May 9th, 2008 admin
Almost twenty years ago I wrote that the way to get good at gardening was to get old, and that that, after all, there was no such thing as a child prodigy gardener.
Within weeks, a child-prodigy gardener phoned. One afternoon spent watching this kid buy sophisticated green-hued bedding plants for his “landscaping clients” convinced me I’d been wrong. The old-lady-as-intuitive-genius-gardener theory also turns out to be flawed. Many years further along in my quest to be an old lady, I understand this. I once gardened by the seat of my pants, throwing seeds around and forgetting to water them, but my many gardens were gorgeous, bountiful jungles anyway. I said I loved gardening because it required no striving, and anyway, the imperfections enhanced the beauty.
I didn’t know from imperfections back then. Whereas today, on the eve of my entrance into the AARP, white mottled death has moved from the ground into my peas, destroying everything in its path. My roses remind me of cinnamon rolls-not their lovely smell, but the sticky gunk all over them. Even now, stink bug parents are sending their 7000 children off to summer camp in my tomato beds. And it’s not just acts of god that plague me–my idiot savant design ideas have dried up like scorched tomatillos, and there’s no lack of those around here, believe me. This morning I admired my wine-dark purplish giant snapdragons until I saw a squatty neon red geranium beneath them. It sort of reminded me of Vita Sackville-West, if she’d been around for the LSD years. On closer inspection, there were hundreds of hard little brown things on the snapdragon leaves. With my luck, they’re alive.
Plus, all this doomed gardening takes work, as opposed to airy pronouncements. Now begins the organic-yet-vicious spraying-watery skim milk, hot peppers, stenchy kelp, baking soda and blue Dawn are all just way stations on the way to something more sinister and powdery, and that probably won’t work either. Also, it’s 95 degrees and I’ll have to wait till it’s dark to spray, and that’s when the chiggers and gnats move in.
Growing old is a big, fat disappointment, horticulturally speaking. Bite me, Red Hat Society! Then again, I still count the hours till I can rise from this desk to go out to the garden and fight the pestilence, and lose. I still have dreams of grandeur, or maybe pole beans, if that’s not too much to ask.
This blog ends with an explanation of the impulse that drives us not just to grow things, but to find the process infinitely rewarding, even if it technically isn’t. I haven’t written that sentence yet.
Have you?
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April 30th, 2008 admin
(This story appeared in the Austin American Statesman last Saturday, April 26.)
Carol Michel is the rock star at the Spring Fling garden party. All the guests are garden bloggers, and they all read Carol’s May Dreams Gardens blog. Though the garden she writes about is in rural Indiana, she attracts readers far from her own USDA climate zone. It may be because she organizes the blogosphere-encouraging everyone to send in state-of-the-garden photographs on designated Bloom Days, convening a virtual garden book club, and inventing the Hoe Down to showcase pictures of cool hoes, posed and au naturel.
Personally, I admire her for having codified the rules of accepting free plants. “Never, ever, thank the giver for the plant,” she writes. “. . .saying thank you keeps the plant from thriving.” This is the sort of thing you don’t know is true until an authority figure tells you it is. And now this authority figure is here in Austin.
“You know you’re a garden geek if you’ll get on a plane to visit a garden,” Carol says. “This is the furthest away I’ve flown.” She’s spent the weekend with 39 other garden bloggers, visiting Austin gardens and nurseries, hearing talks from local experts, eating barbecue and Tex-Mex, and bonding with people she previously only knew only online. As it turns out, a disproportionate number of them live in Austin. Though garden blogging itself is hardly more than five years old, at least 25 widely read Austin bloggers have come into bloom in the past two years.
So it made sense that the first national garden bloggers’ conference happened here.
“We garden bloggers are basically the same,” Carol Michel explains. “We’re introverted, but we want to share our gardens with people somehow.”
Most gardeners like the solitude of gardening, but can be quite social about it after the fact. Garden blogs would seem to be written in our kind of shorthand. Nevertheless, I resisted reading them right up until I launched my own. If I never quite caught up with the demands of my actual garden, I thought, where would I find to read about someone else’s, much less write about the chores I wasn’t doing?
As any Spring Flinger will attest, bloggers can spend untold hours answering comments, guest-blogging, forming multi-blogger cartels, and leaving comments on other blogs. They take and format hundreds of high-quality photographs. Would it ultimately be more satisfying to plant another row of pole beans? I was ambivalent. The questions kept coming.
