Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [52]
“Just don’t,” people insist. If you do say it, they vow, the plant will wither up straightaway and die. They have lots of stories to back this up. They do not wish to discuss whether plants have ears, or what. Just don’t.
So we knew what our neighbor was trying not to say. We refrained from saying “You’re welcome,” had a nice Sunday afternoon visit, and managed not to jinx this plant—it grew well. Of all the tomato plants that ultimately thrived in her garden, she told us the Silvery Fir Tree was the first to bear.
On the week of May 9 we set out our own tomatoes, fourteen varieties in all: first, for early yields, Silvery Fir Tree and Siberian Early, two Russian types that get down to work with proletarian resolve, bred as they were for short summers. For a more languid work ethic but juicy mid-season flavor we grow Brandywines, Cherokee Purples, orange Jaune Flammes, and Green Zebra, which is lemony and bright green striped when fully ripe. For spaghetti sauces and canning, Martino’s Roma; Principe Borghese is an Italian bred specifically for sun-drying. Everything we grow has its reason, usually practical but sometimes eccentric, like the Dolly Partons given us by an elderly seed-saving friend. (“What do the tomatoes look like?” I asked. She cupped her hands around two enormous imaginary orbs and mugged, “Do you have to ask?”) Most unusual, probably, is an old variety called Long Keeper. The fruits never fully ripen on the vine, but when harvested and wrapped in newspaper before frost, they slowly ripen by December.
That’s just the tomatoes. Also in the second week of May we set out pepper seedlings and direct-seeded the corn, edamame, beets, and okra. Squash and cucumber plants went into hills under long tents of row-cover fabric to protect them from cool nights. We weeded the onions, pea vines, and potatoes; we planted seeds of chard, bush beans, and sunflowers, made bamboo tepees for the pole beans, and weathered some spring thunderstorms. That’s one good week in food-growing country.
By mid-month, once warmth was assured, we and all our neighbors set out our sweet potato vines (there was a small melee down at the Southern States co-op when the management underordered sweet-potato sets). We also put out winter squash, pumpkins, basil seedlings, eggplants, and melons, including cantaloupes, honeydews, rock melons, perfume melons, and four kinds of watermelons. Right behind planting come the weeding, mulching, vigilance for bugs and birds, worry over too much rain or not enough. It so resembles the never-ending work and attention of parenting, it seems right that it all should begin on Mother’s Day.
For people who grow food, late spring is the time when we pay for the relative quiet of January, praying for enough hours of daylight to get everything done. Many who farm for a living also have nine-to-five jobs off the farm and still get it done. In May we push deadlines, crunch our other work, borrow time, and still end up parking the tractor with its headlamp beams pointed down the row to finish getting the last plants heeled into place. All through May we worked in rain or under threat of it, playing chicken with lightning storms. We worked in mud so thick it made our boots as heavy as elephant feet. On work and school days we started pre-dawn to get an early hour in, then in the late afternoon picked up again where we’d left off. On weekends we started at daybreak and finished after dusk, aching and hungry from the work of making food. Labors like this help a person appreciate why good food costs what it does. It ought to cost more.
In the midst of our busy spring, one of us had a birthday. Not just a run-of-the-mill birthday I could happily ignore, but an imposing one, involving an even fraction of one hundred. We cooked up a party plan, setting the date