ZION — On a rainy Thursday afternoon in mid-October, two small patio tables sit at the edge of the driveway in front of a modest ranch home on Forest Avenue in Zion, displaying three colorful bouquets of zinnias, chrysanthemums and marigolds in Mason jars; acorn and butternut squash; and a box of cherry tomatoes.
In the midst of the items sits a Planters Peanuts can, where people are encouraged to leave payment on the honor system (50 cents for a bouquet; $1 for a squash; 25 cents for the tomatoes) for whatever they take.
The homeowner, 90-year-old Martha Deitrich, keeps the makeshift flower and vegetable stand stocked with the fruits of her own garden, beginning each March when the pussy willows bloom and running until the late fall frost brings gardening season to a halt.
Often when people stop by to make a purchase, she’ll be sitting in a chair on her front porch putting together flower bouquets, or she’ll spot them from her kitchen window while drying celery leaves or canning vegetables. She says it warms her heart, especially when she sees parents helping their children to pick out a bouquet.
“I have a little thing that I say. ‘Bless my little stand, dear Lord, and those who enter in; may they find naught but joy and peace and happiness therein,’” she said.
Deitrich’s stand has been blessing people for nearly 50 years.
The mother of four says she started it when her children were small, at first as a way for them to raise money to use at the Grange Fair, and later as a way to raise money for charity.
“The first little bouquet I sold, I wasn’t sure what to charge. So I put on it, ‘50 cents,’ and somebody bought it, and I thought, ‘Oh boy. Somebody really bought it.’ And I have never raised the price,” she said. “I don’t want to overcharge. I feel like a lot of people have a hard time. And I have enough.”
After retiring from her nursing career at the age of 65, Deitrich also included baked goods at her stand for the next 20 years.
“Tuesdays I would bake pies, Wednesdays I baked apple dumplings, Fridays I baked bread and sticky rolls, Saturdays I baked cookies,” she says. “I had customers coming from Clearfield and Lamar to get my sticky rolls.”
Deitrich donated the profits from her baked goods to charity, and she still does the same with the money her bouquets bring in. Most recently, she has been donating to hurricane victims in Florida.
Word of mouth has made the stand a popular place. Deitrich says she has only had two days without a customer since last spring.
She laughingly recalls one customer pulling up one evening, grimy from a hard day at work, and looking desperate. This was back when her husband, Carl, was still living.
“He said, ‘Could you make me a bouquet of flowers? I forgot, today is my anniversary.’ So I went down and hunted around and I found some flowers for him,” she said. “Carl said, ‘I wonder how many marriages you’ve saved?’”
To say Deitrich is a talented gardener is an understatement. She tends a 75-foot by 75-foot garden plot, where she raises 35 kinds of vegetables and too many varieties of flowers to count. She peppers her conversation with random gardening tips, many of which she learned from books Carl bought her over the years. She exhibits many things at the Grange Fair each year and took home 81 first-place awards this year.
On this particular afternoon, she has been busy cutting hydrangeas and dipping them in Rootone, which she explains is a hormone that allows new plants to grow from cuttings. They will spend the winter rooting in the warmth of her greenhouse, which was added to the side of her house back in 1979 as a gift from Carl.
“Carl was a real, dear sweetheart. That Christmas, he gave me a great big box, all wrapped. I unwrapped it, and inside that was another, smaller wrapped box, and inside that was another smaller wrapped box, until I came to a little, teeny, tiny box at the very end. He had wrapped up a little green house from the Monopoly game in this box. That year, we built the greenhouse,” she said.
Deitrich’s knowledge and love of flowers and gardening stems from her childhood growing up on a farm on the border of Chester and Berks counties.
“I was originally a little ol’ farm girl,” she says.
Deitrich and her siblings worked hard on the farm, where she recalls doing everything from picking tomatoes to peeling potatoes to splitting wood. She planted her own little vegetable garden at the age of 6. It was also during this time when she first started growing and arranging flowers.
“I’ll never forget, my mother left me get 100 gladiola bulbs, which was really, really something, because this was the Depression. … I was on top of the world. There was a place where weeds were growing, and I spaded a section like a half-moon and I planted these gladiolas and some other flowers,” she says. “Then I had an arrangement in a crock on the front porch. Oh, it was the cat’s meow.”
She still maintains that same hard work ethic she learned as a child. It will soon be time to close down her stand for the winter, but Deitrich certainly won’t be resting on her laurels. She’ll stay busy in her greenhouse, planting seeds, trimming topiaries, repotting plants and drying flowers, just for starters.
“Too many people sit too much,” she says. “You have to keep moving.”