If weblogs are diaries, for instance, who edits out the boring bits? Is blogging just a complicated way to pop in on friends, much the way 1880s ladies left calling cards on each other, but much more often? Do we force ourselves to blog because they won’t take us seriously if we don’t-whoever they are? Should we “monetize” with Google ads and then have to keep track of the pennies that flow in? You’re supposed to “drive” people to your site like so many virtual cattle, but what then? Do you try to sell them wind chimes or something? What does it cost to mail wind chimes? How does one set up a Paypal account? What does this have to do with gardening?
Plenty, as I learned from reading the seasoned bloggers, most of whom write for strictly for their own enjoyment, though some are gaining ground as freelance writers, landscape designers and garden coaches.
“I started just a year ago,” says Dee Nash, who writes Red Dirt Ramblings from the Oklahoma countryside. “I’d been writing for Oklahoma Gardener,” she says, “but I blog to write about what I actually care about, not just what to plant. I wanted it to be about passion.”
She chronicles her vast rose garden-”expanding was an obsession”-and the fact that she doesn’t like “just a rose garden. So I plant my roses with other things. If they don’t play well with others, they get ripped out.” Though her hands shook the first dozen times she hit the “publish” button, she now gets about twenty messages a day, each of which she answers personally. I like Dee’s fascination with weather and weathermen, and the way her Country Living visions fell apart when she moved out of the city. “They are citified fantasies,” she writes. “I actually live in Dogpatch or Deliverance. Sometimes, it’s difficult to tell.” I read Dee to find out about Dee, but I’m also hoping for a few ideas about what to interplant with my roses.
In that way, scanning garden blogs is like prospecting with a metal detector, in that one man’s garbage is another’s collectible beer can. It’s a matter of taste. I don’t care if I never see another cat photo in a garden blog, but anyone who writes about the simple act of watering has my full attention. Just about every week, a new blog will pop up for me to investigate.
“Gardening is an extremely local act,” says Melissa Stevens of Austin-based Zanthan Gardens. “I’ve never said that I’m an expert on any plant, but I’m trying, in a more scientific way, to describe what’s happening in this yard, and to compare notes with other gardeners.”
Melissa’s been blogging since 2001, putting up stories of the Bouldin yard she’d tended since 1993, indulging a Thomas-Jefferson-like ability to write detailed observations on individual plants, and asking for help.
“I had all these books that said things like `plant in full sun’ but they really meant `plant in full sun in Connecticut,’” she remembers. “I wanted to know what that meant in Texas. I could have gone to the garden clubs, but I’m an introvert.”
Now her blog is full of high quality photographs, plant profiles, and the very useful section entitled A Southern Gardener’s Year. Readers may come for those things, but they stay for Melissa herself, as she moves from fancy irises to old roses to a garden deliberately filled in with good-looking weeds. As her large trees grow, her land becomes shadier, and her plants move around accordingly. And though her yard is a strictly solitary space, she socializes online with other Austin gardeners. Last year, a group of them finally met face to face over margaritas at the home of Pam Penick, a landscape designer who writes the top-rated Digging blog, and organized this year’s Spring Fling.
“It was like a family reunion, except most of us had never met each other,” Melissa says. “I still don’t know much about the other bloggers’ personal lives, but I could tell them what they were doing last Saturday in the garden.”
-30-
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April 18th, 2008 admin
The biggest difference between Austin (where I live now) and Colorado (where I lived forever) is that things rot in Austin. People get pretty polarized about this. I come from a line of anti-rots. My dad, who was stationed at Air Force Bases in both Texas and Colorado, explained that Rotlands contain humidity, big bugs and mildew, while Drylands are crisp and bearable, even at 100 degrees. It’s true. I remember Dryland cocktail hours on the deck after a day of hard gardening, needing a sweater as the sun went down behind the mountains. I also remember the first few months in Austin-going outside to get the paper at 5:30 a.m. and being socked in the face by a rotten, moldy, summer smell, and it was only March.
But, I’m a licensed Master Composter, and it’s very satisfying to make compost in Austin. All compost happens eventually, but it happens a lot faster here. Wrangling three huge bins of greens and browns, I can produce several wheelbarrow loads of finished compost in a month, if I keep up with it.
