The ever growing garden of a master

Members of Patti Householder’s family get to shop at “Mom’s Store” on a regular basis. They can select from canned vegetables, applesauce, honey, dried fruit leather, tomato sauce, and spicy salsa. There are also eggs laid daily by her chickens, as well as potatoes from the root cellar and figs, plums, apples, and pears from the orchard. That’s just for starters.

Householder, who lives on seventy-five acres bordering Loblockee Creek north of Loachapoka, is a master gardener. Make that Master Gardener with capital letters, since she is past president of Lee County Master Gardeners and serves on the state board of the Master Gardeners Association. Her home spread, with its terraced gardens, spring-fed pool, and New Orleans-style courtyard, is a great advertisement for gardening – a little pastime she picked up one day in Tennessee that took root quickly and exploded into luxurious bloom.

Patti Householder in her New Orleans-style courtyard

“I love producing my own stuff,” she says. “I know what I’ve put on it, which is nothing.”

Householder grew up near where she lives now. She returned after an odyssey of twenty-five years through Louisiana, Tennessee, and Virginia. Her grandmother had a huge garden, and she remembers apples cut up and laid out to dry in the back window of the car. Her chief interest, however, was making money from her grandmother’s efforts. “I remember picking stuff out of her garden and setting up a card table on the side of the road to sell, wanting to earn a dollar.”

Patti attends a wandering flwer path.

She attended Auburn University and earned a master’s degree in nursing at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, then accompanied her engineering professor husband, Andrew, to Louisiana. From there they moved to her husband’s home state of Tennessee and she started her first small garden. She says her in-laws, who grew potatoes and canned vegetables like beans and tomatoes, inspired her.

Householder’s epiphany came when she moved to Blacksburg, Virginia, home of Virginia Commonwealth University and one of several large community canneries built around the state in the 1940s. Although these were originally created so people could preserve the harvest of their Victory Gardens in bulk, several still operate for avid gardeners. Householder had a small garden, and started putting up jars of beef stew, spaghetti, and chili as well as vegetables. That way, she could return to graduate school in the evenings and know that her husband and two small children didn’t have to fend for themselves at dinnertime. The community cannery let her expand her operation.

The green house keeps tender plants in the winter.

“At home, I could only do seven jars in a stovetop canner, but at the cannery, huge baskets held 96 quarts,” she says. “Canned goods have to cook under pressure for 90 minutes, so I could leave and come back when the jars were cool. Even that was easy, because a fine mist cooled the jars down quickly without breaking them.”

Householder says she can’t even guess how many jars she put up that summer, but once she started, she could not stop. When the family moved back to Louisiana, she taught nursing but kept a garden and continued canning its harvest. When she and her family moved back to Auburn in 2001 she expanded her efforts.

“Now I’m into freezing, canning and drying,” Householder says. “I have a dehydrator with nine racks, so I make fruit leather for my grandchildren. I’m in the garden every day from mid-May until the end of September. This summer I’ve canned a hundred quarts of green beans and probably sixty pints. Now I’m canning pears.”

“I truly don’t know how she fits everything in her day,” Kerry Smith, of the Alabama Cooperative Extension office, wrote in an email. “As a Master Gardener volunteer, Patti is involved at both the local and state levels (volunteer? – her regular day is already full). I’ve known her through
the statewide Alabama Master Gardener Association for four years now. It
feels like much longer and I think that testifies to her level of contribution. No matter if it’s a small detail or a large one (like creating a policy manual), she has the talent to tackle it. Patti sees the big picture surrounding any project, sets a decisive and practical goal, and then connects everyone else to the project with a charming assurance that ‘We can do this.’”

The fountain in Patti's New Orleans courtyard.

The challenges of Southern gardening are one place where Patti puts her can-do attitude to work. One problem she had to solve was how to grow tomatoes without chemicals. “I do tomatoes in containers because of the diseases you get in soil,” Householder says. “Once a disease is in the soil it’s hard to get rid of, so I use new soil every year.” She’s never gardened anywhere but the South, where the heat and humidity contribute to disease.

