I’ve had my hands in soil since I was part of the childhood brigade that helped our parents landscape our house on Price Street as they planted expanses of St. Augustine grass, carved flower beds from the topsoil, and started citrus and peach trees that bore fruit for all the years we lived there.
My mother’s roses, iris, amaryllis, and bougainvillea filled our yard with fragrance and color, as did the azar of citrus blossoms. The amaryllis I sell came from her garden.
The seeds my father brought home from his hardware store grew beets, carrots, and green beans in a side yard garden, and when he mastered that space, he challenged himself to plant acres of corn, cantaloupe, watermelon, and calabacita (Tatume) in the iron-rich red dirt of La Perla, the little farm in Hebbronville that my grandmother gave him, the farm from which she had fed her children during the Great Depression.
My father was a businessman and not a farmer, but what a lot of luck he had raising far more food than our household could consume. He gave the produce to family, friends, his employees, and to anyone who needed it. Ours was a rich feast to eat food we siblings had helped our father plant, tend, and harvest.
Lessons in patience came in the time it took seeds to sprout, how long before the plowed rows were no longer visible under a canopy of vines, how long before the small roundness of a baby watermelon became a ripe, robust fruit that took two hands to carry.
We learned the names of our tools and the value of them, and the first two of us learned to drive on my father’s gray and red 1948 Ford tractor.
The lifetime lessons of that enterprise, of course, were to understand the relationship of soil to seed to light to rain, and the value of water, and beyond those lessons, there was the invaluable lesson of nurturing. Those lessons were expanded upon on the natural setting of the ranchlands as lifetime witnesses to cycles of heartbreaking drought and the miraculous reprieve of gully washers that filled ponds and turned the landscape green almost overnight, it seemed.
Fast forward to the two decades I lived away from Laredo and where this dry-land heart took environmental succor from Little Arkansas on the Blanco River, the San Marcos, the Guadalupe, the Colorado, the Llano, the Medina, and the Pedernales, Hamilton’s Pool, Jacob’s Well, and Onion Creek that ran at the edge of our small farm in Buda.
When I was married to George Allen Altgelt in Austin, we opened Austin’s first organic plant nursery, The Jungle Store, in the early 1970s. I loved that place on 29th Street for all that I learned there, for the exposure to so many beautiful living things, and for the neighborhood that was our community.
I was lucky enough back then to be able to take our son George to work with me for the first three years of his life, so that he could experience, even in his napping moments, the rich, teeming vibrance of a greenhouse ecosystem that included an aviary filled with toucans, macaws, conures, parrots, and toucanettes.
Before enrolling in pre-kinder, he grew into a charming, affable, and articulate toddler who blew the lid off the company’s sales records.
