Once upon a time there lived a farmer who had a wife and NINE children. They lived in a big white farmhouse in the country. The wife spent the whole day and late into the night caring for the children, fixing meals, making clothes and preserving food that came from the fields. The children had a lot of chores to do but when they finished the house cleaning, helping with the babies and working in the gardens they enjoyed running through the fields, chasing butterflies, looking for arrowheads and exploring the edges of the pond.

Because there were so many mouths to feed the farmer worked two jobs. At night he worked for the railroad directing trains and switching boxcars from one track to another. During the day he was a 'truck gardener'. His father was a truck gardener also who had a farm along the banks of the Ohio River and his grandfather before him was also but he lived in Germany. A truck gardener is a farmer who grows a lot of different crops and after they are harvested they are loaded onto a truck and taken to the Haymarket to be sold.

One day the farmer's brother, Paul, came to him and said, "Joe, if you grow some Bibb lettuce, cut it and put it into baskets, I will take it to Chicago and sell it." The farmer who always needed a little extra income for his growing family thought this sounded like a grand idea. The rest, as they say, is history. Dad would tell stories about how he and his mother would sit at the kitchen table in the old farmhouse along the Ohio River going through flower and vegetable catalogues in the dead of winter. Farming is always somewhat of a gamble and particularly during the Great Depression seed selection was very carefully made.

We put up the first greenhouses in the early '60s along with the concrete block garage that is still used today. Bibb lettuce in turn evolved into the annuals and vegetable plants that Dad grew up knowing so well.


To be continued...