“That’s one reason why it is very difficult to garden organically here,” Householder says. “Apples and pears, and especially plums and peaches, need to be sprayed, and I don’t spray, so sometimes I don’t get much. I have a Granny Smith tree up top that has maybe a dozen apples this year, but my brother’s and daughter’s pear trees are loaded, and they don’t spray either. And every two to three years I get a great crop of apricots. But if I’m expecting a great crop every year, I’m going to be disappointed. “

She stores enough potatoes in her root cellar to last through the winter. Potatoes really benefit from her no-pesticides approach. The peel is the most nutritious part of the potato, she says, but it’s also where pesticides accumulate. “If you want to spend money for organic food, potatoes is one item where there are real benefits,” she says.

Householder’s interest in ornamental gardening began when she returned to Lee County. The family first lived in an eighteen hundred-square-foot underground home Andrew built while he worked on a permanent house. He asked Patti up the grounds. The space is now a New Orleans style courtyard, which Andrew designed – a rectangle of blue slate tile surrounded by the French country architecture of the buildings, which include the house, her husband’s small office, the underground home, and a gazebo with a grill, half-bath, sink, and dining and seating areas. A riot of flowers and ornamentals spill over stone planter beds and pots in the enclosed courtyard, which also features large trees, including a huge crepe myrtle.

“It’s been a lot trial and error, and I’m putting in more perennials so I don’t have to repot every year,” she says.” But I’ve still got a few annuals, like lantana, coleus, angelonia and vinca.”

On one side, the courtyard spills out into her backyard, with a path winding through a natural tangle of flowers. “I kind of like a natural look,” Householder says. “A lot of it is volunteer and just comes up year after year.” The backyard is also the site of a small pond, replete with water hyacinths. A small stream supplies the pond, which Patti uses to water her gardens. A weathered picket fence separates one raised vegetable bed from the backyard. Inside, frothy asparagus ferns keep company with okra, beans, cucumbers, pimiento peppers, and other vegetables. A six-foot fence surrounds the whole backyard to protect the gardens from deer, but Householder knows they could jump the fence if really motivated.

Behind the underground house, terraces designed by Householder’s husband, slow rainwater runoff down a low hill. Here, she’s planted about thirty blueberry bushes as well as an arbor of scuppernongs, persimmons, and dwarf citrus trees in containers that she moves into an adjacent greenhouse in the winter. She also has both brown turkey and lemon figs, which she purees to make cookie-sized dollops of fruit leather or incorporates into jams with other fruits. Householder says she loves to eat figs, but they’re expensive and difficult to find because fresh figs don’t transport well.

“Birds may get the blueberries and figs, but I have so many I don’t notice,” she says.

Deer are an issue, though, so she has a “deer chaser” that turns on a radio and lights when motion is detected.

“Along about August I really get upset because armadillos get into garden, even under fence,” Householder says. “But when you live where there is a lot of wildlife, that’s the way it is — I’m not going to sit up all night with a gun and a light trying to kill them.”

There’s a whole orchard on the backside of the property along Loblockee Creek, along with a beehive. Householder added the bees to help with pollination, but also got seventy-four pounds of honey this spring. And then there’s the chicken house. “When your husband’s an engineer, you can’t just ask for a simple chicken house,” she laments. “He has to design the chicken house.”

Householder didn’t work outside the home after the family returned to Auburn because she was taking care of her elderly mother and in-laws. As her gardening expanded, she decided to take the Master Gardener course, which consists of one full day of classes for ten to twelve weeks. Aspiring Master Gardeners volunteer fifty hours at the Lee County Extension office or Grandma’s Garden at the Lee County Historical Society museum in Loachapoka, or a demonstration garden in Kiesel Park. Once they’ve attained Master Gardener status, they continue volunteering.

“The course goes over lots of things. You’re by no means an expert when you finish, but you get a good overview,” Householder says. “You learn about soil testing, what plants need, how to identify diseases and insect problems, and the safe use of pesticides.”

Lee County Master Gardeners sponsors a tour of local gardens every two years, and next year the Householder’s spread will be on the tour. That means from February to May Patti Householder will likely be in the garden eight or nine hours a day. Nevertheless, she says she’s still learning.

“Gardening is a lot of trial and error,” she says. “I lose stuff all the time.”

Jacque Kockak is a freelance writer living in Auburn