I was showing a staff member how to use one of my printers the other day, and my instructions included a lot of, “It’ll say this, but ignore it, you just have to do this, this, and this, and it will work just fine.” At that moment I realized that I am just like my Dad.

Growing up, we had a grill on our patio. When I say grill, you may picture a Big Green Egg or some fancy multi-tiered, multi-burner grill. Nope. I’m just talking about a plain-old, one burner gas grill, probably from Sears. It was brown and had a plastic stand that went down to a rickety 4-pronged foot that held it up. It worked. You could cook steaks, hamburgers, whatever you wanted. No frills, just fire. Thing is for my entire childhood, that grill was on the patio, in varying degrees of, let’s say, disrepair. First the starter button stopped working. Then the burner was only working on one side. Solution: get a new burner. Some critters ate through one of the pipes leading to the burner: replace the pipe. Grill surface rusting away – we can easily replace that. Rickety plastic stand breaks? Find an old frame at a garage sale and remount it on that. Why get a new one, when the one you have works just fine? Sure, we may have to hold it together with a little duct tape, but that’s ok.

I learned from a young age not to get rid of stuff but to fix it instead. And if you can’t fix it, well, you try harder. If you really can’t fix it, you save it so that when something else breaks you have parts for fixing that too. Only when you’ve stretched the lifetime of an item to its maximum, far beyond any warranty or guarantee would have promised, then and only then do you consider replacing. That lesson shows in my garage, where you’ll find a 35-year-old radial arm saw, a 45-year-old table saw, and a lawn mower from the 70s. And I only recently got rid of my own grill that I’d made many a repair on until it finally just wasn’t working at all.

One of the other things my dad and I have in common is that we love fruit trees, and in particular, we love citrus. The house he grew up in over off of Dale Mabry had an entire area that we called the citrus grove because there were so many trees (including a grapefruit that was about 30 feet across). For me as well, my childhood home had at least a dozen citrus trees. I fondly remember many mornings spent squeezing fresh orange juice for the family. So if you, your dad, or anyone you know loves citrus trees, check out our Care Guide on Growing Great Citrus and our video on How to Plant a Tree.

To all of the fathers out there, have a very Happy Father’s Day.