I'll Never Marry a Farmer: Lois Hole on Life, Learning and Vegetable Gardening

Lois Hole, the former Lieutenant Governor of the Province of Alberta, died in January of 2005 of cancer. A true duchess has been lost. This book is a homey collection of vignettes about family, people and gardening--her favourite things. She regales us with the funny and challenging things that happened in her long marriage and farming/market gardening career in partnership with her husband Ted, and tells about how they eventually "grew" one of the best greenhouse businesses in Canada. Some of her stories are about her favourite people, including meeting her eventual daughter-in-law, Valerie, and about her friend and employee, a wise Metis woman who taught her much about gardening, herbs and life. Lois wrote this book with a twinkle in her eye, and she even put in a plug about our venerable Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which she claims was a running background to many long hours of farm work. Along with a lifetime of distilled wisdom, we get the bonus of her gardening tips, including recommendations of which vegetable varieties are her favourites and her tips on how to grow them successfully and even sometimes how to serve them. If you are a gardener and like to read about beautiful souls, this is your book.