grace grits and gardening

ramblings from an arkansas farm girl

The Unloved

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I am cultivating the largest Johnsongrass I’ve ever seen. It sprouted up in our Fayetteville flower bed between visits and is so impressive I feel compelled to watch it grow. It wants to live.
It’s my personal 4-H project. I wonder if I could enter it in the State Fair of Arkansas? 
Daddy would be mortified. Thomas Tate had some of the cleanest fields in Mississippi County. Driving anywhere with him meant factoring in lots of extra time. Like all great farmers, he drove slow enough to watch cotton bolls open from the highway. And he stopped unannounced to chop the errant Johnsongrass growing mid-field.  On our way to anywhere, like playing a game of I Spy, we scanned the fields looking for offensive weeds standing taller than the crops, a slightly different shade of green, showing off, teasing Daddy, testing him. He stopped the truck, grabbed his trusty hoe from the back, walked to the annoying thing and whacked it down.  No matter how muddy the field. No matter where we were going. To a basketball game or wedding or funeral… 
We patiently sat inside the musty truck watching and waiting. We had no Iphone entertainment. No Angry Birds to pass the time. Just conversation and maybe a Barbie in tow.
Growing up that way, I am naturally drawn to weeding pulling and flower deadheading. Even at a friend’s house or restaurant, I can barely restrain myself. I’m surprised that I drove back to Dallas and left that mammoth Johnsongrass free to grow in Fayetteville. A weed is but an unloved flower.

talya

Musical Pairings:

Song Sung Blue – Neil Diamond

A weed is but an unloved flower. – Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Cruel Summer

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Here we are again. Sitting smack dab in the middle of another sweltering summer. Another obscenely hot and cruel summer. Motionless and glaring. Water droplets from sprinklers evaporate before touching the parched grass. Mother Nature sends no rain for the crops.  Evidently she holds a grudge.

Yesterday I fried an egg in the backyard by the swimming pool. The pavement burned my feet and the skillet handle scalded my hand, as hot as the oven. The pool water is probably hot enough to poach an egg. Even the kitchen tap water is warm. 


Every night the super enthusiastic weathermen of Dallas try to inject a new twist into the forecast. Something to justify their time slot before sports. Before the Olympic news and Dallas Cowboys training camp. But there is nothing new. There won’t be anything different until that first cold snap on Halloween, if we are lucky. The high’s and lo’s are fancifully displayed and the heat index is thrown in for effect as the entire Dallas-Ft. Worth Metroplex collectively gasps. As if there is a distinct difference between 110 and 112.

No matter how high the mercury soars each day this summer, the record high temperatures hold firmly in place. From 1980. Nothing compares to the summer of 1980. The summer I graduated from Rivercrest High School. The summer we did rain dances in the front yard in air that cloaked our bodies like gauze.  The summer daddy had a scorched crop yet forked over college tuition. The summer we nearly had to bury him on the banks of Little River.

In 1980, thousands of lives were lost and crop damage totaled in the billions. Beer sales in Texas were at an all time high.
Irrigation. Rice. Tate Farm.
Thank goodness we irrigate the crops now. 

Only 51 days until Autumn….

talya

Musical Pairings:

Long Hot Summer Days, Sara Watkins
Cruel Summer, Bananarama

“The first week of August hangs at the very top of the summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning.” Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting.

Field of Dreams

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At home in Arkansas, I walked around the rice field each morning. Now that the field has been leveled and irrigated, we have our own private walking trail all the way to the drainage ditch at the South end. There were so many things to see in the early morning. Every day something new revealed itself.

Life is abundant. In addition to the rice and corn and wildflowers and vine covered trees, there were FrogsBeaversDucksDragonfliesButterfliesSnakes….
frog
Each morning I walked and sweated and explored, digging up rocks and shotgun shells and pieces of old rusty farm equipment. Daddy’s equipment?
Something shiny caught my eye. A small silver tip nearly hidden in the dirt. It was an aluminum baseball bat buried at the far back corner of the field near the beaver dam. An odd place to find a baseball bat. Field of Dreams?
My corner:)
My favorite part of the walk was the far Southeast corner which is shady and breezy in the morning. Almost cool. I spent extra time there studying the water and the ditch bank which concealed the occasional pearly white shell formed thousands of years ago when the Mississippi River covered the entire delta region.

Over the past week I slowly gathered all these little found objects and piled them in an old rusty hubcap I uncovered in the field. I placed the hubcap filled with treasures near the edge of the bank as an offering to the rain gods. I hope it works…

talya
Musical Pairings:
“With us, when you speak of “the river,” though there be many, you mean always the same one, the great river, the shifting, unappeasable god of the country, feared and loved, the Mississippi.“

~ William Alexander Percy 

Food. Farm. Garden. Life.

THANKS FOR READING!