Pristine garden earns Mantorville couple phantom award

Maintaining a showcase garden comes as no accident. It takes a lot of hard work and dedication to keeping everything spiffed up around the yard.
Just ask Luverne and Cathy Vangness, this year’s Phantom Garden award winner for Mantorville. The retired couple takes great pride in keeping their garden looking sharp with many colorful flower baskets and other flowers planted throughout the yard. 
The Vangness yard has actually turned into a flower garden as they gave up on a vegetable garden this year because diseases usually found a way into their tomato plants setting off frustration and anger at not having any vegetables. 
For Luverne and Cathy, it’s a joint effort between them to keep up the garden, which they often say the current year will be their last. They have had a garden for 25 years with the past decade seeing a little more added each year. 
“Every year we say we’re going to cut back, but we never do,” Luverne said. 
Their love for gardening has become as solid as the soil used to grow the flowers each year. 
The yard is decorated with marigolds, geraniums, petunias and many more. Some of the flowers Luverne and Cathy aren’t even sure what they’re called. “We have a little bit of everything,” Cathy said. 
Every spring the couple makes a few trips to Houston’s in Kasson to purchase all of their plants. “We buy some, plant some,” Luverne said. They plant some of their own flowers in pots. “They’re just as good,” he added.
The key to planting flowers is watering and “a little fertilizer,” Luverne said. It seems to be Cathy’s job to make sure her husband is keeping up with the watering. “Every so often I say,  ‘Did you water all the plants,’” she said, noting it usually takes about one hour to water all their flowers. 
Deheading the plants is important as well, according to Cathy. “You have to dehead the flowers as it takes off the dead ones. Before you know it, you have another new flower coming on,” she said.
In addition to the variety of flowers, Luverne and Cathy have a wide assortment of ceramic decorations and others around the yard that they have collected over the years. Cathy’s favorite is a colored angel located by the house. Luverne made a John Deere colored wagon for the front yard. 
Several years ago they hauled in limestone from Cathy’s grandpa, who lived down the street close to them. The limestone has been worked into the landscaping. 
Both Cathy and Luverne take great pride in their yard, especially when they see people driving by and stopping in the street to look at their place.
“I’m really proud of all the hanging plants I have,” Cathy said. “I’ve always loved flowers, but I didn’t realize how much work they are to keep them nice.”
This is the third time Luverne and Cathy have been honored with winning the Phantom Garden Award. “It makes me feel good because we spend so much time out here and try to keep them so nice,” Cathy said.