Area Treasure

This is a small portion of Joe's Garden, begun in 1933 and still going strong. It's one of the northwest's original truck gardens. If you can't grow your own garden this is absolutely the next best thing. From spring to fall it's a gold mine of every fresh vegetable you can imagine, all raised pesticide free, and purveyed by people who love what they do. Our community has grown up around it over the years but Joe's keeps getting better and better. I love stopping by on my way home from work and buying veggies that have been picked that very morning.

I've never been much of a gardener but when I moved to a ranch in Montana in 1971 and had 180 acres to play with, I put in the world's largest garden. In my enthusiasm, I planted about 8 hills of zuccini, with about 4 plants in each hill. To say that I overplanted the stuff was an understatement, but what did I know -- I was raised in the suburbs of Los Angeles and had no experience with gardens. One or two plants would have yielded enough for even the most fanatical zuccini lover. Added to their prolific nature was the fact that I believe zuccini is the only vegetable that has time to mature in Montana's painfully short growing season. In no time at all I was harvesting zuccini that were the size of propane tanks and I kept harvesting, and harvesting and harvesting until I could no longer think of anything to do with zuccini except write a screenplay for a science fiction movie about mutant zuccini attacking an unsuspecting Montana family. My family got to the point they wouldn't even come to dinner if zuccini was featured on the menu. So I attempted to give it away but was met with a number of people trying to do the same thing.

As far as the rest of the garden was concerned, nothing survived the surprise hail, snow or windstorms southcentral Montana is famous for, so in the end the zuccini was a huge, and the only, success.