Not that I keep up with it. Just as there are Rotters and Dryers, there are two kinds of composters-Screeners and Chunkers. The first do what we were taught in Master Composter school: let the compost heat up and cool down, cool, stir, heat, cool, stir, etc., until brown crumbly magnificence results, and finish by screening out the last imperfections. Instead, the compost I make is half-baked, with recognizable chunks, long stringy things, pineapple tops and egg shells. I could sift them out. Well, maybe you could.
To review: people are either Screeners or Chunkers, Rotter or Dryers. From these four classifications, I believe we can extrapolate the beginnings of a new sort of Meyers-Briggs. I am a Rotter/Chunker. And you?
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April 15th, 2008 admin
This is a photo of a possible future cosmo, in a discontinued shade of brazen scarlet. It’s growing in my front yard under the rebar tepee. For weeks now, I’ve complained that seeds are a micro-managing mishegass, that I wish I could just blow money on bedding plants, that the whole thing seems dicey and unworkable. Well, now look what happened.
It rained. Spring sprang, some. Now there are sprouts just about everywhere I remember flinging seed, and some places I had forgotten.
Neat, huh? Yeah, I suppose. I really like cosmos and nasturtiums and lettuce-especially its name, merveille de quatre saisons-but this endless need for trust, which is probably supposed to renew my faith in nature, makes me feel old and cranky instead.
During my early twenties I once stated in print that the only way to get good at gardening was to get old. “There are no child prodigy gardeners,” I wrote. Almost immediately, I heard from a 16-year-old boy who actually was one, but I held to my theory. At my age, gardening was a screwball comedy, and everything that went wrong at least did so in a charming or instructive manner. Apple tree saplings that never progressed beyond sticks were okay because, I mean, a good stick is hard to find, right? It explained the Minnesota Midget melon that produced one cardboard-tasting fruit, but who cared-what a nice anecdote it made, after all.
Well, you can keep your cocktail party chat, because these days I hope, somewhat grimly, to feed my family on the fruit I plant. Furthermore, as my 50th birthday approaches, the garden actually causes me stress, anxiety, and even a sense of impending doom. Something is suspicious about big items–my soil, my drinking (and watering) water. All, not some, of the leaves of the emerging plants at my place, are a weird yellow. The new plants may have just experienced a little shock. But it’s also possible that our ENTIRE NEIGHBORHOOD IS FULL OF TOXINS. And groundwater? Don’t get me started!
As to the seeds: I’m relieved they sprouted, but also nervous. Since when do squirrels dig giant holes next to tiny seedlings and for what dire purpose? What if the sunflowers choke out the alyssum? What insect chews perfect half-moons while my back is turned? Can these seedlings be saved?
My old vision of the calm and capable old gardener-savant is nothing but a pile of hooey. The fact that you question more as you age is the problem, not the solution.
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April 1st, 2008 admin
The following appeared in the Austin American Statesman in March–my debut gardening column.
Now is a good time to think about tomatoes.
Not that there’s a bad time.
Thinking about tomatoes beats pondering such bland matters as life and death. Sure, we all have to go some day, but in the meantime, what about the quest to grow a one-pound heirloom tomato with slices thick and bloody as prime rib? Or a bowl of tiny currant tomatoes? Or everything in between? All winter, I obsess over plans for our two short, intense growing seasons. And this particular week, more than any other, is my chance activate my own plans, and a lot of other people’s besides.
To start with, now is time to put plant tomato seedlings in the ground. I know, because I did it three weeks ago, losing exactly half my plants to frost. I was understandably impatient. My friend Louise shares her seedlings with me, and this year she went even more overboard than usual, ordering 18 varieties of tomatoes to start under lights at home. All the varieties she picked were:
- indeterminate, to provide a steady supply of fruit instead of a bumper crop all at once.
- self-consciously disease-resistant, with lots of Vs, Fs, Ns and Ts after their names. Louise used to plant only heirlooms, but she’s also the kind of gardener who rips out plants at the first sign of disease, and she’s had to do a lot of ripping over the years. This year, she found herself ordering quite a few hybrids.
- full of promise—of flavor, especially, but also of abundance and even beauty.
Louise and I have more plants than we need, but we may not be able to resist buying a few more. The stock at Gardens is about 60% heirloom, including such varieties as Jaune Flamme, Opelka and Big Zebra. “And of course we have Cherokee Purple,” says manager Angie Motal. “It’s a big meaty fruit. People rave about it.”
