The Customer is Always Right.....?

"I’ve had the first one of the year…..more to come.  A customer wants to know which ….uhhh…let me copy and paste this because I can’t do it justice.

Please advise."

I take a deep breath. Our family grows a lot of plants for the woman sending us this email.  We ship vegetable starter plants, finished hanging baskets and flowering pots, and...starting this year....herbs and cucumber plants, stevia and edamame (yep, edible soybeans) and a host of other flowering annuals.  In our greenhouses, we grow not just hybrid tomatoes and cherry tomatoes, but also heirloom tomatoes, hot and sweet peppers, destined for the patios and gardens of Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, with some making their way as far north as the Dakotas.  Last year we fielded questions about our entire production system for growing the vegetables that would eventually bloom and produce something edible: were they organic; did they contain GMOs? (insinuating that being GMO is a contagion one can catch.)   But the letter she was preparing to copy and paste..copied and pasted here ....was clearly one for the record books.  Read it and weep.

"I need to know which plants that you sell are genetically modified - what I mean by genetically modified are plants that undergo unnatural genetic engineering including shooting genes into chromosomes.  I am fine with plants that have been selectively bred.  Selective breeding is a natural process of natural selection.  I would prefer native but will accepts selective breeding options.  If any of these flowering plants are native and not altered in any way, I need to know that for sure.  I would like to place a sizable order but your plants are not marketed to indicate which ones may be unnaturally genetically modified.  I do not want to kill bees and other pollinators by planting unsafe plants for them.  I am also selective about considering plants that produce vegetables for our consumption.  I only plant non genetically modified (no lab created seeds) food plants for my family's consumption and only use organic soil.  I do not use miracle grow or other harmful products in my food gardens.  If your food plants are not modified, you need to indicate it for sure.  I need to know, for sure, that the flowering ornamental plants I consider from your company will not be harmful in any way to our ecosystem."

Sigh.  Really, where does one start.  With the confused, incomprehensible, and value laden  differentiation between 'natural' and whatever it's antithesis is considered to be?  (Unsafe? Harmful? Unselective, perhaps?  Foreign, heaven forfend.....)  How can we possibly cut a Gordian knot that defines "selective"breeding as a "natural" process of "natural" selection!!?  Selection involves a choice...by someone or something.  In this case, the someone is a human being.  In the broadest sense, yes, a human being is certainly something "natural", but using that interpretation makes all genetic alteration natural and I don't think that's what the writer intended to imply at all.  Choosing a desirable characteristic is certainly "selection", but there is nothing "natural", aka accidental or arbitrary, about it.

Let's continue. No, I'm afraid none of the flowering plants we are growing for this account are 'native'.  They are annuals and unmistakably altered (bred) for color, hardiness, disease resistance, long blooming, and probably, drought tolerance, seeing as many of the flowers purchased by our customers have to endure conditions that are quite "unnatural".... roots constrained to a very small volume of soil and watered once a week or less....  But no problem: if one desires a "natural" planting there are other options.  Just let these highly improved annuals reseed for year or two and the offspring will revert to the pallid ancestors of sporadic bloom and sprawling habit. Or grow your own natives from seed or purchased perennials.  There ARE indeed grand and garden worthy native plants; I'm a huge fan.  But growing indigenous species will not make you a better person or provide more habitat for pollinators or butterflies than a pot of lantana or a planting of pentas.  Grow 'em both; that's my advice!

And let's get one thing perfectly straight; there isn't going to be a genetically modified seed or plant in any of our greenhouses this year.  I wish there were!  I wish there was a way to prevent fungus from spotting zinnias, botrytis from browning geraniums, and put a stop to the downy mildew plague that has devastated impatiens the last few years!  If one buys a tomato from us, it may be a brand new hybrid with lots of letters after its name signifying its resistance to various nasty fungi...or one can choose something tried and true like Rutgers or Big Boy....but we will be just as happy to sell you a heritage tomato variety like Cherokee or German Johnson.  Choice is good, and one need only leaf through a catalog like Totally Tomatoes to realize the past, present, and future of home garden production offers a cornucopia of decisions.  

