The way he did sweet corn…a good hoe, time, and the patience to do it right. (Press Pros Feature Photos)
Something that my dad once taught me that I happened to embrace through pure dumb luck…and now, it’s my seasonal retreat from phones, laptops, and the morning news.
It’s Father’s Day weekend, 2025, and I ran across something in the barn this week that took me back.
It wasn’t a book. It wasn’t a picture. It wasn’t even a keepsake, for most. But it was for me.
The Minster Bank is proud to sponsor the best in area sports coverage on Press Pros Magazine.
It was my dad’s old gardening hoe, what he once told me was one of only two things he took from home when he and my mother got married in 1950 – that old hoe, and a mowing scythe to cut sprouts and weeds. The two of them didn’t have much when they got married, money was tight, of course, and Dad knew that it would be necessary to grow a big garden that Mom could freeze and can for the winter. And you can’t grow a garden if you don’t have a hoe to keep down the weeds. Dad was a weed killer…Phi Beta Kappa!
He learned, naturally, from his dad, my grandfather, Dillon Fulks, who farmed about eighty acres of crops and garden in Lawrence County during the Depression, and did the best he could to teach most of his nine boys how to keep weeds out of the cornfield. And when Dad was ten years old (his recollection), it was his daily chore to hoe next to his dad in a ten-acre field on Guyan Creek. Grandpa Dill (as we called him) took his farming seriously, especially weeds, and was pretty strict about how he wanted the job done. Cleaner corn is better corn, in the days before 2-4-D and Roundup.
“You cut out the weeds, then you pulled up loose dirt around the stalk of corn,” my dad would tell me. “And you didn’t dare cut a stalk of corn by accident. If you did you were going to feel the handle of Dad’s hoe across your back. A stalk of corn was worth two ears of corn come harvest time, and Dad had it figured that close.” Depression finances!
Of course, when I was ten Dad was going to Marshall University to get his degree in education to become a public school math teacher. And while he was at Marshall during the day, he would hand me that same hoe and say, “When I get home this afternoon I want the weeds to be cleaned out of the sweet corn. That’s your job for the day.”
Do I have to tell you? It was 90 degrees and my friends in the neighborhood were all out fishing and riding bikes, but I learned very early that what Dad said, he meant. He came home one day and asked why I hadn’t cleaned the garden.
“It was too hot,” I pleaded. “Thought I’d wait ’til tomorrow and see if it was cooler.”
“Well,” he replied. “It’s too hot to play baseball, too. So I guess you’ll miss playing Little League until it cools off.”
Now my dad also helped coach the Little League team, so I knew I had no sympathy from that end. It was either hoe in the heat, or no baseball. And baseball meant a lot more to me, at that time, than sweet corn and green beans.
But fast-forward fifty years. And that old hoe is still in the barn (with the mowing scythe), and my attitude about gardening and growing your own food is light years beyond 1962. On an average year I plant nearly an acre of corn, tomatoes, peppers, strawberries, raspberries, and Vidalia onions. Last year I froze sixty quarts of sweet corn and canned nearly a hundred quarts of tomato juice.
And Dad’s hoe is still gettin’ it done. In fact, I broke the original handle out of it a year ago and was frustrated to find that while you could buy a new handle, you can’t attach it in the original manner. But thanks to John Siegel, of Siegel’s Country Store in Covington, who sold me a sturdy new handle and said, “Let me have it for a few days.” When I got it back it was better than the original. I cannot recommend Siegel’s enough!
It originally belonged to my grandfather, “who probably got it from his dad, or someone in the family when he got married and started farming,” Dad told me. So it’s probably a hundred years old, and compared to the steel you get when you buy a new hoe, there’s no comparison. Once I year I put it in a vise and file down the edge to a razor’s edge, and it stays sharp all summer. “Never use a grinder on it,” Dad told me. “If you get the steel too hot it loses its temper and won’t stay sharp.” I never forgot that.
Another thing that he did was file down one side of the hoe to where it was a little shorter than the other, perhaps a quarter-inch…to where it had a more comfortable edge-to-ground fit if you were right-handed. Because, compared to a new one off the shelf, just like a golf club, a hoe is easier to use when it’s properly fitted.
Dad took delight in the simple, sensible pleasures of life, of which gardening was one of them. And it had to be done…just right!
And I do have a newer one that I bought from an Amish hardware store a few years ago…much lighter and maneuverable around the small stalks of a corn or tomato plant. And a lot of old-timers would grind their hoes down accordingly, for the purpose of making them lighter. But Dad always called his hoe a “chopping hoe”, capable of cutting bigger plants like hogweeds and horseweeds. He didn’t mind the extra heft.
I now use them both, equally, one for lighter work and the other to cut down the bigger weeds; and it’s amazing how much killing weeds means now compared to 1962. I would never have imagined.. the day when relaxation would come from gardening, over golf, boating, or even baseball.
I recently planted about three pounds of sweet corn, and I have thirty tomato plants just about ready to cage. And believe it or not, my morning routine is usually a walk in the garden with a cup of coffee hoping to find a weed…just like Dad did.
You’ve heard the old adage about how we get too soon old and too late smart? Well, I couldn’t appreciate more what he taught me with that old hoe. I laugh when I think about hearing the stories about what happened if you accidentally cut a stalk of corn. It never happened to me, but nonetheless…I’m careful to remember that a single stalk equals two ears of corn.
Happy Father’s Day weekend, Dad, and dads like him. The hoe’s in the barn, hangin’ on that two-by-four…the same way you kept it.
I’ve never used a grinder. Just a file and a vise.
The Dave Arbogast family of dealerships is the official transportation source for Press Pros Magazine.com.