Editor’s note: In the summer 2024 Newsletter, Gail Falk traced the history of the Plainfield Co-op and Hardware back to its beginning in the little farm stand by Route 2 run by Lyndol Hutchinson and his family, which expanded into Hutchinson Gardens. A reader who worked for them then sent Gail this remembrance.
Letter to the Editor
I am so grateful for your reporting about Hutchinson Gardens! I was happy that, on a whim, looking up Hutchinson Gardens, I found some history.
The photo of Lyndol with the pumpkins was total joy because I worked for him and was in the truck when he handed me pumpkins. I unloaded them into greenhouses and reveled in the variety of shapes and sizes (like us); when customers came, I’d escort them into the greenhouses, and I was fascinated seeing who was drawn to what shapes. I loved Lyndol and his wife Edna, although I knew Edna less well.
I worked 3 hours a day in the summer of 1971 (and 1972?) and would report in to Lyndol about his plans for me that day (always different). He favored me a bit after I planted the straightest rows of lettuce he’d ever had.
I could go on about the vivid details I saw as he’d check in with the weather — eyebrows twitched, nostrils became so astute, as he’d calculate. During corn season, sometimes he’d sit in the field with a shotgun to protect the corn from raccoons. And tired as he was, he’d sort the corn into bins of 1s, 2s, and 3s for kernel size to please his customers.
I learned so much about hard work, and from the sidelines, appreciated how much risk went into farming. It’s all that risk that made Lyndol so alive.
He had oil furnaces (I think) heating the greenhouses to grow the plant starts that locals bought. Timing was everything, especially the first ripe tomatoes! And he brought in some Northern Spy apples and showed me the thumb-fit test to identify them — he prized them as a late apple, and they were the best apples I ever ate.
He was an example of what it means to be human that humans today rarely get to see or interact with.
Joan Lederman
Woods Hole MA 02543
~ ~ ~ END of this issue ~ ~ ~