Garden lawyer

Jim Magnuson's wife gets to make a whole lot of salsa.

And hot sauce. And relish. And pickles.

That's because throughout the year, he's bringing in hauls from his garden.

Hundreds of pounds of vegetables he has seeded and nurtured and doted over every day. A rainbow of legumes, including 15 kinds of garlic, plus green peppers, red peppers, purple beans, yellow beans, green beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, basil, eggplant, snow peas, leeks and more.

"I kind of overdo everything," the Coeur d'Alene attorney admitted with a smile, sitting in his office on a late December morning. "I'm not an efficient person."

But after five decades of rooting around in soil, it's hard not to get excited about producing a bounty of flavorful, mammoth veggies.

"I know what I'm doing," said Magnuson, 57.

Even when snow is still on the ground, he's already prepping his garden.

He starts much of his planting in January, sticking to potted plants inside that he puts on heated mats to spur germination.

These seedlings dwell in the 10-by-16 foot greenhouse outside his home at Mica Bay for a few months, until warm weather rolls in.

Then he starts taking the plants out for an hour or two at a time, he said, letting them assimilate to the outdoor conditions.

"It takes a lot of time," he admitted. "It's like having a 6-month old baby. You've got to take care of it every day."

Usually he plans for at least a couple watering and checkup stops a day, both early in the morning and in the evening.

"When I'm going up my driveway, before I hit the house, I hit the garden," he said.

It's mostly for stress relief, the attorney said. Once he starts whacking at dirt with a hoe, he said, all his problems seem to disappear.

And it's also cheaper, even with all the tools and seeds and supplies, than actually buying the food.

"About 20 years ago, my wife says, we don't have a lot of tomatoes. The next year I say, 'OK, here's 1,000 tomatoes,'" he said with a laugh, adding that everything he grows he takes to the kitchen for his wife, Nita, to get creative with.

His garden is small, he says, about half the size of his 20-by-60 foot office. It includes 60 pepper plants, 30 eggplants and 50 tomatoes plants. He has 600 garlic planted for next year, he said.

He produces the biggest and tastiest veggies by saving seeds from other impressive plants, he said.

Besides the ones he saves himself, he also orders heirloom seeds, or seeds saved hundreds of years, from different companies and gardening entities.

Once he ordered cayenne pepper seeds from Thomas Jefferson's Monticello plantation, he said. Another seed was debuted in the 1846 Shumway catalogue.

Only costing about $2 to $3 for several heirloom seeds, the resulting crop is well worth it, he said.

It all comes down to flavor, he added.

"Sometimes if you buy tomatoes at the grocery store, you have to put ketchup on it to get flavor out it," he said.

He started gardening when he was 6, he said, when his parents gave him radish seeds to plant.

Since then, he has gathered gems of gardening know-how, like which fertilizers to use to nurture certain blooms, buds and fruits. He even raises praying mantises to gobble up spider mites.

His 8-foot, V-shaped wood structure that directs his bean plants to grow upward has proved more than successful.

"(This year) we were eating beans for six weeks straight," he said.

Although his daughter, Clancy Manguson, 20, is more of a food consumer, the attorney's son, Jimmy Magnuson, inherited his father's passion and now works as a landscaper at Gonzaga University.

"He basically grew up around the garden," Magnuson said.

The attorney doesn't have time to belong to any gardening groups, he said, though friends call him for suggestions all the time.

His best advice?

"You've really got to experiment and figure it out for yourself," he said. "You'll find so many people who have information, just by talking about it or looking on the Internet. There are a lot of good ideas. But you just have to see for yourself."