While I'm on my garden soapbox, allow me to point out that it would be a really tough job to find a totally inorganic soil.  Even an abused garden plot will contain a fair amount of organic matter in the form of stems, leaves, roots, mulch and other leftovers in various stages of decomposition.  I guess my grandkids' sandbox might be considered an inorganic garden spot...but not after they've pounded a half dozen gourds into pulp and planted the seeds.....

Ecosystem is such a sterile technical term.  A garden can be many things...organized or unkempt, monotone or multi-hued, edible or ornamental, frivolous or practical. Forgive me if I believe planting flowers and vegetables, whether for consumption or pleasure, is a net gain for the earth and all the creatures thereof.  We grow plants for a living...and for love.  That's the kind of rule I can live with....

Cake and Kohlrabi

Does anyone eat broccoli anymore?  Or grow cabbage for slaw, or Brussels sprouts?  (OK, so I'm not that worried about the consumption of Brussels sprouts.....not my fave in the vegetable category.)  The reason I ask?  Because flat after flat of perfectly lovely cole crops are growing in the greenhouse, not being hauled from Hurst Greenery to garden centers or grocery stores.

Late Flat Dutch Cabbage heads

 Nope, we've mostly had requests for Late Flat Dutch cabbage...and kohlrabi.  Not kidding!!  Kohlrabi!  Last summer, Millie tried repeatedly to interest anyone dropping by in the kohlrabi she had picked from her garden. No takers.  They may be delicious...someone told me kohlrabi can be used like a potato, but what I've read puts its taste somewhere between cabbage and broccoli stems.  Another source says it is sweet like an apple and yet another puts it on the vegetable spectrum between radishes and young turnips.  My interpretation of all these opinions?  One of two outcomes: 1) Kohlrabi has no taste and therefore is chopped up into chunks and used as a generic "mixed vegetable"whenever a mixed vegetable is called for, or 2) Kohlrabi is NEVER eaten, but grown as a curiosity by gardeners who just like something different in the row.  I do know that most of the orders for kohlrabi come from eastern Nebraska. Perhaps there is a great local kohlrabi cuisine in the ethnic heritage of our neighbors to the west.

Here's a Kohlrabi

At any rate, Charlie came up this afternoon for garden plants and carried off not just broccoli, but also cabbage and cauliflower for their garden.  He told me Thursday that the ground was hard, hard, hard, but he's hoping for some measurable rain Sunday night or Monday to help settle his new transplants.  When I drove home around suppertime, he and Millie were headed out to spend the evening in the garden.

He's not alone in wishing for rain even as the planters roll. Earlier this week, the air was thick and the sunsets wreathed in smoke.  Aaron and Gabe manned their machines to mow around the greenhouses, Gabe in his bucket hat, Aaron on the zero turn John Deere.  Both boys wore masks, but that did nothing to slow the accumulation of dust and grit in their ears. Aaron has mowed what passes for our lawn only twice this dry spring.  He's good enough at math to figure out what consequences a dry summer will have on the sum of his summer income.

Blake has spent an agony of mental anguish on our inability to grow grass over the years.  Neither weed, nor feed, nor benign neglect ( we are really good at that!) seems to make one iota of difference. The curse is unbroken in 2016.  Aaron looks more like Pigpen following an afternoon of mowing at Spruce.

 There's nothing like an outing to the theater after a busy week of work.  The Liberty Theater boasted full houses for both Friday and Saturday for a showcase of energetic and exuberant dance on the stage, applause and smiles and laughter and encouragement for the homegrown talent from the audience.  So many proud picture taking parents and grandparents!  I love being part of the crowd at the kids' events, watching them learn to practice and memorize, developing skill and judgment and confidence and grace whether the arena is sports or dance or a spelling bee or Battle of the Books.

