POST FALLS - The closer Richard Martin shuffled to his vegetable garden on Thursday, the smaller he looked.

But then, anyone would be diminished standing beside those towering stalks of corn reaching toward the sky, a few inches shy of scraping the telephone wire above.

Some neighbors stopped their car for a moment to shout out the window.

"That's twice as tall as you are!" one said with a grin.

Martin, 92 that day, had measured the highest stalk in his backyard at about 15 feet.

One of the ears toward the top looked like an awkward green arm frozen in a wave, nearly 2 feet long.

"I'm going to have to step on a stepladder to get it," the Post Falls man said with a smile.

The garden, Martin's first after a decades-long hiatus to accommodate his role as family bread winner, hadn't looked too promising in the initial rain and frost this spring.

Then, said Tim Bretthauer, boyfriend of Martin's daughter Sue Alamar in Coeur d'Alene, the heat hit.

"All of a sudden, boom, they popped up," Bretthauer said.

The mighty stalks have surpassed the corn entries at the Spokane fair, Bretthauer said, where he and Alamar had procured the giant corn seeds they gave to Martin.

"Those entries didn't even compare," he said. "They were only 12 feet."

There's nothing distinctive about Martin's gardening method, save for rabbit manure and a lot of care.

All the crops in the garden, the tomatoes, cucumbers, beans and corn, have been thoroughly tended.

"I do what I can, then sit down a while, and do some more and then sit down a while," Martin said.

Maybe he's getting too old to garden, he mused.

"He always says that, but he keeps going out there," Bretthauer said.

But working in nature comes naturally to Martin.

He was raised on a farm in Deer Lodge, Mont., he pointed out. And he worked on another one until he was 17, when he joined the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression and cleared timber in Glacier National Park.

He even did a little gardening during his service in the Army in World War II, he said. Not so much in Hawaii, where he was stationed to help pick up the pieces a week after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

But later when he was in the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific, he said, his unit was eager to harvest red peppers.

"We'd stop, pick them, stick them in a sack and put it in our hats," he said. "It was the only flavoring for stuff we got to eat."

Martin and his now-late wife settled in Post Falls after the war, he said. He built his current home by hand around 1959, when his neighborhood was nothing but dirt.

He even had to put in his own road, he said.

"I started from scratch," he said. "I dug the sewer line by hand."

He even added a tiny garden, when his children begged for one.

"I could never get them to get the weeds out," he grumbled.

Hobbies like gardening fell to the wayside, he acknowledged, during his 33 years as foreman with Kaiser Aluminum in Spokane, where he spent 10 to 12-hour days.

In that time, what grew was his family. His four children have produced six grandkids and eight great-grandkids.

It wasn't until this June that Bretthauer and Alamar approached Martin about starting another garden, since they lacked room for a plot at their place.

Martin fits it between other hobbies, he said, like small engine repair and saw sharpening.

"I keep myself busy," he said.

The garden is all right, Martin added.

But he wouldn't call the corn a success.

"I'm waiting to get more seeds next year," he said. "We'll see if it won't grow twice as high."