The Treasure Valley has lost a fine and generous gardener, Ross Hadfield, and I lost a good friend with his passing on Feb. 10.

Intelligence, a sharp eye, love and respect for growing things, willingness to share what he’d learned and an extraordinary green thumb were a few of his attributes.

Just as there are sport fishermen and meat fishermen, there are gardeners of ornamentals and gardeners of food. Some fishermen and some gardeners do both, but Hadfield just relished growing food. On one city lot containing his home, he raised a huge vegetable garden and several fruit trees that fed his family. The surplus went to the community kitchen.

He diligently pruned fruit trees so fruit could be harvested from the ground. Too many children wanted his sweet cherries, so he sprayed them with a baking soda mixture just as they began to ripen. He could truthfully tell those who asked, “I just sprayed.”

Hadfield and his wife also bought the city lot next door several years ago, rented out the house and used the backyard to grow several varieties of table grapes. He tried and rejected many varieties when they proved not hardy or not bearing the kinds of bunches he wanted, becoming the Valley’s expert on table grapes. He taught a grape-pruning class for the adult education division of the Boise School District for many years, the last at age 92.

After harvesting his grapes, he turned his roof into a dehydrator, taking advantage of the heat and air circulation to turn grapes into luscious raisins.

Then, while watching television in winter, he and his late wife, Wilma, sat and plucked sticky raisins off the bunches. Later they gifted those unusually flavorful raisins to family and friends for Christmas presents. His patience also extended to harvesting meats of English and black walnuts, used in his own kitchen and to give as gifts.

Educated in biological sciences, Hadfield was a close observer of plant life, noticing, for instance, some walnut trees hardier than others in the area, walnuts with thinner shells than others, a volunteer grape vine that had mutated, yielding red rather than green Himrod grapes, and even finding tiny lettuce seedlings in his garden turned weedy when he and his wife were away on a mission for their LDS church.

His finding the lettuce seedlings under those weeds changed his (and my) timing of planting spring lettuce seeds. Both of us began strewing seeds at Thanksgiving.

Some seedlings and plants begun from slips or cuttings falter when their roots are disturbed, so Hadfield devised a nylon net “sling” for them to grow in, easily removed from its pot and transplanted without disturbing the roots.

When he set out tender seedlings early in spring, he used plastic milk jugs as protective cloches. Spring means breezes here, so he cut three-quarters around the jugs, pulled the bottoms to one side (still connected), and weighted them with bricks.

In 2000, he laid out black plastic at the southern end of his grape-growing area, cut large Xs in the plastic, and planted sweet potato slips he’d started himself from supermarket sweets. In October, he harvested 175 pounds of sweet potatoes from seven hills, kept a few, gave away three or four, and the rest of the harvest went to the community kitchen in Meridian. One of those sweet potatoes weighed 23 pounds, 12 ounces.

His family grown and on their own, he continued to raise abundant food for the community and his grandchildren, constantly experimenting to have a better yield. His huge sweet potato harvest came after he dissolved a couple of Ross Root feeder tablets (for fruit and nut trees) in the irrigation water serving those hills.

He assisted in Master Gardener classes (where he made hosts of friends) at the University of Idaho Extension office, taught grape-pruning classes to Master Gardeners and others, and enriched every LDS ward in the Valley (and probably beyond) with classes in gardening.

For many years he also taught rifle marksmanship to Boy Scouts who scored well in national competitions, but all of that teaching took him on a detour he hadn’t expected. Wilma told me that not long after he retired, he came indoors when she was canning. He immediately began correcting her, “teaching” her how to can. As he talked, she untied her apron, removed it and handed it to him: “You know so much about canning, you do it.”

He did, from then on. He did it well, too.

Margaret Lauterbach: melauter@earthlink.net or write to Gardening, The Idaho Statesman, P.O. Box 40, Boise, ID 83707