Not long after Margaret Burkholder Mett moved into an apartment at Oak Terrace Independent Living four years ago, she noticed a long swath of beautiful black dirt along the back of the building.

“The gardener in me kept looking at it and thinking, ‘Wouldn’t some annuals look good there?’” Mett says. “Now I’m known as the Oak Terrace gardener. I’ve taken care of that garden ever since.”

Mett developed an eye for good land as a farmer’s wife. She and husband Morris purchased 240 acres of land in Watonwan County in 1951 because it was rich, dark and deep. They paid $150 an acre at the time. Today, Mett says, it’s worth about $4,000 an acre.

But for Mett, the value runs far deeper. That good land helped her and Morris raise three children and make a living. It was her home for more than 50 years. And it is the site of many of her most dear memories, some of which she chronicles in her new memoir, “Growing on Good Land.”

“I wrote this one for my kids,” Mett says. “They didn’t know what life was like, what they were like, back then.”

The memoir focuses primarily on the first few years of life on the farm, when the children were young and the land was a work in progress. Mett tells about the blizzard that kept them snowbound for their first few weeks on the farm, the process of turning an old farmhouse into a family home, and the ups and downs of raising children while also growing crops.

But Mett also reveals the more personal part of her journey, from her decision to go back to work as a teacher to the love she shared with her husband. She included a chapter about her own history as well as a chapter about her continued love of gardening. Eventually, her editor (a former student) had to cut her off.

“She kept telling me that it was time to get this book on the road,” Mett says. “Then I’d slip in another chapter, like the one about Morris’ idiosyncrasies. It was too hard for me to narrow it all down, I guess.”

Mett relied on the journals she had kept back then for many of the details, but going through them helped bring back other memories as well.

“I think I’ve lived in the past for most of the last three years,” she admits. “Maybe too much. But it was a fun process.”

“Growing on Good Land” is Mett’s second memoir. The first, “In the Mirror of My Mind,” offers her reflections on growing up during the Depression. That one, too, was pulled from the journals that she kept as a child.

She has another memoir percolating as well: about her years as a teacher, and the students she remembers so well. Although she doesn’t have journals about teaching, she did keep many of her date books with scribbled notes to jog her memories. Even without those, however, she can still name several students who were important to her.

One of those is Delwin Junker, who today farms the 240 acres that Mett still owns in Wantonwan County.

“He was like one of my own kids,” Mett says. “He used to come over to the farm after Morris died and sit and have coffee with me in the morning. Now he farms our land.”

Even though Mett has found good land again at her Oak Terrace apartment, she isn’t eager to let go of her original land. She knows that it will bring top dollar, because it was all tiled and drained and is quite productive. But that’s not enough to make her give it up.