You’ll recall that it rained Friday night and much of Saturday morning, but just as the sun broke through, I found myself standing in Rick Seiwald’s spacious yard northeast of Perry and south of Oskaloosa. The centerpiece of Seiwald’s little corner of paradise is a 5,000-square-foot vegetable garden, rimmed by a lush stand of honeysuckle, inhabited purple martin and bluebird houses, a greenhouse and various smaller beds for garlic, asparagus and strawberries.

Seiwald is the first northeast Kansas gardener I’ll be dropping in on this year, while I take a vacation from my own patch of dirt. A lifelong gardener in his 50s, Seiwald also is someone we’ll be checking back with later in the season. Last year he picked his first red tomato on June 3. While that’s a factoid he would remember anyway, Seiwald has it documented in the detailed gardening journal he’s been keeping since 1988.

This guy is the real thing. A mortal in the throes of an obsession he has no intention of overcoming. In other words, he’s our kind of gardener.

In early winter, Seiwald reads, plans and orders his seeds; in January and February, he starts his first seedlings under lights before moving them to the greenhouse. By Easter weekend, he sports a deep tan from hours of working outside.

It was his wife, Cheryl, who turned him in when I issued my call last month for gardeners who would let me peer over their shoulder and write about it. Her e-mail to me fairly gushed. “Gwyn, she wrote, “I can’t describe how beautiful my husband’s garden is, but I would like you to see for yourself.”

Of the many responses I received, I contacted Rick Seiwald first because of the greenhouse angle. Within a few minutes of talking to him on the phone, I knew I had the right gardener to kick off this ongoing series of area garden reports.

Seiwald starts hundreds and hundreds of vegetable plants and flowers every year. The only plantables he now buys each year are seeds, sets for onions and potatoes, and organic garlic for planting cloves. Every vegetable or bedding plant he puts in the ground he germinates on site.

His light setup for starting seeds indoors consists of two tiers that accommodate a total of 12 flats at once. From there, his seedlings move to his 7-by-12-foot greenhouse and then to the open side of a hog shed he has reclaimed and renovated for a shop. There, the baby plants can be hardened off with shelter from the north wind.

Seiwald’s property sits in a valley with northern exposure, so he has insulated the north side of his greenhouse, up to the roof line, with foam construction board. The foil side of the board faces inward, amplifying the sun’s rays. Because he gardens in a low spot that is susceptible to late frosts, he won’t be setting out his tomato plants until the first of May. But, my, what plants these already are.

One, a stocky Celebrity that stands about 18 inches high, is covered with green tomatoes the size of Ping-Pong balls. This plant got its start in January, when Seiwald was helping one of his children with a 4-H project. Although he also has started dozens of Celebrities and OG50s, also known as the Park Whopper, he’ll put just 16 in the ground and give the rest away.

In a couple of weeks, the tomatoes and a good number of pepper plants and okra starts will join the early season crops in the main garden, which is the former site of a hog lot. The soil, needless to say, is black and loose and oh-so-fertile. Already, Seiwald has his onions, potatoes, cabbage, broccoli, lettuce and radishes in the ground.

Standing at the end of one of his two rows of greens, I correctly identified the first plants in the line as Black Seeded Simpson lettuce.

He pointed down the row and ticked off the litany: “There’s Black Seeded Simpson, Red Oak Leaf,” then, pausing at one, “I don’t remember, Red Fire, Revolution, Bloomsdale spinach and then a mix. I had various packages of radishes left over last year, so I just mixed them all together. There’s even one in there called Reggae Radish. You know how it is. I’m just a sucker for the seed catalogs.”

We know.