HAMILTON, Mont. – It’s high season for gardeners in the Bitterroot. Vegetables and flowers are flourishing. Our climate and soils welcome potatoes, sweet corn and carrots, as well as barley, oats and wheat.
But it might surprise you how many other crops are doing well in what many consider a shorter growing season in a northern state. A Hamilton couple has shown just how much variety a garden can produce.
Bill and Virginia Kindzerski’s vegetable, grain and flower garden isdazzling. It’s big — one-third of an acre.
“I love nature,” said Bill Kindzerski. “I love plants. I guess I was born that way.”
Last week he hurt his shoulder, but it hasn’t stopped him from gardening. He grew up on a farm in Scobey, in northeastern Montana. Actually, he said the growing season in Scobey is longer than in the Bitterroot.
He said the Bitterroot can get those late spring and early fall frosts. But he’s learned what to plant, and to get many plants started before he puts them in the ground.
He is growing crops uncommon to Montana, including many types of melons, sweet potatoes, even a globe artichoke. We don’t think of celery as growing in Montana. It’s a big California crop. But Bill Kindzerski is growing it in the Bitterroot, and it is beautiful.
He is growing grains that many of us have probably never heard of. There’s a lush red grain in his garden called amaranth, a South American grain. It was a staple of the Aztecs.
There are many herbs, including woolly thyme, which is often used for medicinal purposes.
Virginia Kindzerski takes care of the flower beds.
“I just water them and they seem to grow,” she said. Her gorgeous layout is filled with annuals in the summer, tulips in the spring and flowering cabbage in the winter.
“We had cabbages one year in December that looked like Christmas trees,” she said.
The Kindzerskis don’t use herbicides or pesticides and no commercial fertilizer. They use a great deal of compost. Bill Kindzerski doesn’t use a rototiller.
“All of this garden is spaded with what they call a broad fork,” he said, “every square foot of it.”
The broad fork is a tool that just loosens the soil, aerating it, and disturbing it less to keep it intact to help plants grow better.
You have to look hard to find a weed. That’s because Bill gets them before they ever go to seed. This garden “isn’t work,” he said. “It’s fun.”
The gardener said healthy soil makes for healthy plants, and healthy plants, he said, are attacked less by disease and pests.
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