Garden Plant Follies

If everything I had planted in my garden had lived, I’d be in the midst of a jungle right now. It’s probably for the best that my garden practices survival of the fittest. We have been in drought for the past 3 years. Last summer was the worst. What plants did come back, I know to be like the residents of rural Southwest Alabama themselves – hardy survivors.

It’s early morning and I have already been out for my morning walk in the garden. I go barefoot and carry a cup of some kind of tea. I love tea – hot in the morning. Later in the day when I am done with my morning tea, I cut off the kettle and let it cool down. I then drink it in the afternoon iced. I love tea, but I guess in some ways I am not the typical southern tea drinkers because I can’t take the sugary syrup that most southerners want. Our most famous meal is meat and three with sweet tea. It is like drinking sugar straight to me.

My garden is beginning to contribute to my tea drinking by providing various kinds of mint to add to it. I have peppermint spearmint, mint the best, apple mint, lemon mint, orange mint, chocolate mint and variegated pineapple mint currently planted in my garden. Most of them are planted in pots. I’m no fool. I have seen many happy plants gallop away to really invade a garden. That has recently happed with my volunteer spiderworts. This is a plant brought over by the colonists for its medicinal properties. It is so happy in the rural south that it runs a close third in garden invasions to kudzu and wisteria. “Kudzu and Baptists are taking the South” was what a college professor of mine used to say. Wisteria is nothing but genteel kudzu. The way you plant both of them is a throw a plant down and run like hell.
Spiderwort may be worse in a garden because it reproduces from ANY part of the plant - roots, leaves, stems and flowers. The real problem with it is, like wisteria, it looks so pretty at the beginning that you think it belongs there. I have visited two public gardens recently where it was in the flower borders with more legitimate plants. One was Jasmine Hills Gardens and the other was Grace Episcopal Close Garden. They have real gardeners, so I assume they knew what they were doing. This is one plant that not only survived the drought, but tried to fill up most of my flower beds in the process.

My wisteria is a century old problem. My house is that old and the first owner must have planted it when Art Nouveau was making wisteria so revered. I have a large yard. The wisteria is down in the east corner. Over the century, the roots have come up and started new bushes anywhere nobody was paying attention. There is an oak tree that has exposed roots on the bank that has survived three hurricanes because the wisteria is so intertwined with it. In another part of the garden, the growth was so invasive that I just gave up and built a swing arbor for it to crawl on. Unfortunately, it can’t tell the difference in the arbor and the nearby tree, so it has engulfed both and has sent out roots so long, they are coming up on the other side of the house many yards away. The vines in the lower part of the yard are big enough to build stout furniture out of it. I can’t mess with it much, though, because the big oak tree would fall down.

I do have to get to work on the spiderwort. I need to let it know it’s not the only plant I want to grow. I have included a picture of it. It’s like that junior high girl who looks so pretty, but smarts off at her parents when she’s at home.

Simple Foods

I just had one of my favorite breakfasts. I was sitting on my porch listening to the birds sing. The food I ate is a dish I learned to make at age 5 while reading my Susie Homemaker Golden Book. It is melted sharp cheese on saltine crackers. I have come to name it Poor Man’s Cheese Straws.

One of the absolute favorite party dishes here in rural Southwest Alabama is cheese straws. They are cheese pastries torturously extruded out of a cookie press. They are wonderful – a mixture of cheese, flour, butter, cayenne pepper and pinches of spices. Now you can buy them at places like Target anytime. They used to be quite a delicacy making famous for the households that produced them.

My poor man’s cheese straws taste very much like them, only they are just toasted crackers and cheese. When I grew up, a friend of mine’s father had a country store on a dirt road in Chance, Alabama. They lived in an unpainted house across the road form the store. I can remember going to visit them on Sunday afternoons when I was a little girl in the days before Daddy took up golf, which ended our Sunday excursions forever.

When I was about four, we went down to visit. We played outside in the road coaxing doodlebugs out of their holes under the house with the taunt “Doodlebug, Doodlebug, come out o your hole. Your house is on fire!” They would come out. Not because they understood the gravity of their situation with the house on fire, but because we were torturing them with a broom straw stuck in the hole. Anyway, we were dirty and had to be bathed in the big claw foot tub in the bathroom added on the back porch. There were 3 of us in the tub. I can remember it so clearly because there was only an inch of water in it, but it was enough for us all to bath in. I didn’t understand it was because of it being a dry summer and the well being low.

Another thing I remember about that trip was that my friend, Frankie, the child of the family nearest my age, came running out to the car saying “I have brought you some paper dolls”. Being a town girl, I knew all about paper dolls from the Bedsole’s Ten Cent Store. I was excited until I saw them. They were cutouts from the Sears and Roebuck catalogue.

