Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [24]
That’s how springtime found us: grinning from ear to ear, hauling out our seedlings, just as the rest of our neighborhood began to haul out the plastic lawn flingmos and little Dutch children kissing and those spooky plywood silhouettes of cowboys leaning against trees. Lawn decoration is high art in the South, make no mistake about it. Down here in Dixie, people do not just fling out a couple or three strands of twinkly lights in December and call it a year, no ma’am. In our town it’s common practice for folks to jazz up their yards even for the minor decorative occasions of Valentine’s Day and the Fourth of July, and on Easter to follow an unsettling tradition of hanging stuffed bunny rabbits from the crab apple trees (by the neck, until dead, to all appearances). If they’re serious about it, they’ll surround the cottontailed unfortunate with a ferociously cheerful crop of dangling plastic eggs.
I grew up in this territory, and my recollection from childhood is that every community had maybe just one person with a dolled-up yard—such as my paternal grandmother, who was known to be gifted in the decor department—but for the average citizen it was enough to plop a tire out there and plant petunias in it. Or marigolds in a defunct porcelain toilet, in neighborhoods with a different sense of decorum. But those days are gone, my friend, and never more will it be so easy to keep up with the Joneses.
Our recent construction work on the farmhouse had turned the front yard into what you might euphemistically call a blank slate. (Less euphemistically: mud.) With my hands full of vegetable seedlings and the wild rumpus of spring in my head, I considered planting lettuces and red Russian kale in place of a lawn, maybe in the visage of the Mona Lisa. Or letters that spelled out something, like “MOW ME.” But in the end, after considering the fact that nobody can see our house from the road, I desisted in fancying myself the Michelangelo of Kale. These greens would go into the vegetable bed, though I’ll tell you I am not above tucking a tomato or two into a handsome perennial border. Vegetables are gorgeous, especially spring greens, arriving brightly as they do after a long winter of visually humble grains and stored root crops.
Bronze Arrowhead lettuces, Speckled Trout romaine, red kale—this is the rainbow of my April garden, and you’ll find similar offerings then at a farmers’ market or greengrocer. It’s the reason I start our vegetables from seed, rather than planting out whatever the local nursery has to offer: variety, the splendor of vegetables. I have seen women looking at jewelry ads with a misty eye and one hand resting on the heart, and I only know what they’re feeling because that’s how I read the seed catalogs in January. In my mind the garden grows and grows, as I affix a sticky note to every page where there’s something I need. I swoon over names like Moon and Stars watermelon, Cajun Jewel okra, Gold of Bacau pole bean, Sweet Chocolate pepper, Collective Farm Woman melon, Georgian Crystal garlic, mother-of-thyme. Steven walks by, eyes the toupee of yellow sticky notes bristling from the top of the catalog, and helpfully asks, “Why don’t you just mark the one you don’t want to order?”
Heirloom vegetables are irresistible, not just for the poetry in their names but because these titles stand for real stories. Vegetables acquire histories when they are saved as seeds for many generations, carefully maintained and passed by hand from one gardener to another. Heirlooms are open-pollinated—as opposed to hybrids, which are the onetime product of a forced cross between dissimilar varieties of a plant. These crosses do rely on the sex organs of the plant to get pollen into ovaries, so they’re still limited to members of the same species: tall corn with early corn, for example, or prolific cucumbers with nonprickly ones,