Gardening has always been a big part of my life. Of all the places I have lived I would scratch out some kind of garden plot. When we lived in Greenville, California we purchased a 7 horse power Troy-Built rototiller in 1977, to till a fenced garden plot that was next to the old ranch house we rented. After moving into a government house on the Gold Beach Ranger Station in 1979 the tiller came with us, but we were not allowed to develop a garden plot since the station was on the National Historical Register as it had been constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corp or CCC. A few month after our arrival some friends let us garden on their property outside of town. In 1981 we bought our first house on two acres along Hunter Creek, two miles south of Gold Beach. Here we had a big garden, chickens, a sheep for wool, a goat for milk and a fixer-upper house with all its never ending repair projects. As if I did not have enough to do, there were weekends I helped neighbors and friends with tilling their gardens. In the fall of 1986 my wife and two children moved to Eugene where she attended the University of Oregon. In 1988 I was offered a job with the Forest Service in Cottage Grove to be closer to family and rented a house on Lynx Hollow Road where I developed a small garden. Shortly thereafter the Gold Beach house was sold. In 1990 my wife and I went our separate ways with a divorce and in order to have my children live with me on a part-time basis I bought a small house in Eugene in 1991 where they were attending school. Here I developed a blueberry patch that the neighbors and a few homeless people enjoyed who were living in the nearby ash tree swamp along Amazon Creek in South Eugene.
When I left the Forest Service in March of 1995 a co-worker, who had an artistic talent for drawing, made me a cartoon advertisement which included my phone number and a sketch of me and my dog Jack rototilling. I hung the poster up at the Oasis Market on Willamette Street in Eugene and the phone started ringing with job offers. People started telling their friends and neighbors of my rototilling service and at times the phone was ringing off the hook. Some of those people asked if I would do other work, such as pruning, hauling garden soil, hauling yard debris, building fences, painting, repairing lawn mowers or other power equipment. There was one woman who wanted me to teach her husband how to do gardening work. He seemed to be more content watching TV and drinking beer. Another woman with a plot at a community garden hired me to rototill after dark by the headlights of her pickup. Then there was the woman with many cats on leashes in her back yard that would hire me once a year to haul a pallet of cat food from a store in North Eugene and help her unload it in her garage. One of the most colorful clients was an older woman that was always in her bathrobe that wanted to be called Grandma. I did a variety of work for her from rototilling, cutting blackberries and removing a Willow tree that had fallen in her yard. When it came time to pay me she would always add a large bonus from a big roll of cash she had in her house. I tried to refuse the extra money, but she would reply, “never argue with Grandma”. There was a woman who wanted to sell me her 8 horse power Troy-Built tiller at a cheap price and I bought it thinking it might come in handy when the other one broke down. All my equipment was hauled around Eugene and Springfield in my old rusty 1975 Ford pickup. The bolts holding the bed to the frame were so badly rusted out I feared losing it all on some busy intersection, luckily it never happened.
In 1997 I bought a DR Brush mower and took on brush and high grass mowing jobs, many located in the hills south of Eugene. Some of these elegant homes had acreage with forest land and private driveways in need of vegetation clearing. A few of these land owners asked me to estimate the value of their timber. After deducting logging costs from the market value of the logs and adding the expense for cleaning up the mess or logging slash there was little return to the land owners.
One of the better paying jobs was with the University of Oregon Housing Department that would hire me to do chainsaw work on hazard trees and brush mowing around houses they owned east of the campus. There was no bidding required. The housing manger would call me, show me what had to be done and paid me whatever I billed them, no questions asked.
Most of this gardening work was seasonal from March into June and by fall the phone calls were far and few between. In the fall of 1996 I enrolled at Lane Community College and studied Agricultural and Industrial Equipment Technology taking courses over four terms in electrical systems, hydraulics, welding and engine repair. Except for a welding class two nights a week all other classes started at 7am and were out by noon giving me the afternoons to schedule any calls for work.
Under an apprenticeship program with this class it landed me a seasonal job from June through September from 1996 to 2000 as a mechanic and equipment operator on a grass seed farm near Harrisburg. Whenever summer rains shut down operations on the farm for a few days I would catch up on a few gardening jobs in and around Eugene.
In November of 1997 I met Celia, who was working for the Olum Child Care Center at the University of Oregon. By the spring of 1998 she was helping me with gardening jobs on weekends and enrolled in the OSU Master Gardeners Program. Thereafter she became a partner and the brains of the outfit we called C & M Gardening Service, a business registered with the Oregon Secretary of State which we operated together until we moved to our property outside of Oakland, Oregon in 2006 when we officially retired. By the way we also got married in October of 2000 and bought a house in Cottage Grove.
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