No time to sit still for this veteran, he’s a baker by day, gardener by night, good luck keeping up with this gentleman. Get ready to have your mouth watering at the sounds of cheese twists, jalepeno fire tongues and huckleberry muffins he bakes at his German Bakery called the Backstube Edelweiss in Arlee, MT. He also shares tips on growing in our challenging Montana climate and some money saving ideas for extending your season with homemade hoop-houses.

Tell us a little about yourself.

I’m a born native Montanan, lived in Europe for 30 years and then decided to come back to Montana. The time I was in Europe and Germany, I didn’t do a lot of farming, but I did know a lot of older farmers that were in their 60’s and 70’s back then and that was quite a few years ago, they showed me a lot of simple but very effective gardening tips and stuff like that, it all has to do with simplicity. The easier you make it, usually the better it is. This is the first year that I’ve had the garden here. I also have a bakery.

The bakery got started because of Europe, I really missed their breads and pasteries, so we started going to the farmers market with baked goods and next thing you know I have this full blown bakery, which supports the community very well and the community supports us very well, and it’s kind of the way it goes with gardening, you know, it’s one hand washes the other, it’s fun and I enjoy it! It’s a lot of work, yes, but I think the proceeds are better, they say, you harvest what you sow …

Gardening, everybody glorifies organic now-a-days, they say you need to be organic certified through the agricultural department and pay all of these fees through the agriculture department to get a certificate to be organic. To me, if a person has a garden, its their conscious that lets them say, either I’m organic or not. If I dump 40 gal of chemical to make it grow, there’s no way in the world I can say I’m organic.  But if I take 5lbs of chicken manure, then yes, I can say it organic fertilizer, it’s not chemical, it’s organic. To me organic is going back to the basics of life, keeping things neat. Weeds are a problem, maybe you’re harvest isn’t quite as big as Joe next door that’s using Mircale Grow and all this other stuff in his garden, but I think mine probably tastes better.

Tell me about your first gardening experience?

Born in Kalispell, and raised in a little town between East and West Glacier called Essex. Essex was my very first gardening experience, I was probably 8 years old, the only thing we had growing season time, a little bit of lettuce and radishes.

The growing season’s probably from the first part of June till the end of August, if you have that long of a period even? If you’re not getting your crop eaten by deer. Almost dead center between East and West Glacier, on Highway 2, which is a fun highway, it’s got a lot of neat scenery. Horseradish grows really well up there, and rhubarb. But gardening itself was basically just radishes and lettuce.

Then in the early ’70s to mid 70’s we moved down to the West Valley side of Kalispell, we went from a little garden in Essex to a garden down there that was probably about 20 x 80. That was more from necessity then pleasure, we had a pretty good size family, and times back in the ’70’s were pretty hard … Then we started to garden. My step-dad was the one that was kind of the instigator of it all, and us kids had to do it all of the work.

Then I joined the military and went to Europe, that’s where I started. I had a little garden but didn’t really have a lot of time to do anything with it. I talked to lots of the older generation, Germans, after I learned to speak the language, learning all the different type of natural Naturheilkunde I forget what they call it in English, Homeopathic, natural medicines and herbs and stuff like that different natural herbs, that you can do, make tea out of them. This older gentlerman that lived next to me, and I was cutting the grass one day, and I didn’t speak much German, and he was going crazy on me, I was cutting this rare herb that usually only grows in really bad soil, almost an alley way, or just really bad soil. And it was just growing like crazy. It’s a natural herb that they use for blood thinner. I was just mowing it over with the lawn mower, and he just went crazy!

One day I was coming home from work, and he was in my yard, and he had all these little fence things and he was putting them all around these different bushes, over these clumps of grass, and I was saying “what are you doing?” and he’s saying o”h don’t touch this! This is this and this is that!” and he actually wrote all these little cards and put the German name on there and the botanical name and what it was used for. I thought, oh my god, what do I have here? Do I have a natures druggery in my back yard!

I got some books and things and read about it. It was an experience and it showed me how to do different things and how to use other plants. He was using stinging nettle.

He would take stinging nettle, not cook it or anything, just soak it in water, and just use the water, the brine from it, as a spray on plants for mites or things and stuff like that on it. And it worked. It was quite interesting. Then he would take the solid mass from the stinging nettle, and he would pulverize it and use it as a fertilizer. 

We have stinging nettle all over the place around here. He could reach right into the stinging nettle bare handed and not even be bothered. I don’t know why? He said that it never bothered him, he said if you don’t do it in the months that don’t have an R in it you’re good to go.

Tell us about something that grew well this year.

Actually, my radishes were growing so well, and then they all got woody on me. The heat they just shoot, they get seeds real quick. My spinach, I had a really hard time trying to keep it down to where it would produce good spinach leaves.

My arugala salad went crazy on me and it’s already gone to seed, and I’m just gonna let it keep going, and keep the seed and dry it, and use it next year to plant so I don’t have to buy any.

My arugala went to seed, but it’s still pretty fresh and tasty. The little leaves are still tender. 

I don’t have a greenhouse, I planted my first rows of lettuce the First day of April.

I made little hoop house and put some nice foil over the top it grew,

For our first farmer’s market the fist o f may, I had lettuce like you wouldn’t believe, I had arugala, spring mix and a regular leaf lettuce, that was just amazing.

I took a real thin backing material from a piece of scrap wood from Home Depot or something, and I cut strips about an inch and a half wide, and soaked them and then bent them and made little hoops out of them, A friend of mine has these big hoop houses like green houses and he had some extra foil, laying around, plastic covering, heavier then the stuff you can buy at the box stores and it’s actually made for greenhouses, and I stapled a couple of boards along each side of it so I roll it up easy if it was getting too hot or whatever and draped it over these hoops, it was like a little mini greenhouse.

It worked great, even though we were having some really bad weather and cold nights in April and May, my stuff never froze at all.

Best stuff you can use is a 16th inch or 5mm plywood works really good, because you soak it in water. And these little hoops that I made, maybe they are only 18-20” off the ground so it keeps the warmth down there from heating up in the daytime.

I got cabbage growing this year already. I thought I got hit by the cabbage butterfly, that cabbage moth.

I found out today from a friend of mine, I pulled the center out and looked at it, and it’s still good, he said leave that root stalk in there, he had a cabbage that had a roots stalk, grew three years in a row.

First year had nice big heads, the next year he had 3 heads per plant, but they were smaller, but good and tender and, then the third year he said he got another crop off of another root stalk. I pulled that one out, I didn’t know any better. This winter I’ll probably just cover them up and see what happens.

A lot of guests talk about the biggest thing is protect it and keeping the wind from drying them out.

I don’t remember it being so dry and hot. Living up there in Essex,we didn’t have a lot of wind, Right here living in the Jocko Valley, it’s just hot, dry, wind blowing …

They just banned all the fireworks up here. We got a well and water this year, and we’re already having a hard time keeping our place wet and the fire