/johnny
Dad spent almost 50 years building up his soil. Started with a backyard garden in the heart of the south side of Chicago, near the Indiana border. My brother still lives there. The houses were built on rock and slag, lots of steel mills around and that’s where he worked. Besides compost and fish he caught he would drive a couple of miles into Indiana to a forest preserve where a few people rode horses and he would shovel the poop into his trunk. He also got chicken manure from a guy a few blocks away who had a triple lot and had chickens for eggs. Every now and then we would bring him down a few bales of straw (we were 200 miles away). When we were kids he would send us up and down the block with bouquets of leaf lettuce and green onions wrapped in newspaper for the neighbors. Ah, memories.