Blake and I enjoyed a delicious and civilized meal on Ann and Matt's patio this Sunday evening: steak and seasoned potatoes and pasta salad with angel food cake and strawberries for dessert.

Speaking of cake, Thursday is Blake's birthday! Even though he's going to be out of town that day, the crew at the greenhouse has generously offered to celebrate with him in absentia ..with his birthday present from his mother, Millie's exquisite angel food cake! Blake does not appreciate our thoughtfulness nor trust our intentions and has already acted to protect his interest by scheduling a different delivery date for the cake..

..when he will be around to get the first piece.....

So wish Blake a happy birthday if you see him this week....

...and come out and buy some broccoli....

There's Rosemary...that's for Remembrance

If you are a long time resident of a small town, you are no stranger to loss. The more rooted one is in a place, the more one recognizes the truth in John Donne's writing:

"any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind,

 and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls;

 it tolls for thee."

This truth is seldom far from my mind.  Remembrance is in the very air you breathe if you drive the same road and walk the same earth and look at the same view through your windshield for decades at a time. 

 Barns fall down and families move away; trees die and fences are rolled up; farms change hands and farmers retire.  But the old times are near the surface and live as long as there are folks who remember around to talk about them.

When we moved to town in June 1980, right before Ann was born,  we lived just a block from Mrs. Florence Niedermeyer, mother to our family physician and grandmother to one of Blake's best friends from high school, Paul Niedermeyer.  Mrs. Niedermeyer was a gardener and was willing to suspend disbelief and accept me as a gardener too.  One of the plants she shared with me was a chunk of a peony root known as the Mother's Day peony, a scion of the plant carried over the plains...a pioneer, if you will.  When we moved out to the farm a few years later, I planted that peony in the front garden...and I think of Florence Niedermeyer every spring just before Mother's Day.

And that reminds me of Doc Niedermeyer himself.   Dr. Niedermeyer delivered our three babies ( and many many more!) and every Mother's Day week, weather permitting, he would drive his elegant antique roadster out to the greenhouse or call and order a fuchsia basket delivered to his home for Sue to hang in the kitchen window.  We did this for years, and then were privileged to pot up a long cedar planter to deliver to the cemetery after he was gone.

A year or so after we moved back to the farm, the family purchased an 80 acre farm owned previously by Floyd and Mary Parr. At the auction Blake bought a big console television...which never did work so we used it as a stand for our old TV, but for me the real treasure was Mary Parr's garden.  I had an empty slate to plan and plant at our new homestead and was never too proud to scavenge.  I made trip after trip with my spade, bringing home hostas and Virginia bluebells, a currant bush(a dreadful mistake) and a shrub rose with a tiny double pink bloom.  I dug two big chunks of old fashioned bleeding heart, a sentimental favorite from my childhood and several different peonies.  The whole process felt more like a rescue than a desecration as I built the backbone of my new garden from the treasures of a gardener I had never met.

I remember other gardeners, regular visitors to the greenhouse, by the flowers they loved.  Mrs. Barnard would make almost weekly visits to pick up one or two plants or just take a stroll to see what had changed since last week. She always had a friend or two with her during her outings.  She'd start out Easter weekend with pansies and follow up later with less hardy plants including the yellow sweet potato for the front light post.  I always hoped we had a good variety of herbs for Judy Munn when she and Rosalee came out for flowers.  Mary Lou Broerman planted lots of red geraniums and I was always afraid I'd run out before she got all she needed...Marnie Shaum needed lots of big dark red geraniums too. Those ladies were high in my estimation; I was a novice grower and salesman and I wanted them to be happy by having the right plants for their gardens.

Grandma Hurst would come get her flowers in her big red Crown Vic. She was done with vegetable gardening by the time I was around, but she had pretty pots and some perennials in front of the house after the big half dead evergreens were removed. We raised miniature roses for several years and Grandma really liked those.

