Poor Richard’s Almanac

Today is the presidential primary in our friend Ben’s state, Pennsylvania. If you follow politics at all, you’ll know that the pundits claim that the outcome of today’s primary may change the course of the Democratic race. So it seemed like a good day for a post on bleeding hearts.

Our friend Ben loves garden-variety bleeding hearts, plants of the genus Dicentra. And from the wild species like Dutchman’s breeches (D. cucullaria) through the foamy foliage of wild bleeding heart (D. eximia) to the Victorian abandon of old-fashioned bleeding heart (D. spectabilis), the bleeding hearts are preparing to steal the floral show here at Hawk’s Haven. With their blue-green, fernlike foliage and heart-shaped pink, rose, white, or pink-and-white flowers borne in upright or pendant sprays, it’s easy to see why.

Admittedly, our friend Ben has never met a bleeding heart I didn’t like. And they (usually—I have a funny story for you in a moment) behave well for me, resisting the temptation to go dormant in summer as they tend to do in hotter, drier areas. But even among the multitude at Hawk’s Haven, one bleeding heart stands out. It’s Dicentra spectabilis ‘Gold Heart’, another brainchild of the infant terrible of Terra Nova Nurseries, Dan Heims. You may know Dan, or at least his plant introductions, from the numerous heucheras and heucherellas he’s introduced to the trade, many with extraordinary foliage form and color. We grow many of them here at Hawk’s Haven, and they never fail to bring pleasure. ‘Gold Heart’ is another triumph.

What sets ‘Gold Heart’ apart is its extraordinary foliage, which opens gold, then turns chartreuse as the season progresses. You may have gathered that our friend Ben is partial to the foliage of bleeding hearts anyway; it is graceful and beautiful. But oh, to see that cascade of ferny gold foliage in a shady spot. It not only lights up the garden but the gardener’s own heart as well. And it’s not just the gold of the foliage that gives ‘Gold Heart’ a warm glow. The plant’s stems are a dusky red. I’ve seen them described as “peach,” but that’s not quite it, unless it’s a flush of red over a yellow peach, a sort of rose-apricot blush. Whatever the case, they add a show of their own to the display and make a gorgeous color combination with the foliage. And of course, there are the flowers, a clear rose-pink that makes a finger-in-the-electric-outlet effect paired with the gold foliage.

As you’d expect, ‘Gold Heart’ looks fabulous with other shade plants like heucheras, hellebores, and hostas. (Our friend Ben thinks of these backbones of shady spots as “the three Hs of shade gardening.”) In the bed beside the deck, our friend Ben has paired ‘Gold Heart’ with chartreuse-leaved hostas and apricot-, flame-, and peach-leaved heucheras, as well as other gold- and chartreuse-leaved beauties like Hakonechloa macra ‘All Gold’ (golden hakone grass) and, if I’m lucky enough to get some, the annual Talinum paniculatum ‘Kingwood Gold’, which I met courtesy of wonderful Pennsylvania “plant geek” Nancy Ondra. (Check out her fun and informative blog, Hayefield, via the link on this blog; she’s also a regular on another great gardening blog, Gardening Gone Wild, linked here, too.) I’ve tucked in gold-variegated calamint and agastache (anise hyssop), too. Of course, I’ve filled in around and among all this with plenty of green-leaved plants as a visual counterpoint—the eye must rest!—but often add a little trick in the form of flower echoes, as with primrose-yellow tulips or ‘Butter and Sugar’ Siberian iris.

Got shade? Get some ‘Gold Heart’ bleeding hearts! Fortunately, they’re widely available. White Flower Farm is one well-known source, but I’d be willing to bet that your local nursery has them, too, especially this time of year.

Okay, it’s time for the funny story. You might think a cottage-garden classic like old-fashioned bleeding heart would be something of a straightlaced Victorian. But here at Hawk’s Haven, she’s been engaged in playing a long-running joke on our friend Ben. When I first bought the property, there was a huge, fabulous bleeding heart on one side of the front door garden. Our friend Ben wished to create some symmetry, adding shepherd’s crooks with pots of cascading variegated ivy on either side of the stoop. It seemed like a no-brainer to put a second bleeding heart on the other side as well. The new plant prospered. And then the old plant disappeared. The front door display was lopsided once more. Our friend Ben did what any gardener would do: cursed a blue streak, then went and bought another bleeding heart for that side. The new bleeding heart prospered. The one on the other side disappeared.

