This man can garden! He's Bill Kindzerski, Ukranian by heritage, hard-working by choice and personality, humble as the Montana sky is conspicuous and commanding. He may have a classic Montana story. He grew up on a homestead on flat, high plains to the far northeast; he taught school all over the state; and he retired in a valley near mountainous Hamilton to continue his life-long hobby of extreme vegetable gardening (extreme to those of us who dabble at it in our little city gardens back home). "One year was an excellent year for tomatoes," he says without a trace of pride. "I weighed everything that year and we harvested 3/4 ton of tomatoes."
Another case in point. To combat the relatively short growing season here, Bill "hardens off" his geraniums and other tender plants -- mostly annuals -- in a rolling greenhouse of his own invention. It's the back of a small pickup truck that he's outfitted with wide shelves and a plastic cover. In spring, he moves it out of his garage in the morning to catch the day's warm sun and back in at night to protect plants from coldest temps. They'll be out in the garden when the current cold, wet spell is past.
But there's even more in Bill's arsenal. I get to meet him and see his many garden beds on a cool blustery day when Sharon Lewis -- co-host of a wonderful dinner the night before (her husband, Jerry, had given us, strangers, some roadside directions and then invited us to supper!) -- picks me up and takes me to see the best garden for miles around. She and her gardening friends are huge fans of Bill's talents. They call him their gardening guru.
He meets us with coveralls and knee pads on, introduces us to his wife Jenna and quickly gets rid of the outerwear to begin a tour. He grows vining plants such as cucumbers on strong angled trellises of his own design (they're across an expanse of his garden, in the distance above; close up, below). They keep the plants off soil and away from disease and pests...
...Above, he creates a warm micro-climate with a wall of rocks that he's pulled out of his garden soil. They face south and collect heat during the day, get covered with plastic -- along with the pepper plants under a hoop -- at night (unless strong winds pull off the tarp, as they did recently). "Last year was one of the best years for peppers," Bill says, "and the weather wasn't warmer."
Big, fenced-in rounds of compost --12 feet in diameter and filled with grass clippings from two lawn services, plus his own vegetable waste and leaves -- are his biggest keys to success. He reaches into the middle of one to show us the black, friable, finished product. Over the years, compost has built up many inches of topsoil on his vast garden property. See just one healthy border, below, decorated as much with big clumps of chives as with irises in a range of hues.
Before we leave, Bill pulls off a stalk of tree onion, known for its cluster of tiny bulbs where other onions have flowers. I take a taste of the stem as we finish walking around, and it's better and a bit spicier than any green onion I've had. This plant also is known as walking onion because the heads fall over and re-seed around the garden; but they're easy to control, Bill says.
Bill is a Montana -- if not a national -- gardening treasure. Sharon wants to help him keep up with his fantastic project. She's brought her gardening gloves along, but the hour is late. She's careful to make an appointment with Bill before she leaves for returning on the weekend to help him do whatever he thinks need doing to keep the garden strong!
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