Before moving to an apartment last year, Angie grew several successful tomato crops of her own in partial shade against the wall of a house, neither of which practice she recommends. “But I had no problems,” she recalls. “Like, two tomato hornworms, and I just picked them off.” Perhaps it was the handful of cornmeal she put in each planting hole to act as a natural fungicide. Or maybe the regular applications of Rabbit Hill Farm’s Tomato-Pepper Food?
Lauren Bryant at Barton Springs Nursery is free with tomato advice. “Full sun,” she recites. “Always plant after March 15. Use a lot of good compost, and bury the plant up to its lower leaves. Once it get to be three or four feet tall, remove the leaves from the bottom foot of the stem.”
That sounds good to Jo Dwyer at Angel Valley Farm in Jonestown, but with 4000 tomato plants to tend, who has time? Jo grows hybrids—including Celebrity and Sun Sugar—and such heirlooms as Prudens Purple and Brandywine. The image is idyllic, but doesn’t always look that way, she says.
“If you walk through our field, you might see a whole row with dead brown leaves, but the tops will still be green. Sometimes we just have to walk by and say `that’s a shame.’ You can have some crummy-looking tomato plants that still produce quite well,” she says. “But we also spray religiously with kelp mixture.”
The Dwyers use kelp from Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply (www.groworganic.com), and now I’ll do the same, because I never ignore other people’s closely held tomato secrets. A Delta pilot told me never to grow tomatoes in the same place twice. A nursing home administrator suggested scattering tomato plants throughout the landscape like ornamentals.
I always plant marigolds around the edges of the tomato bed, because I hear they repel bad bugs. This year, I’ll also poke some organic garlic bulbs in next to the tomatoes, because garlic greens have a powerful smell, and power may be my only shot at driving away stink bugs. Last year, they drilled little holes everywhere—not just in my tomatoes, but my soul.
“They can be awful,” Jo Dwyer agrees. “And there’s nothing you can do but squish them. Nothing else works. If you look at them closely, you’ll see that a stinkbug is really a little armored tank.”
Ah, so we’re talking weapons?
Chris Chirasis at The Great Outdoors proposes Spinosad, an organic pesticide that’s been shown to make a dent in beetle populations, though it doesn’t distinguish between good beetles and bad. He also recommends spraying a light mist of Neem Oil in the morning, to make the bugs easier to catch and squish. And he swears one of his supervisors goes after them with a vacuum cleaner.
Some gardeners may balk at extension cords and industrial noise. Go figure. In fact, I wonder–if a shop-style vacuum cleaner is good, wouldn’t a hand-held model be better—certainly more nimble?
Reached by phone at Black and Decker customer service HQ, a rep takes up the challenge. Though not a gardener, he agrees to speculate. A “moderately powered Dustbuster” fitted with a crevice tool would do the trick, he decides. “Not much that you suck up with a Dustbuster is going to fly away from it,” he says, making me want to throw my credit card at the problem.
But then, in the politest way possible, he suggests that all this seems like a lot of work to go to for a few tomatoes.
Oh, sonny! I want to say. Have you ever really tasted a tomato? A BLT? Home-made marinara?
But I know better. You might as well try to explain love itself.
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February 29th, 2008 admin
Tomorrow is the best day of the entire year. I think this because I’m a gardener. For non-gardeners (gardn’ters?) tomorrow is Some Dumb Saturday-go to Costco, play soccer, see that Will Ferrell movie, whatever it is you people do.
Here’s what I look forward to instead:
- –rising before the alarm rings, feeling how I did the morning of my seventh birthday, when I thought I was going to get something turquoise and sparkly. (And did.)
- –bolting coffee.
- –dressing in Carhart overalls with the sleeveless Werkstadt motorcycle repair shirt and aged hightops.
- –spackling my face with Sex Wax sunscreen and affixing a do-rag to my head.
- –going into the garden shed I (nearly) built myself and loading up a wheelbarrow with drywall buckets, yankee screwdriver, all the handtools, all the hoseclamps, the seeds, the Sharpie for labeling plant labels made out of plastic knives, a 2-quart water bottle full of ice and, at last, the pot-bound TOMATO SEEDLINGS that must go out, even though it might frost. So, also putting into the wheelbarrow anything that might protect a tomato from a frost, up to and including old blankets, chicken wire, shade cloth, cardboard boxes, aforementioned drywall buckets.
- –spending hours and hours and hours planting everything-seeds, plants, shrubs, divided perennials, potential weeds, everything.
- –as the sun goes down, enjoying the first gin-and-tonic of summer. On March first.