This little game of hide and shriek has been going on for over a decade now. To see the huge plants in bloom, you’d think they’d endured for eons. But no. As this spring advances, our friend Ben notes with outrage that, yet again, only one bleeding heart is making a show (but what a show!) at the front door. (Perhaps to compensate, bleeding hearts have self-sown at surprisingly regular intervals down the length of the bed.) I suppose that a sensible person would simply stop playing, stop being Charlie Brown forever trying, and failing, to kick the football. But of course our friend Ben will be at the garden center, probably this very weekend, buying another bleeding heart for the other side.

Happy Earth Day to all!          

Our friend Ben loves planting, as long as planting doesn’t involve hewing through the impenetrable mass of roots from the Norway maple allee my home’s previous owners planted out back, thinking they were sugar maples. (Don’t get me started.) But seeds, even the big seeds like peas, are so ephemeral. (And once they hit the soil, finer seeds like lettuce and radishes become virtually invisible, except for the white-seeded lettuces.) That’s why onion sets are so satisfying.

Looking like onions in miniature, from about the size of a nasturtium bud to a quarter, onion sets have a comforting heft, a solidity, a reassuring visibility that lets you know you’re really planting something. You can lay them out on your garden bed before you plant them and actually see the configuration you’re striving for. You can space them far enough apart to make big onions (4 inches apart is plenty), or plant them closer and harvest every other onion for scallions when it sends up its green tops. (Yum! We love scallions, and plenty of ‘em, in salads and omelets, and as a condiment on refried beans, Chinese food, and many another dish.)

Or you can follow our friend Ben’s example and tuck them among your other crops. Interplant them among the lettuces; grow them in a protective ring around tomatoes and peppers. They’ll not only fill in the space between other plants, they’ll provide some companion-planting protection for the other crops, confusing pests that find their target crops by either sight or smell.

All this is good. But the very best thing about onion sets is that they’re pretty much foolproof, the ultimate low-maintenance crop. If you want to encourage someone to get into gardening, they’re a no-fail way to go. They’re so easy to plant, you can gently push the sets into worked soil with your fingers, leaving just the tips showing. They require little to nothing in the way of watering. Nothing ever seems to bother them. They just perk along, sending up their sturdy scallion leaves and growing fatter and fatter, until in late summer, the leaves begin to dry off. That’s the signal to pull up the bulbs, let them cure in the sun for a few days, and then brush off the soil, cut off the shriveled tops, bring in your harvest, and enjoy your onions!

Onion sets are even easy to buy. Evoking the country store era, they’re set out in huge open bags (that’s “sacks” to us Southerners) in farm stores, feed stores, garden centers, even groceries. You scoop the amount you want into a paper sack, uh, bag, and pay for it at the counter. (But watch out! It’s way too easy to get carried away and arrive home with two or even three times the amount of sets you need, and that’s even more true if you’re buying different kinds. If you inevitably buy too many like our friend Ben, you can give the extras away to fellow gardeners, swap them for seeds or transplants, and/or plant the extras to harvest early as scallions.)

Our friend Ben always makes a point of buying sets of ’Stuttgarter’, a long-keeping yellow storage onion, as well as a yellow sweet onion, a white storage onion, and a few shallots, onion relatives that are planted in the same way and sold at the same time. They go into the Hawk’s Haven veggie beds, where chives, garlic chives, garlic, and multiplier onions already hold sway. (Um, can you tell that our friend Ben loves onions?! We eat them several ways each day, sauteed in butter or olive oil as a base for the signature supper dish, chopped into an omelet or onto a salad, or simply served whole as fresh-harvested scallions to add relish to a plate of crudites.) Whatever may go wrong in the garden, our friend Ben knows the onions will always go right.

But wait a minute. What do I mean, onion “sets”? What happened to onion seeds? You’re right, I love onion sets so much I’ve gotten ahead of myself here. Onion sets are nothing more than onion seeds that have been grown out through a season to form small bulbs for planting. You can certainly order onion seeds through the mail or buy them in a store like any other seed, and if you do, you’ll often find a wider selection to choose from. Because onion seeds produce a fine, threadlike leaf that’s fragile and easily lost, people who go the seed route usually start their onion seeds in flats indoors and transplant them to the garden later. The seeds will produce small bulbs—onion sets—at the end of the year, which you dry and store over winter and plant out the following year to harvest onions. There’s an intermediate stage, too. You can buy grown-out onion seedlings, with leaves resembling obese blades of grass, by the bunch, plant them out, and harvest onions the same season. Sweet and Spanish onions are often sold this way. But these seedlings require lots of care—watering, weeding, nurturing—unlike onion sets, which are bulletproof.

