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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Vegetables, friends bring couple joy

Don and Lavryle MacCandless have been growing, selling produce for 15 years

Don and Laverie Mccandless clear cover the manual way from the garlic field at their Cheney farm.  (Brian Plonka / The Spokesman-Review)
Ryan Lancaster

It’s a place that’s easy to miss if you aren’t looking for it.

As you head west on State Route 904, just off the Four Lakes/Cheney exit, a folksy sign advertises “Don’s Greenhouse” in hand-painted green letters, with “vegetable plants” in red underneath.

At the top of the short dirt road curving up from the highway, a quiet yellow house huddles between two small greenhouses and a pen of goats. Gardens in various states of planting dot the yard, a couple of old pickup trucks wait patiently by a shed for their next load.

This is Don and Lavyrle MacCandless’ plot, an acre of soil smack dab in the middle of “God’s country,” as Lavyrle likes to call it.

About five years ago, the couple made the short move here from the house next door, where they were gardening on a plot of land three times the size of their current plot.

“As we age, we downsize,” Lavyrle says. “At least, that’s the hope,” she adds with a smile.

Lavyrle puts her age at 71, but Don won’t divulge his so easily. “You never say your age, you just say you’re mature,” he laughs. Lavyrle leans forward conspiratorially and says, “Oh, he’s 77.”

Having retired from the “paycheck world” for some time now, the couple has been growing and selling vegetables for the past 15 years, a process that began when neighbors would come by to admire the crop.

“We always had a big garden,” Lavyrle says. “People would come over and see how nice it was, so we’d give them some vegetables and then we finally thought, ‘OK, they like them so much we’ll start selling them.’ ”

Don and Lavyrle were gardeners from an early age. Both were raised on farms, he in Kansas and she in northern Michigan. Lavyrle says they’ve always raised their vegetables organically, without the use of pesticides or fertilizers, simply because “it’s the best way.”

“When I was growing up they didn’t know what fertilizer was anyway,” Don recalls. “Fertilizers didn’t come out until around World War II, so before that everyone was growing organics because there wasn’t any other system.”

“Say you have a head of cabbage and it has cabbage worms,” Lavyrle says. “Cabbage leaves grow by overlapping themselves, so if you go and spray stuff on them, well, where does that spray go? It’s still in that cabbage.”

To ensure a balanced, pest-free ecosystem, they use a variety of methods, such as introducing certain bacterium to the soil. They raise bees to pollinate the plants and raise goats to provide natural fertilizer.

“We pull out the weeds, throw them over the fence and the goats process them for us. There’s a pile of it right over there,” Lavyrle says, pointing at a mound of manure.

The two were the first husband and wife team to join Spokane’s Master Gardener program, which they were actively involved in for more than nine years.

Don credits the program, a volunteer-based information bank geared toward area gardeners, for their extensive knowledge of how to grow vegetables in this climate. “When you pick up that phone to answer questions, if you don’t know the answer you’d better find out. It was an ongoing education, that’s what we liked about it.”

Now that they’re out of the program, their time is spent tending the garden and the business that seems to be flourishing as organics gain in popularity.

“People are demanding food without chemicals,” Don says. “If you eat these vegetables, you notice a big difference from how the store-bought stuff tastes.”

While they sell everything from tomatoes to cucumbers, the primary draw, Don says, is their garlic.

“We grow about 400 pounds a year and it’s always sold out by September. It’s such good garlic that we ship it across the United States,” he says.

Lavyrle says that most of their business comes from word-of-mouth. “We’ve got about as much as we can handle,” she says.

The McCandless’ say they garden because it gets them outdoors and provides practically everything they need for their own table. Their primary joy, however, comes from the relationships cultivated through selling vegetables.

“We get to know our customers really well,” Lavyrle says. The business seems less motivated by profit than a genuine love for their neighbors. Lavyrle hands out recipes for leek soup or garlic scapes and chicken as Don chats with customers about the best varieties of tomatoes for our short growing season.

“We meet new people all the time and they become good friends,” Lavyrle says.

Don laughs as he jokes, “Yeah, sometimes it’s hard to get them to leave.”

Ryan Lancaster is a journalism student at Eastern Washington University.