Farmer Boos

As a kid I grew up around gardens.  I lived in Indiana for heaven's sake.  Food was grown there and I was well aware that it didn't come from a grocery store.  My mother and father always had something growing, mostly tomatoes and flowers.  My Aunt Lorene tended her huge vegetable garden up until about two years ago when her sons finally put an end to that after she fell.  When my girls were little she would take them out into her garden and pick cucumbers, green beans, tomatoes, lettuce and whatever else she might have ready in that time of the summer.  That is where they came to realize that produce didn't grow inside the grocery.  I can still remember Madison's fascination with how it did get to the grocery.

Cousin Gabby having a drink by the corn

Moving to Florida gardens gave way to fruit trees.  In the suburbs people had orange, lemon, tangerine, banana, and grapefruit trees.  Our neighborhood was once an avocado grove so at least one tree still adorned every yard.  Our tree only use to produce one avocado every other year so it wasn't a loss when we had to remove it for our new porch.  Losing our beloved pink grapefruit tree was worse.  That tree was always full of huge fruit that smelled as delicious as it tasted.  We had to remove it when we decided to put in a pool.  We still mourn that thing.

Having the trees in my yard made me feel as if I were a farmer.  While I had no interest in actually doing the farming part I enjoyed reaping the rewards.  Tom, on the other hand, took to home and yard ownership by embracing his farming side.  After the pool was built, he planted an orange tree.  It started out as just a tiny thing and he nurtured it like a baby pruning it and feeding it all sorts of nutrients until it grew into quite the orange tree.  While the fruit wasn't the easiest in peeling and eating, it was fabulous juiced.  We got fruit in the spring that lasted into the beginning of the summer months, despite the citrus rats that enjoyed it as much as we did.

That experience excited him so much he decided to try a small garden.  He started out with tomato plants and roses.  Both plants had good days and bad days.  One week we had tons of roses to decorate the kitchen table and another day we had one or two tomatoes that were actually red.   He was very excited when the tomatoes would produce, and I had to stop him from picking them when they were still green.  I would spout out my Midwestern gardening knowledge, despite not having a green thumb or an interest, and he would ignore me and keep on planting odd things that I didn't eat.

His most successful plant was his pepper plants.  These he planted in the front of our house in an area that is full of various odds and ends of plants, trees, and shrubs.  He planted three different pepper plants and these grew in such abundance we couldn't give them away.  That and the fact that they were the hottest and spiciest damn peppers every planted.  He was the only one that could tolerate even tasting one of the varieties and the other two even our Indian friends couldn't consume fast enough.  Eventually he realized that while he had a green thumb when it came to peppers the demand wasn't meeting the surplus and he stopped that crop.

In the last two years the farming bug has bitten him severely.  He returned to trees first, planting a fig tree and a banana tree in our front side yard.  The fig tree scarcely produced fruit in the first two months, something that we hadn't expected and were not prepared for when it came to fig recipes.
He picked them and the tree hasn't produced any more since then.  The banana tree started out small and rapidly grew until now it is taller then me and this morning we discovered that we have the beginnings of bananas!

This year I got into the spirit of farming and worked with a small planter of herbs; spearmint, peppermint and cilantro that I kept separate from Tom's little gardening area.  The cilantro died after a few weeks.  The mints I spent time on until forgot about them as I left for vacation.  Tom, on the other hand, changed things up in his garden and started this time with seeds.  He planted some herbs.  He planted tomato trees.  He planted watermelon.

He planted the watermelon in the front of our house in the same area as the pepper plants.  It is the same area that Elliot likes to spend time chasing lizards in and the same area where we had a nest of bunnies.  When I first saw the watermelon vine I almost pulled it up, thinking it was a weed, but since I dislike anything involving bending over I left it be thank goodness.  The rabbits, however, have not been so kind and it was the grumbling about them that led me to discover the vine was actually suppose to eventually produce watermelon. 

Later this summer we had to remove the orange tree that Tom had grown from a twig as it had contacted some damaging fungus.  We paid to have it cut down and Tom removed the stump.  We spent a few days wondering what to put in its space, but it had nothing to do with anything living.  We were thinking more along the lines of a bbq deck.  Then I went on my three week summer travels and when I returned I found that my husband had finally found his nitch in the land of farming.

Somewhere, when I wasn't paying any attention to the back side yard where we once had an orange tree, my husband had planted yellow squash seeds.  During my month away the seeds grew and grew and grew and suddenly Tom is a southern farmer.

We have had several meals now with our squash, and yesterday I took some up to my mother.  The plant in the meantime is growing bigger and bigger and each time I investigate we have more squash.  I have to admit that it is very exciting.  I love going home to Indiana and walking through people's gardens picking produce and seeing it grow first hand, and now it is finally happening on my own property.  I have had the fun of Connie's pineapple plantation, but those things take years to produce and the process has been slow as has Tom's other gardening endeavors.  Now with the squash and the bananas I think I might just have to buy him some overalls and a John Deere hat and call him Farmer Tom.