VILLA PARK — During the village's early days, Villa Park was a chicken town, said Bill Karges. When a person bought a plot of land, he'd get a small flock of chickens to go with the property, and many of Villa Park's chickens got fed off of feed sold at the business currently called Pioneer Garden & Feed.

There's now a village ordinance that prohibits chickens, but Pioneer Garden & Feed remains true to its feed store roots and sells about 60 different types of feed, the same ones that were there in the 1920s.

Karges is the store's manager and has worked with Pioneer for nearly 40 years. He started working at the store even before he started high school.

"We pride ourselves on customer service," Karges said. "How we survive these days is carrying the things that might be unusual to find, along with the basics."

The building that houses Pioneer Garden & Feed was built in 1918, and it was owned by several different people before John Leston took it over in 1965. Today his son, Ron, is the owner.

"We're pretty much advice-driven," Karges said. "We're one of the few stores you can come to to get your questions answered."

With degrees in botany and communications, Karges spends a lot of time giving advice. He's a frequent speaker at meetings of community groups and garden clubs, and there's a steady stream of customers in and out of the shop seeking answers to their gardening questions.

Karges and the other workers at Pioneer stay busy in the summer months by helping local gardeners with insect problems and diseased plants. People will bring in jars of bugs or the leaves of sick plants for Pioneer's staff to identify.

In the past few years, Karges said a big problem for local gardeners has been the Japanese beetle, but the biggest for the last growing season was the drought. Trees, shrubs and other plants are in distress from 2012's hot, dry summer.

"You just have to deal with (the weather)," he said. "It always throws you a curveball and you have to know how to adapt."

A lifelong Villa Park resident, Karges still lives in the same house he grew up in and walks to work each morning. He got his first garden from his parents when he was 9 years old and began composting at the age of 11.

"My mom was a really good gardener and I learned from her," he said.
For someone looking to start a garden, Karges recommends planting vegetables such as radishes, peas, lettuce and onions in early spring when the weather is still cool, and starting tomatoes, cucumbers and squash when temperatures get warmer.

Seeds have been at Pioneer since January and right now, the store is inundated with shipments as the employees prepare for spring.

One of the rising gardening trends that Karges has observed is an interest in organic foods, and Pioneer caters to that with organic seeds. It's a trend that he thinks will continue to grow as people become more concerned about what is in their food and where it's produced.

"The younger generation wants to get into local food," Karges said. "They want to know where their food is coming from. I think we're seeing the backlash of (genetically modified organisms). We don't know what's going to happen with GMOs to our health and some people are saying, 'Let's stop using that until we know what's going on.'"