“Bulletproof” is music to our friend Ben’s ears, especially with so much else going on in the garden and having to haul every drop of water milk jug by endless milk jug out to the veggie beds. We’ve even added a bit of romance to our onion-growing, purchasing incredibly plump, perfect onion sets (the best our friend Ben has ever seen) from an obscure roadside stand in Boone’s Creek, Virginia, every spring while en route to our annual vacation in Greensboro and Asheville, North Carolina. (We have also purchased intriguing varieties of dried beans, local honey and jam, obscure apple varieties, and assorted other items at this stand, while studiously ignoring the truly mind-boggling array of concrete lawn art on prominent display.)

The humble onion set may not strike many gardeners as cause for celebration. But to our friend Ben, it epitomizes the best that gardening has to offer us: Not the endless struggle to force something that doesn’t grow in our climate to survive, battering our fellow gardeners with our triumph, but the simple, soul-satisfying joy of taking a crop effortlessly from selection and planting to abundant harvest. Onions are fun to plant, fun to grow, and fun to harvest. And the luscious, house-filling smell of onions sauteeing in butter, the exhilarating bite of green onion enlivening a salad, the simple power of onions to, without demanding attention, set the tone of any dish, creating a solid base for the complexity of subsequent spicing: ah. These are the moments that transform a simple plant into a powerful force for cementing relationships, creating memories, building community: good food, good fellowship. Good health, too—can’t beat those alliums for their curative and preventive powers. 

Our friend Ben says, grow your onion sets with pleasure and pride. Encourage every child you know to start with onion sets. Encourage older people who think they no longer have what it takes to garden to grow some onion sets. It’s a great beginning, and a beautiful ending, too.                 

It’s me, Richard Saunders of Poor Richard’s Almanac fame, back today to continue our discussion of dollars and sense. (If you collect coins or currency and have missed earlier posts on the subject, check out “Can a penny be saved?” and “Big bucks and silver dollars.”)

You’ve probably heard that the prices of copper and nickel are going through the roof, possibly literally. I was horrified to read a great post last week by Benjamin Vogt on his blog, The Deep Middle (http://deepmiddle.blogspot.com/), about copper thieves and how not even copper lawn ornaments are safe from their depredations. The reader responses were even more appalling: tales of houses broken into for copper pipes, electric lines stripped for copper wiring. Vandalism and opportunism coming together for profit: the ultimate mockery of the American way.

Nickel has received less attention, perhaps because thieves don’t know where to find it. But it’s present in our five-cent piece, and its presence is what gives that coin its popular name, the nickel. Or I should say, it’s usually present. Just yesterday, I was fishing in my pocket for change and pulled out an odd-looking nickel. Being a small-time coin collector, I checked it out and couldn’t believe what I’d gotten in ordinary pocket change: a silver nickel. Sure enough, “1943″ on the front and a huge “D” looming over Monticello on the back, still circulating 65 years later.

Now, if you’re entertaining visions of a beautiful, gleaming silver coin, I hate to disappoint you. But a circulated silver nickel is anything but beautiful. It has a characteristic look that I can only describe as “greasy.” (I have to interrupt this post now, no thanks to our friend Ben. Our friend Ben and Silence Dogood are visiting this morning and had promised to make brunch while I wrote this post. But, as usual, our friend Ben has abandoned Silence in the kitchen and is reading over my shoulder. Our friend Ben wants me to note that the way Southerners pronounce the word “greasy,” with a “z,” sounds a lot, well, greasier than the way Northerners pronounce it, with an “s.” Thank you, our friend Ben, for that valuable contribution. And by the way, I think I hear Silence calling for you…)

You see, this isn’t the first time that copper and nickel have been worth more outside our national coinage than in it. It was also true during World War II, when copper and nickel were needed by the military. So from 1942 through 1945, nickels were made of an amalgam of copper, silver, and manganese rather than the copper-nickel alloy that they were composed of before and since. And the penny’s composition changed from bronze to zinc-coated steel, but just for the year 1943, and then switched to copper-zinc (the steel pennies were prone to rust). Which reminds me, if you’re planning to turn in your old pennies for their copper value, they’d better date before 1982, when the composition again switched, this time to copper-plated zinc. And please don’t turn in the so-called “wheat ears pennies” (the ones with the twin wheat stalks on the back, a design used from the Lincoln cent’s inception in 1909 through 1958, when the Lincoln Memorial replaced wheat on the reverse of the coin) for their copper scrap value! You’d get a lot more for them at your local coin shop, and collectors everywhere would thank you for preserving this piece of history for future generations.

