”We made a good investment,” she says.
The house sits high on a mountain above Weott and the view is spectacular in all directions. It was once the site of the split products camp owned by the Newtons. There were cabins, a cookhouse, and a thriving industry turning out railroad ties, fence posts, and such items. Her late father worked at the Newton camp long before he met her mother and the family settled in Healdsburg where Betty was born. The property has some redwood stumps of significant proportions and when Betty’s father came to visit them, he remembered which ones he had helped fell back in the day when logging was booming.
Developing the neat, well-ordered garden that surrounds the house started with developing a water source. There was a spring on the
A drought came along just after they settled in and the spring almost dried up. They found another spring, even larger than the first. Charlie developed that and they decided to build a water storage tank. She says the hardest day of work she and Charlie ever had was when they built their first concrete water storage tank.
”We started at daylight and didn’t finish till dark,” she says.
That tank held 16,000 gallons, Later they added another tank with a 25,000 gallon capacity.
The flower beds of the garden are built around lush, green lawns, front and back. The plantings are low enough not to interfere with the spectacular views of valleys and mountains. The back garden boasts a nice collection of various ferns and several varieties of rhododendron. The hand-poured concrete pathways lead to a shady area between two redwoods and a pond that Betty says is popular with a ringtail cat and the local raccoons. They like to come and splash in the water and play. The pond is really there for the birds, she says. There’s a large feeding station for them and a traditional birdbath. From the house or the porch, she can watch the birds coming and going.
The patio between the bird area and the house is brick. She and Charlie laid every brick in the patio themselves.
Betty is very particular about the back lawn. She planted over topsoil brought in for that purpose and prefers to mow it herself by hand with a rotary mower. Charlie uses a riding mower on the front lawn.
The vegetable garden is located on a sunny slope between the house and the greenhouse. The greenhouse walls are made of glass. Betty says at the time it was built, the glass was cheaper than fiberglass panels. But the first year she used it she found that the sun coming through the glass was too hot for the tender seedlings and they wound up buying fiberglass panels anyway to protect the seedlings.
Betty grows almost all the fresh produce that she and Charlie eat. About the only thing she buys, she says, is asparagus. She used to have an asparagus patch but it wore out and she hasn’t replaced it yet.
Charlie usually rototills the vegetable garden every year, but he hurt his shoulder, so Betty did the rototilling this year. She doesn’t plant a winter garden. At 1,000 feet elevation, she says, everything shuts down at the end of October. But that’s okay. She says. Once the canning and preserving is done, they look forward to winter and a slower place of weeding, pruning, and cleanup.
In the greenhouse, Betty starts every plant that goes into her vegetable garden and her flowerbeds. She rarely buys starts, she says, because the garden is so large, it would be too expensive. One year, she says, she grew 1,200 marigold seedlings and planted them all in her front flowerbeds. Since then, she has added a variety of shrubs to the beds, but still adds a few hundred marigolds every summer. Betty says that color is always in her mind when she is selecting plants for her beds. Sometimes she sketches her ideas on paper.
Betty says that some seeds like to germinate in the light, and some germinate in the dark. The smaller seeds prefer light, the larger seeds like the dark. Corn, for instance, prefers to germinate in the dark. She plants two corn seeds in each container and then selects the stronger one to plant. She staggers the planting time for her seeds to ensure a longer harvest period.
Her greenhouse is full of flats of lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, tomatoes, peppers, corn, onions, and melons. The only thing she doesn’t start from seed is impatiens. They’re too hard, she says. She can definitely lay claim to a green thumb. Some geranium cuttings that she tossed onto the ground under her seedlings flats have taken root and are thriving.
Betty has been a member of the Southern Humboldt Garden Club since 1954 and in all that time she has never missed the annual flower show. There were less than 100 entries at the first flower show. The upcoming 57th Annual Flower Show on May 18 will likely have over 1,000 entries.
A flower show would not be complete without a few of Betty’s iris, which are guaranteed to win ribbons. She used to have 150 different varieties of iris, but that number is now down to 74.
”I’m getting older. I have to cut down someplace,” she says.
She digs and divides her iris every three years and rotates them from bed to bed. When she moves them she plants them far enough apart so they have room to spread. She says that the iris rhizome shouldn’t be planted more than a half an inch or so into the soil. Some of the rhizome should be above the soil. If you plant them too deep, she says, they won’t flower.
She keeps her iris separate from the other plants. They grow in a bed of their own.
”They bloom such a short time,” she says, “I like to put them off by themselves.”
Betty has a good-sized compost area that she feeds with grass cuttings and prunings piled in short windrows. She is not a believer in using sawdust or wood ashes in her compost. The wood ashes make the soil too alkaline, she says. She doesn’t mulch either, but layers compost on top of her beds to refresh the soil.
The vegetable garden has a row of artichokes, too. Artichokes should be divided every three years as well, she says. Otherwise they won’t make as many artichokes.
”Their clumps get bigger and bigger, she says, “and you have to dig them and divide them or they’ll quit making artichokes.”
A lot of her knowledge of gardening comes from experience. She discovered that if she cut her dahlia stalks back in the fall, the open hollow of the stalks would fill with rain, causing the corm to rot.
”If you can hold off cutting the stalks until late spring,” she says, “your dahlias won’t rot in the ground and will come back and bloom again.”
Betty says that gardening is in her genes. Her grandmother, mother, and cousins were all gardeners, she says.
A gardener’s work is never done, either.
When the weather warms and she and Charlie set up the table and chairs on the brick patio Betty rarely sits long enough to admire her handiwork.
”Every time I sit down,” she says, “I see something that needs to be done.”
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