Lorlee Bartos takes her gardening on the road

(Hey 65ers! Here's an item just sent our way, written by the Assistant Editor of the Dallas Morning News on June 25, 2004, about our very own Lorlee Bartos, one of the smartest kids in our class! Read on.)

Alley gardener Lorlee Bartos has figured out how to thwart the tomato thief. When he or she raided her tomato vines of their bounty last summer, the scoundrel – clearly not a tomato connoisseur – left the yellow fruit alone, thinking they were unripe. This year, Ms. Bartos has planted only varieties that produce yellow tomatoes.
When you garden in a public venue, you have to deal with the public, says Ms. Bartos with a shrug of inevitability. And when you cultivate a flower garden on a highway right-of-way, you have to be prepared for the state's machinery to mow down your efforts.
But since gardening is a synonym for hope, Ms. Bartos not only has staked out a 50-yard-long plot parallel to Interstate 30 in East Dallas, she has planted trees and rosebushes in it.
"The highway department knows I'm there," she says. "They mow around me. They're very considerate."
A frugal Midwesterner from a long line of gardeners, Ms. Bartos, a legal secretary who runs local political campaigns on the side, bought a house whose previous owner had lined the alley with extra daylilies gleaned from crowded clumps. In time, Ms. Bartos added surplus iris tubers, expanded to the other side of the alley and then beyond her property line.
"I ran out of space," she says simply of her 24-year tenure, explaining how she came to commandeer the interstate right-of-way.
She has planted 10 rosebushes along the alley, camouflaging a man-made vertical slit in the chain-link fence separating homes from freeway. An adult human has to squeeze through like a ferret, and then there are the mighty rose thorns to dodge. All in all, it's a job for a circus contortionist: This woman desperately wants to garden.
She has an orchard of apricot, pear, pomegranate, persimmon, plum and fig trees. Her vegetable garden includes English peas, potatoes, onions, garlic, lettuces, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, radishes, mints and beets, all planted from slips and seeds in the appropriate season. In her cutting garden bloom glads, purple coneflower, zinnia, cosmos, larkspur, sunflowers and more, with dusty miller and amaranthus providing arresting foliage for the bouquets she takes to work.
"I bring flowers in every Monday," she says. "The people in the office are disappointed if I don't."
Ms. Bartos, a native of central Minnesota, was not interested in gardening as a child, because she was usually assigned the chore of weeding. Yet "I come by this quite honestly," she says. "I'm Grandmother Bartos all over again!" Her granny planted flowers next to the house but raised vegetables across the tracks on the railroad right-of-way. "I have a very vivid image of my grandma in a dress, but barefoot, with the sun shining."
The work ethic of a farmer's life is in her blood. She owns no power tools and recycles yard waste rather than buy mulch and fertilizer. To enrich the native clay in her adjunct garden beds, she worked in about 400 bags of grass clippings and leaves dropped off by a mowing service happy to avoid city dump fees. To help her garden get through the summer, she mulches heavily with more of the same.
"I'd rather go shovel for an hour than go to a gym," she says. "It is my time to think and work out problems."

Lorlee's Irrigation System
Because watering is such a chore when one has to haul yards and yards of hose and navigate past obstructions, chain-link fence and rosebushes out for blood, Ms. Bartos looks for ways to minimize the task. In addition to mulching heavily to keep moisture in the soil from evaporating, she makes personal plant waterers from plastic milk jugs, one-gallon size or larger. ("I'm a pretty sloppy gardener," she admits.)
Prick a hole in the jug's bottom with a straight pin (a nail hole is too big). Put a couple of inches of sand in the bottom of the jug to weight it down. Position the jug, upright, in about 2 inches of soil close to a plant (but not close enough to damage tiny roots) and fill with water. It may not be pretty, but it eliminates daily waterings by hand.

Self-seeding favorites
Amaranthus, cleome, cosmos, datura, dill, larkspur, morning glory, poppy, sunflower, zinnia.
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(Lorlee promises to send us her life story soon -- I've heard that from many of you before -- and I am particularly interested. Lorlee and I started first grade together at the country school on Highway 29 going to Glenwood. Other members of the class were Darrell Williams, Carol Navratil, Alan Norling, Larry Olson and Marlow Kluver. The biggest first grade ever, boomer style. Lorlee could only write her name in capital letters, I knew upper and lower case. Since then, Lorlee has eclipsed any scholastic standard I have set. -- Stan Rolfsrud)