A Walk Down Memory Lane

This week, one of Behnke’s Best, Steve Gerwin, who worked at the Beltsville location in the 1970s (and possibly the 80s), shared a wonderful memory on our Behnke Alumni page. I wanted to share it with all of you because it brought back so many memories of my own growing up at the nursery in Beltsville.

Steve reminisced about the new flat filler they introduced, but I still remember the days of hand-filling those fiber market packs. As a little girl, I was given a pencil to poke holes in the packs while transplanting tiny seedlings. I searched everywhere for a photo of the group of ladies who spent weeks transplanting, but I couldn’t find one. I did find this photo of the greenhouse filled with packs ready to be planted.

My Aunt Ele Behnke, along with many other women—including Steve’s own mother—worked tirelessly to plant all the annuals that customers would later buy for their spring gardens.

I hope you enjoy what Steve wrote as much as I did! 😊

Bob Dylan and Behnke Nurseries

I went and saw the movie “A Complete Unknown,” a movie about the life of Bob Dylan. It brought back Behnke memories of the mid 1970s.

At that time the nursery had purchased a flat filling machine. Before that market packs were filled one at a time by hand for the ladies to transplant seedling into. My job was to take a bunch of weekend warriors and with that machine located at the back of the big fiberglass greenhouse back by the parking lot fill thousands of the newer style plastic eggshell-filled flats with soil. A real assembly line process.

Now, like most, we put up with WGAY–the elevator music the nursery played. But management pretty much left us alone back there so I put on Casy Kasem’s top 40 music to work by. There was this one young man, Kenny Leveque, who just did not seem engaged with the team so I asked what we could do and he asked if we could listen to Bob Dylan.

At the time I was not a big Dylan fan, but why not, so Dylan was a staple for all those Saturdays we turned out thousands of flats ready for planting during the week. For me Dylan took some getting use to but in time he kind of grows on a person.

So whenever I hear Dylan I reflect back to those golden years at Behnkes and Saturday morning in the late winter and spring turning out those flats ready for planting. ~ Steve Gerwin