Lives in a Shoe

Happy Birthday to Donna the Gardener

I save these seeds every year.

Radiator Charlie and the story of his Mortgage Lifter tomatoes.

Sometime in the early 40s, Radiator Charlie Byles wanted to build a better tomato. You remember this is a story about a tomato, right? Well, this is how he did it.

BYLES: What I did I took ten plants and put them in a circle and put one in the center.

YOUNG: McCormack has studied this part of the tape carefully and says Byles invented an unorthodox but elegant system.

McCORMACK: Well, he started with four varieties of tomatoes and he placed a tomato called German Johnson in the center of a ring of 10 tomatoes. All these tomatoes were the largest seeds he could find in the country at the time. So, he would go around to the other tomatoes, collect pollen in the baby’s ear syringe, then squirt it on the flowers of the German Johnson. Then he would save seed. After seven years, he felt he had a stable tomato with all qualities he was looking for, and once he was satisfied with that he never worked with any other tomato plants, did any other plant breeding. But he really ran with it after he developed it.

YOUNG: Ran all the way to the bank. Turns out Radiator Charlie Byles had quite a knack for marketing, and sold tomato seedlings for a buck apiece—a lot of money for a little plant in those days. He sold enough of them to pay off the mortgage on his house.

BYLES: I didn’t pay but six thousand dollars for my home, and paid most of it off with tomato plants.

Wikipedia has an article disputing the Byles story, crediting the cultivar to William Estler in 1922.  Facts are hazy.

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And I've included seeds of:

 

Elephant amaranth (Amaranthus gangeticus) is an eye-catching annual that can brighten your vegetable garden. You use its leaves as you would spinach and its seeds as a cereal-like grain that can be milled into a gluten-free flour, among other uses. The 3- to 5-foot plants are ready to harvest as seed approximately 90 days after planting. Each upright, lumpy red flower head develops into thousands of seeds. Mature plants produce upwards of 50,000 seeds -- plenty to eat or plant.

I grow them every year because they are gorgeous.  I've never eaten either the leaves or the seeds.  My brother Dennis gave me seeds from his garden more than 30 years ago and I've saved them every year -- there are always more than enough to share.  To little kids we say they look like an elephant head with trunk.  But some of us think it looks like a giant hand giving passersby the finger,  My friend Joan calls it the Elip-Off Flower.  They reseed like poppies do.   Scatter seed, lightly cover, keep moist until up.  They like sun and get about 3 feet tall.  I put four or five of the plants in a large pot and cover round the outside with lobelia and marigolds.

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Plants Defending Themselves

For Donna --

Newgrange Was Built 1,000 Years Before Stonehenge, Predates the Pyramids by More than 500 Years.

Deep inside the world's oldest known building, every year, for only as much as 17 minutes, the sun -- at the exact moment of the winter solstice -- shines directly down a long corridor of stone and illuminates the inner chamber at Newgrange.

Lost and forgotten along with the civilization that built it, the site was been rediscovered in 1699. Excavation began in the late 1800s and continued in fits and starts, until it was undertaken in earnest in 1962. It was completed in 1975.

Seen as a tomb, the function of Newgrange in regards to the solstice wasn't known until 1967 -- and then by happenstance acting on a hunch. It was in December of 1967 that the astronomical alignment was witnessed and understood:

Michael O'Kelly drove from his home in Cork to Newgrange. Before the sun came up he was at the tomb, ready to test his theory.

'I was there entirely alone. Not a soul stood even on the road below. When I came into the tomb I knew there was a possibility of seeing the sunrise because the sky had been clear during the morning.'

'I was literally astounded. The light began as a thin pencil and widened to a band of about 6 in. There was so much light reflected from the floor that I could walk around inside without a lamp and avoid bumping off the stones. It was so bright I could see the roof 20ft above me.

'I expected to hear a voice, or perhaps feel a cold hand resting on my shoulder, but there was silence. And then, after a few minutes, the shaft of light narrowed as the sun appeared to pass westward across the slit, and total darkness came once more.'