Any gardening reference work will tell you that planting should be done at intervals-the old plant-lettuce-in-successive-two-week-sowings method. I’m sure this is all sensible and makes for a long and manageable harvest. But to hell with it, I say, every year. Because I get to this point and all of a sudden I just can’t wait another second. I want to be watering, feeding, pruning, harvesting-IN THE GAME.
And in one day, I’ve discovered, I can completely change my landscape. Tonight, as I type this, I am a garden writer. 24 hours from now I will have turned back into a farmer.
As usual, it’s already been pretty brutal for my seedlings. Fully one half the tomato starts never made it through the boot camp of the fluorescent light hung over the bathtub. The other fifty percent have heart-I can just feel it, though some of these brave cadets won’t survive until harvest time, either. There will be stink bugs. There will be weeks when the temperature soars past 105 degrees. A time will come when I lose interest in the whole thing and suddenly want to stop distributing fresh water and go immerse myself in salt.
But that will be a lesser time than this, and right now I am constructed entirely of hope. Maybe I can persuade one of my daughters to make me a sandwich at high noon tomorrow? If so, the last detail will have fallen into place, and the day will be perfect, and good Lord, when else would I even dare to think such a thing?
Happy Plant Everything Day, if and when you have one.
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February 14th, 2008 admin
I signed up for regular weather e-alerts because weather events trump all others in terms of sheer excitement. My father put Radio Shack weather radios in just about every room of house-yes, bathrooms–and they sent out piercing shrieks whenever a tornado might be hitting the planes. His idea of a good date was jumping into a car and heading into the path of a hurricane. Growing up, I felt deliciously like an insider, backstage at the big weather show. Good times were had when the barometer fell-it gave us the sense that daily life was not predictable.
Except for the past three months, when the weather, no matter what accuweather.com promised, followed a basic pattern: threat of rain, followed by a half-dozen rain non-drops, and plenty of sun, with the occasional dangerous high-wind-and-low-humidity combo. This is edge-of-your-seatly thrilling for firefighters, such as my husband Eric, but it’s terrible seed starting weather.
I imagine a seed finally sprouting, only to be sun-fried during the one day I forget to mist it. Then again, I forget to mist my seeds almost every day because I resent having to do such a micro-managerial thing in the first place. I shouldn’t have to deal with phrases like “sprouts in 4 to 47 days.” I shouldn’t have to “prepare seed bed.” You just know the redwoods would never be what they are today if all this niggling perfectionism had been required.
It has been two weeks, and NOTHING is coming out of the ground for me. Sure, this could be my fault. I could have done something wrong. But isn’t that the point? Gardening itself has always been about making giant, impulsive mistakes-letting acts of nature occur all over the lower forty. It shouldn’t be about scrutinizing six square inches of soil to see if anyone has bothered to come to the party.
Could 100 percent of my seeds be “non-viable?”
Could they be fertile, but pouting in their biological dressing rooms?
Are they waiting for permission?
If so, you have it, pipsqueaks. Become mighty acorns, already.
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February 13th, 2008 admin
Seeds are miraculous and all that, but I’m an instant gratification gardener. When Lowe’s sends me a 10% coupon, I heed its embedded, subliminal instructions: save money by buying enough plants to fill the cargo area of a mid-size American car. Dig holes all over property and go nuts. Three years later, wonder why three shaggy rosemary bushes were really better than one, or even none. Fantasize about a spare, serene landscape in which tall grasses wave behind short Martha Gonzales roses, not the other way round.
The most recent coupon is staring at me. I’ve vowed not to use it unless a crucial piece of equipment breaks. (This doesn’t mean if I don’t get a chipper-shredder, I will die of boredom.)
I must resist. This year, reasons not to wave my credit card around are as abundant as stink bugs on an heirloom tomato. I’ve become a fiction writer, as opposed to a non-, and this isn’t a job so much as a full-time cash-sucking hobby I can now add to gardening, quilting, thrifting, dining out and bicycling. This year, I will scrimp.
Okay, but where are the kicks in just tending a garden? How can I live without infusions of the new, thrilling, and fraught with potential failure? Maybe another stab at giant, tasteless watermelon! Absolutely another home-made irrigation system that either refuses to drip or drains the local aquifer! But no, no, no!