What will the future of our penny and nickel be? Are we headed back to steel pennies and silver nickels? I guess we’ll have to see what solution the U.S. Mint comes up with. Let’s just hope they don’t propose a series of wooden nickels!      

Our friend Ben’s home place, Hawk’s Haven, only really looks respectable in spring. That’s because the enormous, lawn-swallowing island bed that forms the main front garden is really a spring garden, awash with the blues and yellows and whites and soft lavenders and purples of the big and little bulbs, a symphony of spring color that echoes back and back across the whole one-acre Eden that is my Pennsylvania home.

Growth and bloom and fruiting of course continues until winter (and even then, the greenhouse is a lush oasis in a dormant world). The trees and shrubs in the island bed, for example, leaf out and bloom and provide ever-changing interest, but only if you’re our friend Ben or Silence Dogood and are keeping a close eye on things. The equally huge cultivated wild meadow in back provides a fascinating progression of bloom from the veronica, baptisias, and hollyhocks through the culvert’s root, butterfly weed, purple coneflowers, rudbeckias, goldenrods, and asters.

And all the other shrub and flower beds bloom their dear little hearts out in shade and sun. (In fact, our friend Ben’s very favorites are the two great shade gardens, the creekside garden with its lavish display of hellebores, hostas, geraniums, ferns, astilbes, bleeding-hearts, heucheras, and gingers, and the wildflower garden with its Virginia bluebells, variegated false Solomon’s seal, true Solomon’s seal, trout lilies, blue cohosh, toothwort, spring beauties, Allegheny spurge, native wild ginger, trilliums, Dutchman’s breeches, and on and on. But that’s yet another spring garden.)

But an acre covers a lot of ground, and unless one’s friends and relatives are gardening aficionados, it’s hard to get them to appreciate what appear to be a few blooms strewn across the expanse of property, even if what’s blooming are roses and clematis or iris and daylilies. (Grrrr!!! But our friend Ben absolutely refuses to descend to the forced-march approach, hauling reluctant guests from one end of the property to the other while intoning the mantra of garden forced marches, “Look at this! Look at this!” If they don’t see it, they don’t see it. We all have our flaws.) That’s why we always make sure the container display on the deck is pretty spectacular, so when we’re sitting out there in the morning or evening or entertaining friends, there’ll be plenty of color on hand.

So, to come full circle, our beloved Hawk’s Haven would only strike the drive-by observer as a true garden about now, in spring bulb season, when there are vast enough swatches of color to impress pretty much anyone. We also have help enhancing the display with movable color in the form of our beloved goldfinches, now in full breeding color, as well as rosy-pink house finches and brilliant red cardinals, and, of course, the fire-orange breasts of all those robins. (Oh bluejays, where have you gone?!) Once the columbines are blooming, we’ll add ruby-throated hummingbirds to the display, and the occasional bluebird and oriole pair will also enliven the scene with brilliant color.

And of course we have butterflies, so many kinds of butterflies, monarchs and swallowtails and fritillaries and the rest, adding unhurried flakes of color to the tableau throughout the warm days as the lightning bugs (called fireflies up here) do at night. I just saw the first butterfly of the season yesterday, another joyous mark on the wide trunk of the heart.

But what’s really gotten our friend Ben excited is the return of the bees. I counted four kinds yesterday, not even adding the omnipresent carpenter bees (quit dive-bombing me, you %$#@*!!!) or the hornets and wasps that have also emerged suddenly. Last week, no bees. This week, bees everywhere! I had to rescue a fat bumblebee that had managed to get into the greenhouse last evening, doubtless drawn as I was by the heavenly scent of the variegated lemon blooms. Bumblebees, honeybees, ground bees, orchard bees: Everybody’s been busy going about their inadvertent work of pollination. In the wake of a year’s worth of disaster stories of colony collapse disorder devastating honeybee hives, this bee abundance is very good news for our friend Ben. Thanks be to God!

Just in time, too. The fruit trees are showing bud color here. Our friend Ben is about to digress into another unstoppable rant, but I’ll try to stay on point long enough to note that my pluot (a plum/apricot cross that produces fruit that must be worthy of heaven) is already in full, foamy white bloom. And the near-stupefying sight of my dwarf ‘Reliance’ peach covered with thousands of hot pink blossoms, as well as the dwarf pears and apples following with a snowstorm of white and pink-white blooms, with the explosion of blooms on the strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries, is imminent. And the ignominious but all-important grape blossoms will follow. (Why dwarf trees? Our friend Ben is terrified of heights, and about as coordinated as a plaid jacket with striped pants. Please don’t make me climb a ladder to harvest fruit!) All those flowers need bees (well, flies in the case of pears, but that’s another story for another day) to set fruit. Thank you, bees, for calling Hawk’s Haven home!!!