Little Lee's first Easter; my dress from Grandma..

Not entirely put together..note the shoes!

 She would always buy us girls a new dress for Easter and a hybrid tea rose for Mother's Day.  I never have been very good with roses, I confess, having killed or let die uncounted victims.  But I still appreciate the gesture of one gardening generation to another, just as I remember fondly the women who treated an untested rookie gardener as their peer.....

"There's rosemary...that's for remembrance......and there is pansies, that's for thoughts"
(Shakespeare, from Hamlet)

Handiwork...or The Old Fashioned Way

Happy last week of April...a time of year that truly deserves special appellation on the calendar for those of us in the "seasonal"professions. Barring the types of abominations that bookend a bell curve of weather expectations, events like snow, a hard freeze, seven inches of rain...you get the idea.....this is the week machinery of all configurations typically crowds the fields and highways. With the first of May peeking out from under the next calendar page, trees in full flower and the whine of mowers a constant accompaniment, gardeners throw caution to the winds and clog the parking lots of garden centers and nurseries like bees in a hive.

But at the greenhouse, the mechanical helping hands that sped the job of transplanting and filling flats sit idle as the tide of spring brings a transition from planting and growing to picking up the flats of flowers, vegetables, and choosing the finished hanging baskets and mixed planters for customers in four states. There is always an element of art in the growing of plants; there are rules of thumb and seasons of experience we rely upon. But when push comes to shove, we cannot grow plants from our devices or our instruments or our rules and records, or even necessarily follow our hard won experience; we have to get out amongst 'em, feel what they feel, pick them up, turn them over. It's detail, it's habit, it's time consuming....and absolutely essential.

So much of this enterprise is handwork. Watering in is rule 1,

but tagging is a close second. A perfectly beautiful flat of flowers will be left behind like Cinderella from the ball without a tag.....and no one wants to guess whether that vine in the corner will grow to bear a 20 # pumpkin....or 2 dozen zucchini!

Whether our customers order one flat of this and two flats of that..or 256 flats of marigolds and 243 flats of mixed zinnias, they are all picked up and carried by hand, two by two, the most ancient and elemental means of transport. It is piecework and not the stuff of glory...and it is the grand accomplishment of every single day. Flat by flat, basket by basket, truck by truck,until the greenhouses get too hot to bear and the whiteboard calendar is bare.

I am reading a book about work right now, believe it or not, a book that deals with work from a Biblical viewpoint, work as a vocation, a calling. I am comforted and encouraged by this interpretation when I do the most menial of tasks during the day: bagging the trash, emptying the dishwasher, putting away the laundry.

 Even though these chores are replayed daily, hourly in households world wide and require no especial talent, still, it would be universally acknowledged that the world is a better place when work like this is done. According to Martin Luther, these homely commonplace jobs are as beautiful in the sight of the Almighty as any other service rendered to His glory.

 With this insight, the work of the farmer , the gardener, the carpenter, the truck driver, the plumber, the welder, all become holy offerings when performed with our whole energy and effort. The outcome may not suit us; there won't be a standing ovation; we may consider our work menial or pedestrian or ephemeral....but our goals should be our best...no less.

These are the thoughts I ponder as I fill the carts with petunias and marigolds, snapdragons and salvia. Common annuals, beautiful and fresh as spring this day on April, but gone with the season like the proverbial lilies of the field. Some days my job seems trivial compared to the weighty burdens of the mighty, but I trust it is an offering to grow beautiful plants using the raw materials God has provided and the blessing of day by day work, no matter how humble.

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Name Dropping

“I read in a book once that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but I've never been able to believe it. I don't believe a rose WOULD be as nice if it was called a thistle or a skunk cabbage.” 

― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

gomphocarpus physocarpus 'Hairy Balls'...

