Lehman’s Country Life

Well, college is as stressful for me as it’s ever been, but I’m still finding time to keep ahead of my garden. Several days ago, I had my first of (hopefully) many tomatoes, and just yesterday I had my first three green beans – everything has been delicious!

I’ve learned some things, though, too. For instance, a) that tomatoes need pruned, and b) that there is such a thing as loving a cucumber plant to death. For the tomato pruning, it turns out that anything that is dead or dying should be removed. One of my friends advised me to simply lop off a particularly tall shoot. However, it is better to instead cut off any leaves that are near the bottom, and don’t have a chance of getting to the light. By removing these and also the dead leaves, the energy distribution of the tomato plant is more efficient – less energy is wasted on leaves that are dying.
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Hi there! My name is Matt Lehman. Some of you may have read the blog article I wrote while fulfilling an internship. Since then, times have changed, and I now find myself at college once again. As many of you might have read in my dad’s blog posting, I brought a small square foot garden out with me to college this year, in an attempt to grow my own vegetables year around.

Two weeks into college, the garden seems to be doing remarkably well. Sadly, I had to replant my cucumbers, as the small sprout that grew on my way out to college suddenly broke off at a single touch (oops). My green beans and tomatoes, however, are thriving. The joyous moment of my day was that, while watering, I discovered that one of my green cherry tomatoes had turned a light shade of greenish-orange, practically overnight!

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For those of you who don’t know, I’m the son of Galen Lehman (president of Lehman’s) and grandson of Jay Lehman (founder), which means that as I grew up, Lehman’s has always been a large part of my life. As a young child, it seemed natural to me to stop in at the hardware to see my dad and my grandpa, or ‘Poppy’ as I still call him, and to walk with my dad through what was then the stove room, or to watch the model trains from the balcony of the toy room with my grandpa. Some of the employees still remember this, and turn on the trains whenever they see me in there.

The funny thing is, though, I have never had a really good idea of how exactly the store runs and operates. So this summer, upon completing my first year at Hesston College in Central Kansas, I returned home to begin an internship with the hardware. Soon, I found myself up to my ears in information about Lehman’s that I never knew.

While most of what I have been learning is really technical, what struck me the most was the dedication to serving the customer. Whether it was watching the shipping department in the warehouse carefully load a stove hearth onto the back of a customer’s truck, or listening as customer service representatives courteously and calmly worked with customers to resolve even the most difficult issues, I had no idea of the effort that each employee put forth to meet the needs of every individual that came through the store. Just as watching the trains run is forever ingrained in my memory, the courtesy of the people I worked with will stick with me for a long time.

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