Okay, on to the rant. (Warning: Sophisticates, foodies, cover your eyes!) Our friend Ben is one of the lucky ones: I actually love, really love, pretty much all fruits and vegetables. And I especially love fruits served plain, tree- or vine-ripe and not stuffed in a pie or coated with sugary goo. (Veggies, alas, I tend to eat with butter and salt, unless they’re the sort that can be eaten raw, alone or in salads.)

But of course, there are exceptions. Our friend Ben’s palate is not, shall we say, sophisticated. And worse, since our friend Ben is a Southerner, I don’t give a damn about what sophisticates think of my lack of appreciation of their more refined tastes. If someone really wants to eat raw fish and seaweed, for example, our friend Ben would not dream of trying to stop them, unless they happened to be a friend or relative, in which case they would be treated to my parasite-and-pollution lecture early and often. And if they actually want to eat bugs (our friend Ben in fact knows several people who have sampled grubs in Australia and ants in the U.S.), well. Our friend Ben believes that if these foods are part of one’s cultural heritage, it’s right and good to eat them. Otherwise, there must be a support group that can help you. I know the Chinese eat dogs, and as far as they’re concerned, I’m not going there. But when some bastard American goes over to China to eat dogs so he can make headlines, our friend Ben and our golden retriever Molly have a great deal to say to you. (As in, eat your own arm, why don’t you, *%$#@!!!!? And I’ll come over and cut it off and cook it for you.)

But I digress. Thank God, most of us don’t actually go around eating dogs or even bugs. But many people do, apparently, appreciate foods that are bitter. Sweet, salty, sour, and bitter are, after all, the four major taste groups. (Hmmm, what happened to “hot”?) Our friend Ben gets the point of sweet (duh), salty (oh yes), and sour (pickles!). But bitter? Oh, no. Our friend Ben loves cabbage and Brussels sprouts, raw and shredded in the South’s signature slaws or lightly cooked and served with (shock surprise!) butter and salt. But sauerkraut? Oh, geez. Our friend Ben would rather chew on a tire, not because kraut is sour, but because it’s bitter. (I’m trying to overcome this aversion by making my own fresh-cured kraut with lots of spices, thanks to Sandor “Sandorkraut” Katz and his book, Wild Fermentation. Check it out!)

But back to bitter. Our friend Ben admires the gorgeous color and appearance of radicchio and frisee, for example, in a salad. And our friend Ben will even eat radicchio and frisee (and endive and chicory and etc.) if served up in a salad, hoping that the bitterness will, as with mediaeval herbs, indicate some curative properties. But, gorgeous as they are, will our friend Ben grow these bitter-tasting veggies in the Hawk’s Haven veggie beds or buy them in the grocery? God forbid.

Worse still, worst of all in our friend Ben’s opinion, is the horrific combination of bitter taste with slimy texture. Turnips and rutabagas, keep away!!! Our friend Ben vividly remembers my first encounter with turnips. I was at another family dinner with the unfortunate family that had hosted our friend Ben for my first encounter with Northern-style spinach (see my earlier post, “Ben Picks Ten: Southern Comfort Foods;” in retropect, I wonder why those poor people kept inviting me to dinner). To set the stage, let me note that our friend Ben loves mashed potatoes like few things. So, confronted by a pile of mashed turnips (or possibly rutabagas), our friend Ben was thrilled to be assured by the family that they “tasted just like mashed potatoes.” What a lie. They were not only horrifically bitter, they were slippery. No amount of butter and salt—our friend Ben’s go-to remedy for bad food—could save this pile of bitter slime. Mercy!!!

Since that first unfortunate encounter, our friend Ben, thanks to my local CSA, has been introduced to salad turnips, which are neither bitter nor slimy. You slice them raw as a pleasantly crunchy contribution to a great salad. Our friend Ben is addicted to really hot radishes (eaten with salt, or salt and butter on a great baguette as the French and, I think, Germans do), but salad turnips provide that desperately-needed crunch! to the salad without the heat, as well as adding a touch of white to set off the other veggie colors. Our friend Ben says hooray! Please tell me how to do the same with rutabagas and other bitter fare. Our friend Ben will thank you.                  

