play as we wished. After several years of that nonsense growing up, I vowed I would never have a garden. It was way too much work and kept me from having fun. I just couldn’t see it. And I didn’t.

But, in my mid-thirties we bought a house that had a raised flower garden in the back yard. I thought that was pretty cool and proceeded to maintain and improve the flower garden. But, absolutely no vegetables! I just couldn’t see the point of growing vegetables, but could get into a beautiful flower garden.

That was the beginning of 30+ years of planting and growing flowers. 15 years later we moved out of the city to a rural suburb. This house had even more flower gardens, so I got even busier with them. I often turned to my mom for advice as she was clearly an expert and was a tremendous help. Although I swore I would never do vegetables, I did plant one tomato plant in my flowers for my husband. But that was it. One summer when I was being treated for cancer and was in the hospital for weeks, she came down to see me in the hospital and put herself to work, cleaning up one of the perennial gardens I had not had the time to get to. What a mom!

A new septic mound system had been installed just before we moved in and one of the flower gardens was torn up. It was a large mound and would be challenging and a lot of work to mow. I decided to plant wild flowers on the mound instead of maintaining grass. That turned out to be a major undertaking. At the State Fair I came across a booth with a woman selling wildflower seeds. I talked to her for quite a while and learned what I would have to do. My son and a friend’s son helped me clear off the growing weeds, grasses and little trees growing there. After applying weed killer in the fall, I was ready to plant the next spring. Around the time I was going to start planting I got a stress fracture in my foot and was wearing a walking cast. No worries, I got a plastic lawn bag and tied it around my leg to keep the cast clean and proceeded to plant. It did get a little challenging though when it came time to walk over and over the whole mound in order to tap the seeds down. But, I got it done.

Years later, I decided to tear out the raised garden in the front yard, which had been my pride and joy. The roots from the big maple tree in one side of the garden had torn up the old bricks around the garden and it was looking pretty ugly. I hired a landscaper to build 2 new gardens circles, one for annuals and one for perennials. But once again, when it came time to plant, I wasn’t exactly in shape to plant. I was recovering from my breast cancer lumpectomy with a drain in my left armpit because my lymph nodes weren’t too happy with that whole process. Guess what! Here comes my mom. I had been telling her all about my plans. She came down and brought several perennials from her garden to get me started. She was over 80 by this point and her knees wouldn’t let her get down and back up. I couldn’t use my left arm but between the two of us we loaded in the dirt and planted both gardens. We barely had one working body between us, but found a way to get it done.

Only a few years later, I was admiring my gardens in the spring and realized that with my back problems (2 previous surgeries for a herniated disk, and facing a spine fusion) and my husband’s health issues we could no longer keep up our big house and everything that went with it. It was time to move. We downsized into a single level townhome and I had to give up my flower gardens. Not one to despair, I simply went out and purchased pots of flowers, some already made up and some to create my own pots.

Fast forward 3 years…Mother’s Day, 2025. It’s a tough one this year. Since my first-born son passed away, last December, the thought of Mother’s Day would bring me to tears on a regular basis. I decided I wasn’t doing Mother’s Day this year. I couldn’t bring myself to celebrate being a mother. The only thing I wanted to do, was be with my mom. I thought I would maybe drive up for the day, or meet her halfway for lunch. When I talked to her, she said she was actually thinking about coming to my place and staying overnight. 150 miles each way is a long way to do the trip in a day for her. I thought that was an excellent idea, because I would get a whole lot more time with her, than I could get if I went up there. My husband is no longer in any kind of shape to go with me, so it would have to be a quick trip for me. We agreed that her coming down was the perfect solution. She said she would bring some potato salad, deviled eggs and a dessert. I picked up some marinated chicken breasts and we didn’t have to put a lot of work into meals. She asked if we were going to do any greenhouses and I told her I already had that planned out for us to do. And, we did.

Once again, I was in tenuous physical shape for planting. I was still using crutches and a walking boot for my broken foot and in a lot of hip and back pain waiting on a SI joint fusion. But, we went shopping for flowers for both of us (she still has gardens and all kinds of flower pots at her cabin and had barely started her own greenhouse haunting to get her flowers.) She was looking for a specific variety of fuchsia and hadn’t found it yet. On Saturday, we came home and she transplanted my flowers for me. We realized that one of the larger plants I had bought needed a bigger planter than what it came in. So, Sunday, back to another greenhouse for a planter. And, more flowers of course. They had a planter with the kind of fuchsia she wanted. I told her I was buying it for her for Mother’s Day and in honor of my father, who every year, bought her the biggest and best fuchsia he could find for Mother’s Day and her birthday in the same week. By the time we climbed back in the truck, groaning from the exertion, it was pretty easy to convince her that she could spend another night. The drive home would go much better the next morning.

We’ve come full circle from me wanting to help her as a toddler, then hating everything about gardening, to enjoying planting flowers together. She turned 88 this week and has only slowed down enough for her body to catch up. She is truly my hero. The joy of being with my mom through Mother’s Day weekend filled my heart and hers as well, I think. The pain in my heart of celebrating Mother’s Day without my son was filled with a peace from the time spent with my mom and gardening. A truly wonderful gift.