"As its name implies, eating the leaves or buds causes a “buzzing” sensation in your mouth… or in the mouth of the person your children gave it to. Numbness occurs and next comes the drooling. This plant is known as a sialagogue meaning it causes one to start salivating. Big time."

What's in a name? Given all the time, effort, creativity....and money...spent not only in creating new and improved products, but also christening them, lots of people believe that having a catchy or unique or clever name is the verbal equivalent of being the Roadrunner vs. Wiley Coyote. Clearly, the folks that gave "Hairy Balls" its name had a good grip on "attention getting". No one would choose Gomphocarpus physocarpus off a plant list for fear of contracting whatever-that-is simply by reading about it. But attach the variety name "Hairy Balls"to it? Downright irresistible. Even before one of our customers ordered the darn thing, I thought I might have to plant some just to see what it did..Besides make people salivate uncontrollably, that is.

Speaking of spontaneous salivation.... without luscious names, just how many varieties of garden tomatoes do you think there would be? After all, the "just the facts, ma'am" of their attributes are about as enticing as the signs on a test plot.

 Big this, Early that....sigh...Where IS the sense of imagination? Compare, if you will, the listing in my seed catalog for tomatoes with the enticement of names gleaned from an heirloom listing. 

Here be tomatoes differentiated by color: Green Zebra, Persimmon, Pineapple, Plum Lemon, Purple Calabash, Blush Pear.

Pineapple

Green Zebra

And tomatoes differentiated by origin...or someone's romantic notion thereof: Caribe, Cherokee Purple, Chesapeake, Italian Heirloom, Jersey Devil, Nebraska Wedding, Missouri Pink Love Apple.

Jersey Devil

Finally, there are even tomatoes that pretend to be members of the family: Aunt Gertie's Gold, Aunt Ginney's Purple, Aunt Ruby's German Green.

Aunt Gertie's Gold

One gardener claimed she had grown the tomato variety with the longest...and most literal...name of all: Orange Fleshed Purple Smudge tomato. Descriptive, but not poetic, I say.

Orange Fleshed Purple Smudge

Modern seed breeders have their work cut out. Their cohorts on the vegetative side of the aisle have a leg up on them. Take, for example, varieties of coleus. Coleus, of course, is an annual originally discovered in Java which became wildly popular in Victorian gardens inciting a coleus craze something like the tulip madness of centuries before. Back in favor with both gardeners and breeders, coleus varieties are like overly eager first graders waving their hands frantically, vying for attention and popularity with bold colors, textures...and, naturally, over-the-top names. Looking over this list, it appears that some of the original coleus madness is still alive and well in nomenclature! If you're brave enough to take a walk on the wild side, choose your coleus wisely from options like: Apocalypse, Pink Chaos, Alligator Tears, Coco Loco, Hot Lava, Inky Fingers, Pistachio Nightmare and Stormy Weather. Think you can handle it?

Pink Chaos

Coco Loco

Pistachio Nightmare

Probably. After all, we consumers are used to dealing with the persuasive powers of advertising whether the product is Made For TV (BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!) or a particularly seductive sports car streaking out of a computer generated backdrop. You could plant an entire estate to posies for what that Lexus with a bow will set you back. Do some name dropping of your own....forks will wonder what you've been up to!

Just keep your Gomphrocarpus physocarpus in your own garden.....

Nothing Contrary Here!

Mary, Mary, quite contrary

How does your garden grow?

With silver bells and cockleshells

And pretty maids all in a row.

That was then....graceful but finicky cottage blossoms, ephemeral but lovely to celebrate in rhyme.... never mind the dark historical back story....

But this is NOW...

Mary, Mary, don't be contrary

Choose a flower that will give us a show!

Whether Bada Boom or Nightlife, 

Cocktail or Harmony,

We know these begonias will grow!

The 21st century gardener's version of pretty maids all in a row.. upon row.. upon row.  

When all else fails...including imagination...we wind up with a greenhouse of marching bronze leaved begonias.