Eight Tulips Twinkling and Thoughts of Cat's Whiskers

The tulips all opened. Then, The Great Plotnik had a few extra tomato plants so he decided to plant one right in the pile of last year's potting soil on the ground in front of the other three: two Sungold and one Early Girl.



Upstairs there are two more Sungolds and one Siberian variety called "Grigory's Altar." Then, in the pot over by the arugula patch there are two Sweet One Hundreds, along with a couple Sugar Snap peas that will eventually cover the trellis in back.



In Saint Plotniko, you don't have the option of growing large tomatoes or of getting much production out of them if you plant them in the ground. Not enough sun, not enough heat in the normal summer. Global Warming is helping, though.

This time of year, Plotnik thinks of his huge garden in Cat's Whiskers, Pennsylvania, where he bought tomato plants from the cannery by the lots of 50 and planted them in long rows. He also learned to surround the tomato plants with many rows of red beets, because he couldn't fence the garden high enough to keep the deer out and they always went for the red beets first. If they got enough of those they left the other stuff alone.

People hunted deer very seriously in rural PA. Plotnik posted his and Duck's 12 acres with signs that said NO HUNTING!!! NO SHOOTING!!! Usually, the morning after deer season opened, the signs would be shot full of holes. One year, hunters killed Prince, the greatest dog who ever lived until he was reindognated and came back as Mischief. They probably thought Prince was a deer. Or a cow.

Vegetables: Oooh, the corn.

Does anyone remember old fashioned sweet corn, before the Super-Sweet varieties that have completely taken over now? True, you had to eat it no more than an hour after you picked it, but the flavor was rich and incomparable. Now it's just sweet: Old Corn is to New Corn like Zinfandel is to Kool Aid.

Plottie even loved chopping wood. It's funny how these things change. Now, he'd probably go to the lumberyard and scrounge old firewood. Then, he culled dead trees from the property and split them for the fireplace. It was an idyllic life, but it took a lot of work to stay warm if you didn't have a furnace.

Plottie and Ducknik put in a furnace.

They bought their 12 acres and dilapidated farmouse in 1971. You can barely buy a used car today for what they paid for their country paradise. They finished renovating the farmhouse in 1975, and moved in a few months before The Great PD was born. Then they left the farm in Pennsylvania (1978), rented it out for awhile until renters could practically destroy it, then sold the farm (1980) and bought a house in Stiletto City. Then they sold the house in Stiletto City to buy the house in Saint Plotniko (1993). Then, they sold the house in Saint Plotniko and moved to Mars (2008) to get away from the next eight months of dinnertime political phone calls.