In Spite of My Doubts, There Sits a Nursery Full of Sprouts.

In Spite of My Doubts, There Sits a Nursery Full of Sprouts.

Lofton looked at me and shook his head. “You want to do what?”  I wanted a garden. A big one with thriving rows of silver bells and cockle shells. 

How big you want this garden to be?”

 I walked off an area slightly larger than a king size bedspread but smaller than a strip mall parking lot.

“Do you plan on ever going to the store again?” 

Of course Lofton, I planned on going to the market. How else was my family to eat?  I just wanted to experience farming. My petri dish of God’s 1/16 of an acre.   Plant lots of seed, some tomatoes and beans. Beans never disappoint. My love of farming started with the bean. 

First grade rite of passage. After lunch, you rinsed out your milk carton – the one with red label and smiling cow. Filled it up with soil, stuck a finger deep into the dirt and then dropped in a bean seed. Smoothing over the soil, you finished by adding water and placing it with all the other cartons lining the classroom windowsill like mallards in a shooting gallery. Every morning I whispered prayers over my carton. Nothing happened. Then that first over-achieving bean began to peek through in someone else’s carton. Then another. Then another. 

Where was my slowpoke bean?

Finally after days of anxious glances back to the windowsill, the moment arrived when my seed shook free his sleepy green head. “Hello world.” A bean was born. A rather precocious bean.

Not many things in life match that thrill. For me – or guess for my baby bean after being stuck in the dark confines of a 2 x 2 inch box of slick white cardboard with the smiling cow.  I wanted that feeling. Lots of that feeling. We rented a tractor from Al Kimsey. Al delivered the tractor and never said, “What the heck are you thinking?”

But Lofton did. Lofton stared at the newly tilled tract. “A girl from Florida come up here and think you’re gonna have a garden. This never been tilled before. Now we might have a good garden next summer, but can’t see how we’re going to have much success this year.” 

“Dang Lofton, it’s a little late for that kind of thinking. Sometimes you’ve got to be the one to plow new ground.”  Good Grief, if things in this endeavor depend on me being the positive one we better throw down the hoe right now – along with some fescue. 

In spite of our doubts, those expressed or held silent deep within our breast, we planted rows of corn, squash, cantaloupe, tomatoes, peppers, okra, collards and cabbage. Honestly, I don’t know all that’s in there. Except lots of beans. Already reaching their delicate tendrils to latch about the fence, they are climbing and hopefully soon producing lots. What I’m going to do with them I have no idea. I never got farther with the one in my milk carton than witnessing its glorious birth. 

Now there sits a nursery full of baby sprouts to feed. It’s a bit overwhelming. Maybe next summer I’ll start slower. Wonder if Lofton would be interested in us farming some beef? After all, everyone looks swell in a straw cowboy hat.