Life in the Garden

Garden Story

All the best farms or gardens have a story. So what’s the story behind Grandpa’s Pasture Garden? Though Grandpa’s Pasture Garden as a market garden is just beginning, its story really started when Grandpa and Grandma Anliker bought an 80-acre parcel between Tumalo and Sisters in the late 1940s. He built the house my family now lives in — out of railroad iron and concrete blocks, finishing in the early 1950s. They raised their daughters…

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Blog Posts:

Winter Window-Garden….

Sixteen years ago, while we lived in Thailand, we could have had a garden almost year round, but we didn’t. There were so many pests to fight against, the worst…

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About Me

Maybe my need to garden started when I came to consciousness as a five-year-old in Loma Linda, California. My parents liked to work outside on the fruit trees in the yard. I remember our neighbors had fresh figs. I refused to eat them fresh, but I did enjoy them once they candied them. My folks rented our next house in town from Grandma Whitney (Hulda Crooks), who climbed mountains into her 90s and let little girls help her plant pansies and watch her sulfur apricots from the trees in our joint back yard. She also grew pink pomegranates and grapes and sweet peas, and it was a delightful place to live.

Or maybe it was the tiny garden bed Mom pickaxed next to the sidewalk of our rental in Lake Havasu City, Arizona. She sifted out all the rocks, removed the horrible thistles, added steer manure, and grew the most amazing crop of tomato hornworms on the tomatoes she planted that I’ve ever experienced. Dad’s creative methods of dispatching them are still a family legend. If not that, maybe it was the garden in Moscow, Idaho, or the bananas, okra, tomatoes, and avocados she grew on Guam.

Or maybe it was just that I loved books like “Little House in the Big Woods” and wanted to grow and harvest my own food from a young age. Wherever this passion for growing things came from, I can’t wait to see where it ends up!

—The Midnight Gardener

Since this website is in its infancy, you won’t find me on these other platforms, yet. I’ll let you know once Grandpa’s Pasture Garden has a presence — and then we can hang out there!