tobacco.jpgWe - my wife and I, that is - have begun to plant things in our food garden.  Well, I use words like “we” and “our” but I am the one doing all the work tilling, weeding, planting, etc, etc, etc.  She does nothing but dictate which crops go where and does not contribute even a little bit to the labor effort.

Why not, you may ask? Why is she so damn lazy - too many soap operas and bon-bons? Hasn’t she ever read the story of the Ant and the Grasshopper? 

The truth is she is 7+ months pregnant, and her ogre of a husband refuses to let her deal with fertilizer, come near insect poison, or dig in the hot sun.  I figure she’ll have ‘labor effort’ enough later. :) In the meantime she can just focus on building us a little dude and let me tend to the crops.  Personally, I couldn’t be happier to do it.

Since this is “my” garden this year I got to add a few plants that normally would not have been there.  For instance I will be planting some soy, some peanuts, and even a couple of tobacco plants.

Why those? The wife and I like tofu occasionally and, as with the peanuts, I think it’s cool to get protein without having to raise and kill farm animals.  Not that I am a vegetarian -  there is nothing I like more than a huge medium-rare steak, and, statistically speaking, at the time you are reading this I probably have a #1 combo from Wendy’s somewhere in my digestive tract.  I also know that growing only a few plants might sustain a small family for a week at the outside, but no longer than that, that’s for sure.

So call this a very tiny experiment in self-sufficiency.  I will post pics and descriptions as I go.  Sort of like Agmorion has been promising to send me for well over a year now to post on this site.  I mean, would it kill him to send a few descriptive paragraphs of the work he has done on his basement greenhouse?  But, noooo, he can barely fire off a zero-text email with “a bunch of pictures attached” and remember to actually attach them… But let’s get back to the tobacco.

I have been trying, unsuccessfully, to get someone in this tobacco-growing region to give me a straight answer to the question “Where can I get a small number of tobacco seeds or slips?”  50% of the people I have asked, at both large and small gardening centers have haughtily rebuffed me for even asking such a stupid question. They even seemed angry, as if this was my 50th time calling in this “prank” and they had had just about enough of my shenanigans.

49% of the respondents, while non-rude have been less than useless with their answers, trading in the perfectly acceptable reply of “I don’t know” with “I don’t know, so instead let me while away the hours telling you everything I do know about tobacco from the establishment of Jamestown Colony to modern federal regulatory actions…”  I have even gotten responses that, if true, prove the existence of time travel - “The plants are grown from seed in greenhouses in February but you can’t get seeds because the plants are grown from slips starting in May…”

It’s almost like I have stumbled onto the existence of a secret society of some kind, one whose pass phrase is “Where can I get tobacco seeds or slips around here?”.  The correct response on their end is “Tobacco plants draw worms away from tomatoes” or similar.  The correct response on my end then is probably something like “The pearl is in the river” or “John has a long mustache” at which point we would show each other our secret tattoos and they would lead me to some tastefully decorated underground lair…

But, since all I actually want are two damn tobacco plants all I get are trivia of suspicious value and strange looks.  You know, I might actually have to follow the advice of the other 1% of the people I have asked (Siun-Kelan). She said all I need are three things to get them: a shovel, the cover of night, and a moral compass that doesn’t point True North.  Check, check, and check. 

I will let you know how it turns out.   Who knows?  You might see it on the news.