PENN TWP - Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? Well, Mary might have used things like cockleshells to border her beds, but if you ask the same question of Peter Yuhanjak, you'll get a very different answer.

His garden grows quite well with the help of things like baby shampoo and whiskey, country music and windowpanes, plastic strips and ordered disorder.

Growing food is more important than flowers to Yuhanjak, although he does both. He has 17 fruit trees in his orchard and 17 raised beds in his vegetable garden. He's got a tomato garden and a mini cornfield, blueberries, strawberries, and raspberries.

The berry patch is where sheets of glass come into play. He uses windowpanes to separate the strawberries from the raspberries. They make a handy divider and sunlight passes through undiminished.

He guards against blow-over of his corn stalks by having them grow into a web woven from narrow strips of plastic that is raised as the corn grows.

Vegetables that need to be protected from the midday sun get their shelter from the leaves of their taller companions. Onions overshadow lettuce; beans overshadow onions.

"I used to put everything in rows, potatoes just with potatoes, but now it's all in one bed," said Yuhanjak - and he likes the response he's gotten from the new companion approach. The secret is knowing what is in his charting system.

He keeps a record of what's planted where and exactly when it's expected to be ready for harvest. "I pick the earliest date planted first and when I take it out of the ground, I cross it off the list."

"I don't use any chemicals," states Yuhanjak firmly. "I have a sensitive stomach to chemical smells." Instead he treats for bugs with homemade concoctions made from innocuous household items. His fruit trees get sprayed for bugs weekly and the vegetable garden is treated monthly. The cost of the treatments is much lower than with store-bought remedies.

In his opinion, "You don't get the true value of the food if you use chemicals and they go right into the fruit."

In the interest of keeping garden marauders at bay and after having tried any number of methods to keep raccoons and chipmunks from unearthing seeds and browsing on tender plants, he settled on annoying the critters as much as they annoyed him.

He keeps two radios, tuned to the same country music station, at opposite ends of the vegetable garden enclosure. The radios play country music simply because Yuhanjak prefers it, not because the foraging animals don't.

Since the garden is a full-time occupation for the retired man, the music is a nice addition to his day. Covered by plastic milk crates to keep them dry, the radios play nonstop from planting until harvest time.

Yuhanjak started gardening as a child with a victory garden and has made an effort to retain what he's learned through trial and error. He keeps notebooks filled with his own observations of what grows best and how to help ensure that happens. "Mostly everything I plant, grows."

There's barely two months of the year when Yuhanjak doesn't have his hands in dirt. In the off months, he has his hands full of seed catalogs and gardening books. Starting seeds in his small greenhouse begins early in spring, and he's got a few frost-hardy vegetables in the ground by April 1.

If December is mild, Yuhanjak can still be found out in

the three-quarter-

acre backyard doing last-minute tasks.

Until lately, Diana Yuhanjak, Peter's wife, has kept herself out of the garden and in the kitchen canning what he grows. "Canning takes a lot of time. This is the first year I've been able to work in the garden," said Diana. She's done everything from running the tiller to shoveling manure alongside her husband.

Diana agrees with her husband's natural approach to gardening, calling herself the "Mother Earth" type. "I'm a conscientious environmentalist. If you don't like a weed, pull it out or pour scalding hot water on it."

A garden as fruitful as theirs results in more food than their family can eat.

"I'll take some to church and just put it in the back," said Yuhanjak.

"We share with other people," echoed Diana. "I couldn't sell it. If I did, it would be work."