A Father's Day Story About the Voices We Carry into the Garden
How a Nebraska Farm Boy Found His Way Back to the Land
It’s almost Father’s Day, and as I putter about in the soil of my containers, I find myself hearing my Dad’s voice. It turns out I’m not the only one.
Meet Joe Axberg, husband of my good friend Pam Stegora Axberg. Bloom With Me readers may remember Pam from last September’s Sunhat Edition, where she appeared in her garden in overalls and her Minnesota Twins baseball cap.
Joe and I both grew up with farm roots, mine in California, his in Nebraska. It wasn’t until we each left our careers that we found our hands back in the soil. Mine in containers. His in acres up north.
Both of our Dads played a powerful role in our “dirt-under-our-nails” stories.
Here’s his story
Joe Axberg, in his late 50s, spent more than 30 years in technology. He grew up on a farm outside Spencer, Nebraska, population 500, watching his father work the land with patience, purpose, and a particular way of reading the ground beneath his feet. Then Joe followed a computer into a career, raised four kids with Pam, and built a life that looked nothing like Spencer, where he grew up.
From the Cornfields of Nebraska to the IT Classroom
Joe grew up straddling two worlds. His mother ran a small motel in town. His father farmed land 10 miles outside of Spencer, sometimes partnering with his brother and uncle on additional acreage. Joe absorbed both: the business rhythms of the motel, and the seasonal rhythms of the fields.
“It was just constant immersion in farming and large gardens,” he said. “Mom, dad, uncles, aunts, grandpas, grandmas. All of them on both sides contributed to my collective knowledge. Hillary was right when she said it takes a village. That is how I view everything I know about gardening and farming.”
His father was a patient man. That patience became one of the most enduring lessons of Joe’s life, though he didn’t fully understand it until he was back on the land himself.
When his high school got its first Apple computer in 1983, Joe knew where his path was headed. He pursued a long career in technology, and later a stretch in academia teaching IT courses at Dunwoody College of Technology and the University of Minnesota. He loved it. And then, gradually, he didn’t.
“I was suddenly like an English teacher who didn’t like reading books,” he said. “When you kind of get to that spot, you think, maybe it’s time to move on.”
His father had made a similar pivot decades earlier. After Joe’s mother died during his high school years, his dad sold the farm, packed up, and moved to Wyoming to live near the mountains he had always dreamed about. First thing he did in Wyoming? Till up a large garden.
The Land That Was Waiting
Joe’s farm didn’t happen all at once. Joe and Pam had already purchased land near their lake cabin in 2021, originally thinking of it as hunting ground for Pam’s family. Then Joe started wondering. They’d always kept a garden. Why not move it here, where space was no longer a constraint?
“The farmer in me just could no longer be contained,” he said.
Today Joe considers himself a caretaker for roughly 120 acres of fields, woods, and hay meadow in west-central Minnesota, not far from the lake cabin he and Pam own. This year he is growing 14 varieties of potatoes, sweet corn, pumpkins, cucumbers, tomatoes, carrots, radishes, and beets. He drives a John Deere.
“There’s a fine line between large-scale gardening and small-scale farming,” he told me. “It depends on where you feel like you’re on that side of the line.” Joe is clearly on the farming side. He has a John Deere tractor for tillage and cultivation, drilled a well, and this year installed drip irrigation for the first time. The area experienced its driest May in 30 years. He had to replant much of his sweet corn and some of his pumpkins.
Farming, as his father knew, does not always keep its promises.
“There are no guarantees in farming and gardening,” Joe said. “Just promises. Some kept. Some broken. You hope that this agreement you have with your land will result in success.”
Walking the Meadow, Hearing His Father’s Voice
The moment Joe knew something deep had shifted came right after closing on the property. He and Pam drove out to the land, still new owners, and walked the hay meadow.
“I saw some brush growing up out in the middle of the meadow and immediately thought, that’s not good for hay,” he recalled. “I saw some clover and thought, oh, that’s good. Makes good hay, puts nitrogen back in the soil. I saw some rocks poking up and thought, those can damage hay equipment.”
None of it required effort. The thoughts just appeared.
“Those are my dad’s thoughts,” he said quietly. “It could have been me as a kid, walking around with my dad. Those are the things he would have said.”
It happens constantly now. Stopping the tractor after planting sweet corn, climbing down, getting on his hands and knees to dig in the row and check planting depth. Talking to himself out loud about adjustments. Walking plot to plot just to see how things are progressing. All of it, he says, transports him instantly.
“Dad is ever present in everything I do out there,” he said. “It’s inescapable.”
He even prepared for marriage with a farming lens. The first time he and Pam drove to meet his father, Joe told her: “I’m going to show you what I’m going to be like in 30 years.” These days, Pam confirms he nailed the prediction.
Other voices show up too. Last year, breaking a piece of machinery, the image in his head was his uncle Jerry saying, “Jezzus Joey, you gotta watch what you’re doing.”
Right before I talked to Joe on the phone, I found myself looking for a photograph of my father among our orange trees. I couldn’t find one. What I found instead was my mother, my grandmother, my two brothers, and me, dressed for Easter Sunday, the navel oranges heavy behind us.
My father is not in the picture. He was behind a different camera, the way he almost always was: present in a way that doesn’t show. He worked full-time in town then farmed our 40 acres on mornings, evenings, and weekends. No formal lesson passed down. Just the daily fact of him, showing up for the land. Listening to Joe’s Dad stories, reminded me of my Dad.
What He Thinks His Dad Would Say
I asked Joe what his father would think if he could see the farm today.
He laughed. “First, he’d probably wonder why. He’d think I was crazy. Why are you buying all this equipment?”
Then he paused.
“But then, the other side. He’d get it. He’d know why I was doing it. And if he was still alive, I can guarantee you he’d be out there every day.”
Joe’s father died in 1997 at age 56, from colon cancer.
He never saw the blue ribbon on the Viking Reds. He never saw the watermelons delivered to the Union Gospel Mission, or the drip irrigation lines running through the potato rows, or his son on a John Deere in his late 50s, doing exactly what he had done.
But Joe carries him out there anyway, in the way he checks on the sweet corn, reads the meadow, and adjusts the planter. It is also in the patience he learned young and still practices. In the voice that comes out of his mouth that makes him stop and think: oh wow. That’s exactly what dad would’ve said.
Working the land, Joe told me, reconnects you with nature in ways almost nothing else can. “You’re not just walking through it,” he said. “You’re truly interacting with it.”
He’s also, quietly, trying to leave something behind.
“You start to realize you’re a temporary caretaker of this land,” he said. “How do you leave it better than you found it? Better for agriculture, better for habitat, better for pollinators. And maybe, when we’re done with it, some new young farmer can come in and continue the work.”
That sounds like something a patient man would say.
I think it sounds exactly like my father, too.
Do you hear a parent’s voice or grandparents’ voice in your head when you’re working in the garden?
It’s my hope that maybe part of this story has roots in your soul, whether you reflect on your parent’s voice in your head, or something you grow because it just reminds you of a time when life was a little more simple.
Wishing you a Blooming Father’s Day.
Diana Pierce
#bloomwithme
I loved this article. Diana, you are a great story teller. My Dad loved to garden and while he has been gone 11 years I still hear his voice in my ear when I am weeding or especially while picking green beans. When my cousins would come over for bean harvest and we'd get to fooling around and lobbing beans at each other, he'd say "Alright, get back to work. All I want to see are elbows and asses!" All of us kids remember that saying to this day.
You are a beautiful writer and storyteller. Thank you for creating community with your stories.