So I’ve been forced to turn to seeds-as-future-landscape-plants. I had a lot of seeds lying around. I threw them everywhere. I covered them with a layer of fine soil and firmed it down, sort of. Watered in with a gentle mist, somewhat. And even wrote the names of the seeds on plastic knives and marked the spots where the seeds were to emerge. Unless I didn’t.
Sitting in the palm of my hand, the seeds betrayed no personality at all. They went to work in the earth about a week ago. So far nothing has happened.
I have a terrible feeling this is all going to take discipline.
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September 15th, 2006 admin
All summer, Austin was the hot orange spot on the national weather map. Even at 6 a.m. a humid, moldy smell hung in the air. Every plant on earth stalls dead when it gets over a hundred degrees, but I love to garden, so I moved dirt instead, an utterly absorbing activity. Nevertheless, the thought of a gin-and-tonic began to crowd my thoughts at 4 pm every day and the cocktail hour became a habit as ingrained as tooth-brushing or gossip. By the end of August, it hadn’t rained since the fourth of July.
48 hours ago, at three a.m., I heard it return. Surely everyone has these best-thing-in-life-are free moments-falling in love all over again with stars and clouds-but what I like is rain. Rain is a great promoter of interesting developments.
–When my daughter Coco, not a writer, was in seventh grade, she had Mr. Schneider for English. On one of those drizzly Colorado days that happens about twice a year, he instructed her to go out in the rain and write a poem. In doing this, he busted open a mile-wide vein of romance that had been living in my daughter all her life, and now she is a writer.
–My friend Louise, who didn’t believe in such things, fell in love at first sight with the guy who came to set up her rainwater collection system. Not four months later, on their wedding day, she and Bruce, the magical rainwater guy, planted silver sage, which only blooms in the rain.
–When my other daughter Gus was five, she invented the “rain-bathe”. You slither out of your clothes and prance around on the deck naked until you’re wet enough to deserve a really hot bath. I recommend it.
–The Jack and the Beanstalk story makes perfect sense who you actually see new bean seeds popping out of the ground in response to rain. My Kentucky Wonders are aimed at the sky. And what if The Giant were an immoral 1970s record producer? Another story, I guess.
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August 15th, 2006 admin
When I moved to Austin, Texas last year, I resumed two hobbies I had missed for more than ten years. Listening to live music and growing large tomatoes. Austin people made it east. They started giving me things the minute I got here and have yet to stop. Gin and tonics, barbecue, concert tickets, party invitations, and, from my neighbor, a huge piece of land where my daughter and I created Mother’s Day Farm.
The tomato project began in August, when I planted Brandy Boy tomato transplants, shuffling in the humidity, sweating the shape right out of my straw hat, listening to an old black man’s voice from the back of the apartment building next door. My neighbor told me the voice belonged to a fairly well-known blues musician. She remembered his name as Top-Hat Somethingorother.
I re-embraced live music portion by going to the Broken Spoke bar on my 48th birthday to listen to what had been advertised generically as A Night of Blues Piano. Back in the days when I had no trouble staying awake, I had played blues piano myself.
And who should show up but Top-Hat Somethingorother, who down at the piano and revealed himself to be Pinetop Perkins, the best blues pianist in the world! When I was 17, he was playing with Muddy Waters’ finest band and I was playing along with him, though I had to stop all the time to move the arm of my turntable back to the beginning of the track. It was that long ago. To Pinetop Perkins, it might as well have been last week. He was 94, and he hadn’t lost any of it, even though his hearing aid was on the fritz. In an age of floating, dweedly piano solos, his left hand like the door of an old Cadillac slamming shut. As I sat there, breathlessly clutching a cold beer bottle, all the mediocre music of the past thirty years was washed from my soul and I was clean.
Having Pinetop Perkins for a next-door neighbor is an astounding confluence of fate, as well as an ongoing thrill. A certain kind of person would feel the same way-Mick Jagger, for instance. He paid his deep respects to Mr. Perkins backstage at the Stones concert here last month. There are pictures to prove it.
Possibly because he has high-toned admirers, and also because I’m incoherent in his presence, Pinetop Perkins continues to ignore me, even when I bake cornbread for him in the hope of promoting a Tuesdays-with-Pinetop relationship. It ain’t gonna happen, but so what? I remain the neighbor in the garden in the back, the one with the unhinged smile, thinking how can this wonderful thing be happening, even when it isn’t exactly happening, but rather, is.
Also, the Brandy Boy is the best tomato I’ve ever grown. I don’t know who invented it, but creative genius was involved.
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