Memory View Farms

Memory View Farms is a family farm located in Scottsburg, Indiana. My family and I work diligently to keep the farm updated and in the family. 

My grandfather, Paul Rogers, was born on the property in 1935. His grandfather is the original homesteader of the property that has been in the family for over 100 years. 

The farm comprises over 200 acres, 180 of which are used as farmland, growing soybeans, corn, and hay seasonally. 

In 2015, my grandpa was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. As the disease progressed, the family took on more responsibilities at the farm.

 In the midst of the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, I began to take over the greenhouse at the farm. My grandparents had run the greenhouse as supplementary income and a source of entertainment. I chose to re-open the greenhouse as an escape during the pandemic and as a way to keep my grandfather active both mentally and physically. 

The greenhouse has a long history at the farm. When my grandparents retired, they started up the greenhouse as a supplementary income, and it continued to grow. My grandparents became master gardeners, with my grandpa specializing in selling ornamental grasses. At one point, he was the region's top seller of ornamental grasses and sold to an abundance of golf courses, families, and businesses all across the Midwest. 

When my grandpa's health started to decline, the first thing to go was the greenhouse. When COVID hit, I wanted an escape from living with my parents, and the greenhouse was the perfect thing. It felt like a little Florida vacation in the middle of winter. There was a lot of work to do, but it came naturally to me. I had helped in the greenhouse when I was growing up, and I retained more knowledge than I realized. ​

We made some huge changes to the greenhouse. We installed a timed automatic watering system and organized the place which included replacing the ground cover across the entirety of the space. We created an organization system for the pots and got rid of many broken or weirdly-sized pots. 

The garden turned into a project I never expected, but I found it to be the most rewarding. When I started the greenhouse, I knew how to grow the plants, but I didn’t know how to get everything started. I had worked in the greenhouse as a kid, filling pots, watering-- basically anything that my grandpa needed.

When we started discussing this project, my grandpa gave me a bunch of old seeds. They were just old enough that we assumed they wouldn’t grow, but figured it was worth a shot to try--they were "free".  When it came time to plant everything, I decided to plant 95% of the seeds I had, starting with the ones we weren’t sure about. I wasn’t expecting ALL of the 300 old tomato seeds to grow. Not much else came up, but all of the tomatoes did.  

I worked towards selling the plants on Facebook marketplace, and I was pretty successful. However, it got to a point where the plants really needed to be in a garden or they were going to die. 

We ended up planting over 200 tomato plants in the garden on the hottest days of the year. It was rough. But we were able to make so much salsa and red sauce from those tomatoes. We also go to sell quite a bit of the tomatoes locally. 

For the 2022 garden, I fully intended to do things differently. My goal was to grow just enough that we would have enough for the family and to sell at the farmer's market in Bargersville. I also intended to sell some of our plants at the farmer's market--so I planned accordingly for that.  

However, because the farmer's market didn’t start until the first week of June, most people's gardens had been planted for a while. So again, I was stuck with an abundance of tomato plants.  We planted 300 tomato plants, but a much wider variety. We had romas, large red cherry, super sweet 100 cherries, gold pear cherry, jelly bean, Abe Lincoln, beef steak, and beef master.  

We also had peppers (jalapenos, banana, habaneros, bell), watermelon (moon & stars, crimson sweet, sugar baby, jubilee), green beans, gourds, and pumpkins. This is by far the biggest garden that I have ever been a part of. I’m really proud of how everything has turned out.

My grandfather planted the blueberry plants shortly after they moved to the farm over 25 years ago. I have very vivid memories of picking them with my great-grandma as I was growing up. 

Over the years, my grandfather’s solution for keeping the birds out was to throw bird netting over the top of the bushes. Unfortunately, this would lead to birds getting stuck in the netting and dying. It made it hard to pick blueberries in spots, and overall it was unsuccessful. 

When my cousin Andrew and I started working on the farm more, we talked about the blueberries, and he decided to build a full cage around the blueberry bushes. In a couple of hours, we constructed a bird-netting cage with PVC pipe, bird netting, zip ties, and rebar spikes. 

The first year with the blueberry cage, we were able to pick and sell over 100 pounds of blueberries in a month. All of the berries were hand-picked, hand-packaged, and sold on Facebook Marketplace. 

A week before Christmas, we had gone to the farm for a wedding only to discover my grandfather was struggling to maintain normal oxygen levels. My mom and I went with him to the hospital where he was told he had pneumonia. Honestly, at the time, we didn't think much of it, he already had overcome Covid-19 twice in his late 80s, so there was no reason he wouldn't recover from this. 

My mom was able to stay with him in the hospital. A few hours after his initial trip, he was transferred to a much larger hospital in Lousiville because the hospital in Scottsburg didn't have any room for him to stay. 

A few days into his stay, we were informed he was silently aspirating his food, which is a late-stage symptom of Parkinson's'.  He was told at the hospital that he had two options, either go home and continually get pneumonia until you die, or undergo a procedure to get a feeding tube. Without hesitation, he chose the feeding tube. 

