What cha' Cookin' ?

[tjc transport]

i remember many many many many years ago on the farm we bought a load of sweet potato seedlings from a co op in North Carolina because of a shortage at our usual sellers.

we ended up with about 25% of the field being tobacco plants.

[other dog]

We raised tobacco when I was a kid, that was many years ago. And my Dad and grandfather would make a plant bed in the woods. I don't know why it was in the woods, maybe the richest dirt? Anyway, they cleared a spot, tilled the soil good, then cut 4 poles to put on all 4 sides of it. They sowed the tobacco seeds inside and covered it with a big white cover like cheesecloth. I guess so frost wouldn't kill the plants when they came up, and the poles kept the cover off the plants. And they would always put tomato seeds in it, so when everything came up they had enough tomato plants for half the county.

Dad grew his own sweet potato slips too, but he would just put a sweet potato in a hole in the ground and cover it with sawdust and it would sprout lots of slips. He still had a little plant bed for tomatoes and peppers every year too, long after we stopped growing tobacco. Still had enough plants for everybody in the neighborhood.

But when I was a kid many years ago there was 6 of us in the family and our garden covered a half acre, there wasn't much we didn't grow.