Since that time, people from all over the world have made the pilgrimage to Newgrange to bear witness to this ancient ritual begun over 5,000 years ago and only brought back into the light for the last 40.
The unknown makers built well. And they built for a very long time:

Five thousand years ago, the people who farmed in the lush pastures of the Boyne Valley hauled 200,000 tons of stone from the river bank a mile away and began to build Newgrange. At the foot of the mound, they set ninety-seven massive kerbstones and carved many of them with intricate patterns. Inside, with 450 slabs, they built a passage leading to a vaulted tomb, and placed a shallow basin of golden stone in each of its three side chambers.
Like so much else from the Age of Myth the "why" of it all at Newgrange will never be known. The people who took 20 years to move 200,000 tons of rock left us no clues beyond the spiraling runes cut into the rock. Like all the mysteries that emerge from time with no footnotes, it is left to us to make what meaning we can from them. But perhaps this one monument from the Age of Myth gives us, every year, one small hint.

No matter what time and the universe can throw at us, we still go on. To remind ourselves that we have and shall endure and prevail, we still mark our small planet's turn around our home star. We mark it with ceremonies every year when, at this moment in time, the sun begins to rise higher to warm us again in our small patch of heaven. And we are still here to bear witness, no matter how shrill the Acolytes of Zero, to the mystery and the gift. We're a tough race and a rough species. It will take more than a few degrees centigrade, one way or another, to finish us.

The light of the solstice pierces to the heart of the tomb at Newgrange, and then, soon after, the Light of World arrives. Two moments that remind us of the many manifest miracles of God. Reminders that no winter is without end and that The Gift is given to us again. If we can but receive it.

Heirloom

Yesterday I discovered little blossoms on my tomato plants. Look carefully -- yellow blossoms right in the center there.

These plants are an heirloom variety called "Mortgage Lifter" and the seeds were in my shoebox in an envelope with handwriting on it -- no idea where they came from but know they've been there for a long time. 

Not expecting much, I started these seeds in January over bottom heat, after sprouting continued them in the unheated greenhouse for some weeks now.  Healthy plants, transferred into those large containers two days ago.  I'm thinking this year to grow half my tomatoes in the greenhouse, the remainder outside. Have I had tomato blossoms this early before?  Don't think so.

Curious, I looked up the variety and learned about Radiator Charlie and the story of his Mortgage Lifter tomatoes.

Sometime in the early 40s, Radiator Charlie Byles wanted to build a better tomato. You remember this is a story about a tomato, right? Well, this is how he did it.

BYLES: What I did I took ten plants and put them in a circle and put one in the center.

YOUNG: McCormack has studied this part of the tape carefully and says Byles invented an unorthodox but elegant system.

McCORMACK: Well, he started with four varieties of tomatoes and he placed a tomato called German Johnson in the center of a ring of 10 tomatoes. All these tomatoes were the largest seeds he could find in the country at the time. So, he would go around to the other tomatoes, collect pollen in the baby’s ear syringe, then squirt it on the flowers of the German Johnson. Then he would save seed. After seven years, he felt he had a stable tomato with all qualities he was looking for, and once he was satisfied with that he never worked with any other tomato plants, did any other plant breeding. But he really ran with it after he developed it.

YOUNG: Ran all the way to the bank. Turns out Radiator Charlie Byles had quite a knack for marketing, and sold tomato seedlings for a buck apiece—a lot of money for a little plant in those days. He sold enough of them to pay off the mortgage on his house.

BYLES: I didn’t pay but six thousand dollars for my home, and paid most of it off with tomato plants.

Wikipedia has an article disputing the Byles story, crediting the cultivar to William Estler in 1922.  Facts are hazy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Rhubarb

The word "rhubarb" was used to simulate a noisy background crowd in old talkies and some stage productions.  It was very common in the 1930's to use actors to repeat or mutter the word "rhubarb" continuously to provide radio sound effects.

In the 1940's, it became popular to associate the word with angry fans, team-players or umpires at sporting events -- or a loud argument.  My dad used it that way, referring to a quarrel as "a big rhubarb".

 

 

This is my rhubarb plant, year two from its start as a tiny section of Margie's big plant.  The stalks are getting red and siince the strawberry plants have flowers we can look forward to strawberry rhubarb pie pretty soon.