A good job with good pay and you’re okay

Citizen Conversations

My grandpa, Edgar Banse, was a businessman through and through. After he sold his general store, BB&D in downtown Weimar, he continued to offer water well repair out of his home. Grandpa was the son of a first-generation German immigrant who farmed and ranched to feed his family. It was easy to understand why he chose to pursue a degree in business, avoiding the grueling manual labor he endured helping his pop on the farm. As an adult, he had no use for even something as simple as a backyard garden.

But Grandma Banse had other ideas. I spent many hours helping her pick green beans or shell peas from her garden behind their yellow house on FM155. It really wasn’t work to me and I picked up her love of nurturing her family’s food. I hope she’d be proud of the small garden my husband, Will, and I started in our own Weimar backyard this past weekend.

A close family member and good friend, Mr. James Polk, loaned us his tiller Saturday and it didn’t take long for Will to turn the soil. My former neighbor, Mr. Ernest Kubesh, gave me his old cultivator before he passed away, and I remembered him fondly as a careful built up the rows, just as he taught me all those years ago. Will broke down two old wooden wire spools he obtained from doing linework and used the wood planks to build me a dry walkway. We planted heirloom tomatoes, a variety of peppers, cucumber, crookneck squash, green beans, marigolds, dill, cilantro, one strawberry plant, and a few kennels of sweet corn.

There’s a reason that strawberry plant is in the

mix. I’m going to let you in on a little-known family secret. As much as Grandpa Banse hated anything related to farming, he always grew little bit of mint for his iced tea, a few vines of mustang grapes, and a small discreet patch of wandering strawberry plants on the south side of his old yellow house. Some of my best memories were going with him to pick a few fresh strawberries. Most of the time they didn’t make it past the corner of the house. We ate them fresh at the patch. As I built the fresh garden soil up around my lone strawberry plant, I couldn’t help but think I should have tucked it away and hid it on the south side of my house somewhere instead.

Another sentimental addition to my garden is the sweet corn. I didn’t like a lot of vegetables when I was little, but like most kids, I loved sweet corn. My dad, Jerry Banse, and I planted a garden or two behind our house and it always included several stalks of corn. One year the cows in the pasture next door to our house got out and ate all of our corn. I was devastated but Dad saved the day. He dried my tears quickly when he suggested we replace our lost stalks with popcorn kernels. That year we enjoyed fresh popcorn, right off the ear. Sadly, it’s hard to find popcorn on the rack of seeds at the store, so I had to settle for sweet corn. Now, if a cow somehow manages to scale my in-town, chain-link fence and eat my garden, I may have to search a little harder. It’s a tradition, after all.

At the end of the day, I have to admit that I understand why Grandpa Banse chose a career in business instead of agriculture. This big, red blister on my hand serves as painful inspiration to stick with my day job, hiding only a small patch in the back corner of my yard, playing in the dirt just enough to indulge the little girl in me.

So then neither the one who plants nor the one who waters I anything, but God who causes the growth. 1 Corinthians 3:7

Michelle Banse Stokes is the Publisher of the Colorado County Citizen and lives in Weimar. Connect with Michelle on social media: fb.com/MichelleBanseStokes