Spinella Farm

When I was growing up, Grandpop Spinella and my uncles grew 40 acres of tomatoes for the can house. It was this time of year that they would be busy cultivating and fertilizing those Roma plum tomatoes in anticipation of the coming year.

I remember they sprayed just about every week. The spray came in big metal containers that you used by pounds or quarts instead of the ounces they use today. That old metal John Bean sprayer was a work horse that never failed. But I think that Grandpop spent a lot of time repairing the holes in its metal body and making sure the boom sprayers worked.

Uncle Sam and Uncle Dave were busy teaching high school so Grandpop was the bulwark during May and the early part of June. Uncle Sam worked the hardest of my two uncles and should have been the one to carry on the tradition. But fate did not work that way.

Meanwhile, as a little boy I was more worried about honing my baseball skills than hoeing tomatoes. After all, the chemicals did everything - killed the bugs, the weeds and the fungus. Early in the season, my job was to walk with Grandpop with an old Mills Brothers coffee can filled with kerosene as we picked Colorado Potato bugs off the plants and dunked them in the kero.

When it didn't rain for awhile we would move pipe throughout the fields and run the overhead sprinkler system. We would move four to six lengths of pipe at a time. The younger ones always hopped over the plants faster than the older members of the family. Sometimes we busted off the top of the tomato plants which brought a reprimand from Grandpop. Since I was one of the younger ones moving pipe, I got the end that did not have a sprinkler. When I reached a female part of the line, I plugged the male in and told everyone to pull to tighten up the line so there were no leaks.