When I had a question about vegetable gardening, I knew just who to turn to. My very good friend Bob Hicks is not only the best gardener I know he’s also the oldest. When I called for advice, his lovely wife, Micheline, told me he’d call me back as he got off the tractor, he was currently busy grading the driveway. Did I mention that Bob is a very happy and active 94 years old?
It didn’t take much encouragement to get Bob talking about gardening. When I asked when he had his first garden, he laughed and said that when he was six years old, his mother gave him a small garden plot for his own and he’s been gardening since.
Bob grew up in Dublin, Georgia with his parents and 6 brothers and sisters and lived in this childhood home until he joined the service in 1943. His mother, he says, was a wonderful gardener and grew all kinds of vegetables including butter beans, field peas, green beans, collard greens, okra, onions, sweet potatoes and of course, corn and tomatoes.
“Most of our fertilizer came from chickens. My mother had an ingenious design for a chicken house and yard that actually fenced in two different garden plots. She’d garden one for one year and let the chickens in the other, then switch the next year.” (See Bob’s drawing below.)
When I asked if his mother preserved the garden harvest, Bob’s eyes lit up. “We had a wall about 14 feet long, 9 feet tall and by the end of July it was filled with mason jars that had been canned with everything from tomatoes to okra to butterbeans. It was the prettiest thing you’d ever see.”
Bob’s love of gardening, begun as a six year old, has lasted almost nine decades. And maybe this love of the earth, this life-long habit of finding simple satisfaction in caring and nurturing for something has kept him active, interested and interesting all these years.
In his”real” life, Bob was a successful and very well respected lawyer. In 2009, he won the Georgia Bar Association Tradition of Excellence Award. When Justice George H. Carley introduced him at the award ceremony, he said that Bob was “a lawyer’s lawyer.” Well, I can’t testify to that, but I can tell you that Bob is a “gardener’s gardener,” who successfully blends knowledge, experience and pure joy in growing things. His thumbs are green and he still has garden dirt under his fingernails. May I be so lucky when I’m his age! My I be so lucky to someday BE his age!
Stay safe and sane and keep gardening!
Laura
Nice story. Well preserved advice from a generation that knew how to survive hard times. We can learn a lot when we pay attention.
Nice portrait of your friend Bob.