I’m telling you all this, to emphasize the simplicity of my breakfast. The basic supplies for making this were in every country store in every part of the Deep South. Saltine crackers and hoop cheese were always available in any place that sold food.
They were as common as the cans of pork and beans or sardines sold for lunches for people working in the woods and fields. The other night at Lion’s Club, two of the members were joking about the seafood platters they had for lunch while working in the woods. What they had were sardines on crackers, which they found as delightful as my poor man’s cheese straws.

There is a right and wrong way to prepare these toasted cheese crackers should you ever want to try them. The right was is to start with the most well aged cheddar cheese you can find. I use a Yankee cheese that I think is the best – Cabot’s extra sharp Vermont Cheddar or Kraft Extra Sharp Cracker Barrel that has a date that is about to expire. You must use plain saltine crackers. I have tried variations with Ritz or other fancier crackers. It will not work. The plain crackers turn into a crisp pastry when done right. Besides, you don’t want any sweetness in these.

You must bake the crackers at 350 degrees until the cheese is running off the crackers and leaves a lacy brown edge on cookie sheet. Do not let the crackers touch each other or they will not be as crisp and good. I have tried adding ground cayenne pepper and garlic powder under the cheese, It is okay if you like it, but not necessary to the success of the crackers. The key is the sharpness of the cheese and the slow baking. I promise you a delicacy that you can serve to anybody with pride. I have served it on the front porch to all kinds of dignitaries who just happen by. My front porch is a known gathering place in my hometown. We’ve had parties after big meetings, we’ve had every morning coffee meetings. We’ve had major quality of life discussions over iced tea. I’m having two distinguished guests who happen to be dear friends this weekend. We’ll be having breakfast on the porch eating – of course, poor man’s cheese straws. Don’t’ be too proud or too sophisticated to try them!

HAPPENINGS IN SELMA

I’m so proud of Selma. There is getting to be something to do there every weekend. Last weekend was the Battle of Selma. The weekend before that was the Pilgrimage and the Antique Sale. In the midst of all that, Senator John McCain made a visit. It doesn’t matter what our political leanings are. This was a major event for Selma, Gees Bend and Thomasville.

This past weekend, there were several interesting things that happened, but on a much quieter scale. The Freedom Foundation which recently moved to Selma from Colorado spearheaded a local production of the musical “Footloose”. It used local talent from all schools, ethnicities, and walks of life.

In conjunction with the play, the historic St. James Hotel had a special dinner package. They offered a 4 course dinner for $30.00 a person. I ate all four courses. The best thing was the sweet potato crème brule'.

The play was good, the food was special. The highlight of the weekend in my anticipation was the Sunday afternoon high tea at Sturdivant Hall. There was to be a tea tasting and wonderful refreshments as well as a lecture by a world traveled tea planter. I was so looking forward to it. Everything lived up to my expectations except the lecture. It was on the art of tea growing. It started off well enough. He told us about the history of tea, the kinds of tea and interesting facts about tea. That was where the interesting part left off. There is NOTHING more boring than a boring Englishman. I think the actual growing of tea takes less time than his explanation of it. There were lots of slides which were supposed to move along automatically. He would stop on a particular slide and give excruciating details about the picking of tea or the drying of tea. People all around me were dozing and slipping out. One lady graciously agreed to give up her seat near the front to a person who were hard of hearing. She had been one of the dozers.

This man had traveled around the world trying to figure out why production was down on a given plantation. I think one reason it might have been down was that pickers were going to sleep during one of his pep talks. He was enthusiastic in a droning sort of way about things like black tea being oxidized instead of fermented. It was like listening to an engineer wax lengthy (not eloquent) on some obscure part he was developing to increase the productivity of a widget. A lot of people’s eyes were glazing over (those who were not dozing) by the time he hit the 45 minute mark. He was particularly into a process called CTC – cut, tear and curl. I was about ready to do all three to him by the time he was through.

The experience reminded me of the old axiom we always use. If a teacher would just teach sex education like he teaches everything else, the students would loose all interest in sex. It was perfectly excruciating.

You may remember the 2 ½ hour lecture on herbs I wrote about a few months back. I could have listened to the herbalist all day. I felt like I DID listen to the tea planter all day. I decided that it being Sunday, I’d have rather listened to a fundamentalist preacher for the 150th time on the blood of Christ than 45 minutes of the tea planter. Oh, God.

The only things that kept me from bolting were the three other people I had fooled into coming with me and the memory of all those beautiful goodies in the dining room waiting to be consumed. It was like bible school. There is a reason they serve refreshments at the end.