ramblings from an arkansas farm girl
Did you know cotton and okra are cousins? The plants are botanically related from the same scientific family Malvaceae.
The veined leaf shapes are very similar with a reddish purple spot at the base of each petal.
The blooms are similar too.
The final product!
One fills our bellies, the other covers our bellies. I love both!
Grace Grits and Gardening
Farm. Food. Garden. Life.
Musical Pairing:
Alabama – Song of the South
While home on the farm one of my favorite things to do is to walk around the rice field. My sister and I spent many a summer day at the back of our field messing with tadpoles in the ditch. Tadpoles were fun.
Saturday my goal was to find a snake. Now, just to be crystal clear, I am not a parcel mouth. I am no fan of the snake.
Not.At.All.
But, several of my Northeast Arkansas Facebook friends have recently posted snake photos. Lots of snake photos. Clearly, this is the year of the snake. As a writer, I try to be observant—listening, smelling, tasting, feeling so that my writing is believable. If I were truly observant, I would see a snake on my walk, right?
So off I went on my first snake hunt.
Right off I found “farm glass”, which I like to compare to beach glass.
The killdeer were downright noisy. “Kill-deer, kill-deer, kill-deer!” they chanted.
“Shhhh! You’ll scare the snakes,” I said. Their track patterns were as wild as the jabbering overhead.
Vibrant wildflowers filled the edge of a shallow ditch.
But no snake.
I stopped in the far corner at my favorite spot and waited. Watched. Listened. Could the sky be any more clear?
Then finally, there he was. Sunning. At least three feet long. My snake.
I leaned in close and snapped a picture. He slithered down the ditch bank. A successful farm walk. And yes, I had the heebie-jeebies until I made it safely back to the house.
Grace Grits and Gardening
Farm. Food. Garden. Life.
“Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
Musical Pairing:
Heebie Jeebies, Ladies in Tune
We were driving to church for my cousin’s wedding when Daddy pulled off the highway and stopped the truck. “What are you doing?” Momma asked, even though she knew the answer. Riding anywhere with a farmer meant factoring in lots of extra time. Daddy drove slow enough to watch cotton bolls open from the highway.
“We’re gonna be late,” I moaned and applied another coat of strawberry lip gloss. I hated to be late for anything, plus I was in charge of the guest book.
Daddy grabbed his hoe from the back of the truck, ambled across the shallow ditch, and waded through rows of knee-high cotton. He wacked down the annoying weed wearing his new sport coat from Westbrook’s.
Momma sighed.
All the Tate girls had been trained to scan the horizon for johnsongrass. Teasing and waving in the breeze, the offensive plants were easy to spot, a different shade of green standing taller than the crop.
Daddy had some of the cleanest fields in Mississippi County. Everyone agreed.
Grace Grits and Gardening
Farm. Food. Garden. Life.
Musical Pairing:
Lord I Hope this Day is Good, Don Williams
