Maybe we should call it an Osage hoe and not a dutch hoe?

I had a good laugh at Julian Codding's remarks about a hoe and what it taught him and his cousins, Harold and CH.  Basically I identified with his analysis.  If you did not see it, go to Facebook and look it up.  Here is what I learned from a hoe not to be confused with a person but it is an instrument used in the garden.

In fact I should tell you about my wife's experience with a hoe.  We still garden a lot and we use a device we call a Dutch Hoe.  Basically it looks like a stirrup from a saddle on the end of a stick but made with metal and sharp on both sides.  We had about worn out our Dutch Hoe and Shouna decided to look on the Internet to find who carried this tool.  Yes sirree, she typed in Dutch Hoe and boy was she surprised.  We had to do some computer cleanup after that one.  I assume you have been on the Internet enough to know you never, never, ever type in Dutch Hoe and hit enter.

Like Julian if we ever seemed un-busy or not doing something Mom thought was productive she would bring out the hoe and send us to the garden.  I swore for years I would never come back to farming or gardening or even come back to Grainola for fear I would have to work in that garden with the hoe.  Actually there were two other things I hated worse:  chopping ice during the winter and pulling calves.  I always told mom and dad that I would not come back home until they got the old road paved so it would not be gravel.  I lied.

In fact I fondly remember the fresh vegetables and the rhubarb and potatoes in the spring with green beans and bacon cooked together.  Gosh, that was good eaten!  I also knew that it took work to get those veggies to grow and produce and of course it took a hoe plus some back labor.  Still to this day it amazes me how you plant beans and they grow in a straight row but weeds come up everywhere and you don't plant them.  I also longed to own a farm and something to grow after leaving the Osage.

In about 1994 I bought a farm in west Edmond, OK and started growing pumpkins(40 acres) and tomatoes (2 to 3 acres) and okra (4 acres of okra - it was a great idea but a little much), strawberries (2 aces), peppers (1 acre), blackberries (1/2 acre) and then I planted 4000 trees and had all kinds of animals and YES we had a gravel road that I built.  After about 7 years of that we developed our farm into a housing addition as Edmond was growing all around us.  We named the addition Clifford Farms after Dad and we named one of the streets Opal Lane after Mom and remember Mom's maiden name was Lane.  Finally after about 12 years we sold the small acreage we had left and built a house in the middle of a 2.25 acre garden.  There is no gravel road and no vegetables but hundreds and hundreds of flowers and plants and trees and yes we have multiple hoes including two Dutch hoes.

A little piece of trivia.  I named my investment business Lane Financial Strategies and my insurance company Lane Financial and Insurance Strategies all named after the Lane side of my family.

So what do you learn in the Osage?

• Be careful on what you call a hoe
• Never say never because God will bring you right back to where you started
• Learn to love your past regardless of the challenges you go through

Thanks for listening,

gary@thepioneerman.com