“What don’t we plant in our garden!”

From their farmstead south of the new turnpike entrance, just west of Bonner Springs, the Lingenfelsers turn each summertime gardening season into a project most folks couldn’t begin to handle.

Yet the Lingenfelsers, who are in their 70s, stay on task from dawn to dusk.

So far, nine gallons of sauerkraut have been put aside, they have a good start on filling their three freezers with produce and by the end of the season, they estimate their garden’s work could have filled at least 100 grocery carts.

This year, the Lingenfelsers planted close to 40 different fruits and vegetables in their garden. Their varieties range from the typical, such as tomatoes, cucumbers and squash, to the more unusual, such as kohlrabi, multiplier onions and white eggplant.

As in most years, tall rows of sweet corn lined their driveway this summer. On a recent Sunday morning, they harvested 147 dozen ears of corn. That was just the first picking.

“The corn was a bumper crop,” Betty said.

Spinach wasn’t bad either.

“We planted the garden March 19 to red potatoes, lettuce, peas and two seventy-five foot rows of spinach and, let me tell you, it was the best crop of spinach we ever had,” Betty Lingenfelser said.

The key to the success:

“We got it planted early and we had a lot of moisture,” Betty said.

Another key could be their experience.

Since 1957, when the Lingenfelsers moved to their farmstead, they’ve gardened. During 10 summers before that, they gardened in Topeka.

For years, they raised their own beef on the farm, milked their own cows and kept chickens. On the fence by their driveway is a sign that reads: “Honey for sale.” Clearly the Lingenfelsers are part of America’s stalwart but vanishing breed of do-it-yourselfers or do-it-withouters.

Future concerns

But there’s more than just their durability, and their determination to head to the garden before the morning sun has cleared the horizon that makes them stand out. As their hands reach for the produce produce grown from seeds they planted in soil their hands have tilled they worry that bountiful harvests in this land of milk and plenty may someday be a thing of the past.

They see their neighborhood, once clearly rural, encroached upon by houses, large and small. They see roads where there used to be none, housing developments where farmers used to crop.

As the cuckoo clock on the wall of their living room chirps the afternoon hour, George sits in an easy chair, getting a rare moment of summertime rest. Betty takes a chair nearby. Beside her is a plastic basket containing white crochet thread, crochet hook and a strip of the bedspread she is making.

Betty looks out her picture window, toward the garden, the cornfield and beyond toward the turnpike where a continual rush of traffic churns along the four-lane road.

“The farm land is disappearing,” she said. “And I see that in less than 100 years this country will see famine. If God doesn’t give the farmer the weather to grow food, he’s not going to be able to feed the 65 people a farmer’s supposed to be feeding today.”

George agreed.

“Seems like everywhere you look, they take the best ground and put in a housing development or a road,” George said.

They worry that the country is becoming beset by idleness, something unfathomable to the ever-toiling Lingenfelsers.

“We were born at a different time,”‘ she said. “Nowadays they have everything so easy vacuum cleaners and all that, it just keeps getting easier and easier as the generations come by. That’s not necessarily good, there’s too much idleness.”

The ‘big one’

Indulging in a hobby that some might at first glance consider to be idleness, George Lingenfelser is an avid fisherman on nearby Stranger Creek.

Each year he pulls from 600 to 700 pounds of fish from the muddy waters. One of his largest catches, he recalled, was a 70-pound flathead.

“It was almost like butchering a hog,” George said. “It took from six in the morning until noon to do that.”

He says most people would take his 1.5-pound bait of bass and crappie and fry it in a pan.

George smiles when he talks about the “big one” he’s hoping to catch again.

“There’s one down there in a hole in the creek that is as big as I am,” George said. “I caught him three years in a row but I couldn’t get him up to the boat. I’m going to get him this year if I have to take dynamite to do it.”

Of course, he’s kidding about the dynamite.

Youthful outlook

Their healthful diet would make anyone take notice. Betty, at 72, looks much younger than her age. She’s only been hospitalized six times when their children were born, for a tonsillectomy and about 15 years ago for pneumonia.

George, at 76, has been healthy except for a round of cancer 11 years ago.

Betty said because longevity doesn’t run in her family, she’s been conscientious of what she could to stay healthy. Part of that, she said, has been to center their diets around their homegrown produce.

“I think we take good care of our bodies,” Betty said. “I think we eat good food and try to live a good life.”