Unfortunately, after undergoing the procedure, he never seemed to come out of the anesthesia. My parents and I spent Christmas Day with him at the hospital. He was there with us, but he couldn't keep his eyes open for more than a few seconds at a time.  ​

A few days after Christmas, he was sent home. It just happened to be right in the middle of the only ice storm of the year, so it was a dramatic trip home, but we knew he would recover best there. At that point, we were being told his body was metabolizing the anesthesia slowly, which tends to happen in older patients. However, because we couldn't find another set of hands to help my grandmother, we were encouraged to find a hospice nurse. 

We called hospice and within 24 hours, he passed. We felt very fortunate that we were able to have many friends and family come by to say goodbye before he passed. 

I knew I wasn't going to be able to hold it together to give a speech at his funeral, so I shared the following with my family, who then encouraged me to share on Facebook. ​

This is what I shared: 

My Pawpaw and I bonded over homemade ice cream. If we were going to Mawmaw and Pawpaw’s house, we would have ice cream, no matter what time of day.

Don’t tell my parents but occasionally Pawpaw even let me have ice cream for dinner. He would say it was “priming the pump” so I would eat a good supper (which of course would follow with ice cream.)

Several years ago, my pawpaw passed the homemade ice cream torch to me. I’m not going to lie, I don’t think I’ve ever been able to make ice cream quite as good as he did, but every time I did make it, he would tell me it was the best batch yet.

While I refuse to share our homemade ice cream recipe, I do want to share some ingredients that made up who my pawpaw was. There are 5 ingredients in our recipe, so it’s only fair to share the 5 main things that made up who he was in my eyes.​

First, he was patient. In the last 2 years, I decided to re-open the greenhouse on a small scale. Part of the reason was it gave him a good excuse to leave the house for a bit, but the real reason was I didn’t want to miss out on an opportunity to learn from him.

Pawpaw and I would sit at the kitchen table for hours in the middle of winter and discuss the vegetable varieties to plant in the spring. His patience was abundant as I asked every couple of minutes “Why that variety of tomato?” or “When am I supposed to plant that again?”​

You should have seen the look on his face when I told him that of all the seeds that we planted that we thought were duds, every single tomato plant had come up and now we had 200 tomato plants and no plan for what to do with them.

Second, he was the funniest person I know. I can’t tell you the number of times that Mawmaw, Pawpaw, Andrew, and I were sitting at the dinner table after a long day of working on the farm & Pawpaw would come up with a joke out of nowhere that would make us laugh until our stomachs hurt.

One of my favorite jokes of his was my grandma would regularly say "shoot" in the middle of doing something that she had messed up. Without missing a beat, he would say "Bang!"

He was the kind of person who was quiet, but when he spoke you listened, and at least half the time he would make you laugh.

The third ingredient that made up who my Pawpaw was, was his love of the farm. He was the happiest on gator rides explaining how things were when he was a kid, telling us which trees he wanted to be removed, or helping me determine which produce was ready to harvest.

His greatest joy, however, was getting on the little Deere and mowing. Though half the time, he wasn’t actually mowing but getting into some sort of trouble.

The fourth ingredient was how much he cared for and loved others. I was fortunate enough to stay with my grandpa in the hospital for a day so my mom could be at her last day of school before Christmas break.​

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was coming down with the flu (thanks Mawmaw). On Monday morning, halfway through his first swallow test, I got the overwhelming feeling I was going to pass out. I did everything in my power to not draw attention to myself as I basically crawled over to the bathroom in his room. Turns out that only having a piece of bacon over the course of 17ish hours can lead to a blood sugar crash at the most inopportune moments. After that, though he was the patient, Pawpaw was checking on me every few minutes. He even made the nurses check on me to make sure I was okay.

While he was in the hospital, I befriended one of the nurses on his care team. She had brought in a recliner so we could rest a bit better while we stayed with him. On the days she wasn’t working, she would send me a text and ask how he was doing. He had made such an impact on her that when he passed, she was devastated. Her text said, “Your grandpa was my best patient, he was always incredibly kind. May he rest in peace.”​

Even in his last moments, Pawpaw showed just how much he cared for others, especially my grandma. He would reach over and grab her hand and tell her he loved her, even when it was clearly becoming more difficult for him to do so.

The final ingredient that made up who my Pawpaw was was his involvement in the community. I’ve grown up hearing all the stories about the things he’s done for Scottsburg and beyond. Whenever we would go into town, we would get stopped at least half a dozen times by people to whom he had donated plants or someone he had helped in a large way.

I don’t think I realized how deeply he was involved in the community until I received his obituary to edit. I don’t know how many of you have read it, but it is LONG. And a good chunk of it is all the different ways he has served his community over the years.​

He will be a presence that will always be missed. Just a week ago, we were talking about how our family functions would have to change because they were all food-focused and he would no longer be able to eat with the feeding tube. It is crazy how quickly things have changed.

The next coming days, weeks, months, and years will be difficult without his smile, patience, jokes, and compassion. I would give anything to go on a gator ride and listen as he added to the already mile-long list of things he wanted us to accomplish at the farm. I am honored to have spent as much time as I did with him and to have so many memories that I will treasure forever.