Rita Veal consults her volume of notes as she looks over a field of peanut plants at one of her ‘gardens.’
My mind was bent on recalling the directions to her home that I’d carefully drafted on a yellow note pad then proceeded to leave on my bedroom dresser.
The first of the summer cicadas and crickets were chirping their lengthy songs as my pickup bumbled and bumped down the hazy gravel road through a tree-rimmed corridor of Oklahoma humidity somewhere in Payne County.
I was thinking out loud, “turn right down the one-lane gravel road…” when my truck emerged from the trees with a puff of chalky road-dust engulfing me as I pulled to a halt. I was instantly overwhelmed at what I saw.
Rita Veal ambled down one of the drives to meet me at my truck and shook my hand with a sturdy grip as I stood ogling at the landscape, astounded at the sheer amount of gardening that she and her husband had taken on.
I had expected Rita’s “garden” to be a large plot—maybe a half-acre or so—filled with the weeds and confusion that many large-scale home gardens grow to be.
Those assumptions were choked as we walked past five separate greenhouses and she began explaining the strains of plants and cultivars she was experimenting with.
We strolled over old field terraces past nurseries, drying houses and a particularly charming henhouse filled with tentative young chicks peering out the door.
Rita went on describing her daily life of watering the beds, weeding, planting, picking, drying and seeding as I struggled to comprehend the ungodly amount of work this small farm must command.
There were row after row of neatly organized platoons of root crops and vines; all with ingenious electric fence combinations erected to thwart the rural robbers such as deer and raccoons.
We walked through football field sized beds of peanuts and cucumbers, as Rita recited names, traits and quirks of each of the types of plants she raised and listed from memory more than 50 crops she and her husband planted each year, most subcategorized by numerous strains and varieties.
She consulted a well-worn book of tedious notes and secrets that served to organize the gigantic production as we arrived at a bed of many thousand onions.
I stood among the pungent bulbs as Rita slid a spade easily into the fertile soil, unearthing a perfect white orb. “Texas 1015 variety,” she remarked as she began methodically lifting, pruning and stacking her harvest in a crate.
I said my farewells and drove off squinting into the sun between paddocks of produce.
Rita’s husband, Keith, and I exchanged a wave as a glance in my rearview mirror showed the silhouette of his veteran gardener wife picking in repetitive rhythm.
Rita and her husband sell all their produce under their official name Putterveal Farms at the Stillwater Farmers’ Market, and no place else.
The Stillwater Farmers’ Market is located in Strickland Park east of Hastings and features produce grown in Payne, Noble, Logan, Lincoln, Creek and Pawnee counties.
It is open Wednesdays and Saturdays, 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. April through October.
In November it changes to Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.
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