Here at Hawk’s Haven, spring is not just the time of daffodils and forsythia. The pirates are back again. Strutting across the deck, a bold gleam in their eye and their glossy black attire enlivened with gaudy flashes of bronze, blue, and purple, they are brazen in every sense of the word. They don’t say much, but our friend Ben remains convinced that when they do speak, it’s to shout things like ”Aaaaarrrr!”, “Yar!”, and “You savvy?”

They’re grackles, of course, and their shameless depredations are mostly focused on the big bowl of cat food just outside the deck door. They stroll up bold as any raccoon, help themselves, and follow their meal with a slow swig of water from the cats’ bowl. Then it’s back to the food dish for another helping. Fortunately, our friend Ben gets a kick out of grackles (and all things piratical; check out the great blog, Future House Farm, at http://futurehousefarm.blogspot.com/, for a fun pirate hit). And there’s more cat food where that came from.

What about Captain Hook? He’s also hanging around in the form of our ratty old tom, Danticat. It must be said that, visually at least, Danticat is not one of nature’s finer efforts. His enormous round head sits on a very modest body like a pumpkin stuck on a pole. Adding to his disreputable appearance, his ears are almost devoid of fur. But the worst is his tail—a ludicrously pathetic rat’s tail that hooks up at the end. All he needs is some Johnny Depp-style headgear and a silver hoop earring and he’d look like the worst kind of pirate.

Danticat’s behavior reinforces the piratical impression. Maybe it’s just because he’s old, but his every movement is deliberate, seemingly filled with malevolent intent. The huge head swivels slowly back and forth, green eyes seemingly sizing up the situation before giving the command to attack and take no prisoners. If you greet him with an eye blink, he fixes you with a long, slow stare before deigning to blink back.

Fortunately, Danticat’s laissez-faire temperament belies his vicious looks. Rather than eating them, he’d much rather command his pirate crew from the comfort of the captain’s quarters—curled up as living mulch on the warm soil of a large planter or insinuated into the pachysandra behind the deck. The crew for their part seems unlikely to mutiny; instead, they’d probably just walk over the old tom en route to their treasure, perhaps pausing just long enough for a muttered “You savvy?”

Our friend Ben can only say, “Yaaarrrrrrr!!!!!!”       

Life takes such sad turns sometimes. I was planning to write my next post about the joyous return of bees to the yard, and no doubt I will write that tomorrow. But I just received an e-mail from a friend asking if I’d seen the sad news in our local paper, an obituary of a mutual colleague and friend. No, I hadn’t seen it. No, I hadn’t particularly been thinking of her, even though another friend was planning a get-together for the three of us in May to have dinner and admire her garden. And no, she hadn’t been ill. But though deeply shocked, I wasn’t surprised.

You see, my friend was an alcoholic. None of her colleagues, including me, had the slightest idea. In fact, she seemed to have the perfect life. But that hadn’t always been the case.

With only a high school education, she had gotten pregnant and married the kid who did it. Needless to say, neither one was ready for marriage, much less kids, and after a few more years of premature responsibility (and a second child), the guy split. My friend got a job as a secretary at the company I eventually arrived at with my multi-graduate diplomas and not a worry in the world. She was smart and talented, and she worked hard, eventually overcoming the prejudices towards both her lack of education and her secretarial standing and rising to a very important, responsible position in sales.

She also married a really dreamy guy, incredibly attractive, smart, educated, with a fabulous and secure job. He was even younger than she (though as long as I knew her, she always looked like a high-school student). And, unlike husband #1, he was totally devoted to her. They had a third child together, bought a property and built a house the rest of us could only dream of, and started raising and showing therapy dogs for pleasure.

I had known and watched my colleague’s progress since my first arrival on the scene, but didn’t really get to know her until we both attended a business retreat years later. Like everyone who knew her, I was enormously impressed by her phenomenal common sense, her grasp of what mattered, her apparently effortless handling of every situation. And later, when she began inviting me to her home for dinners, I was stupefied by the perfection of everything—of the house, the cleanliness and order, the elaborate home-cooked meals. Our mutual friends and colleagues could not stop talking about it. Our houses and dinners were never like that—or close. To top it all off, she retired young to enjoy her beautiful home, her life with therapy dogs, and her gorgeous spouse. We all loved her—she was so kind, so wise, so competent, so funny, how could we help it?—but I don’t think there was one of us who didn’t feel that old snake, envy, stirring in our hearts. Here was a woman who had it all!

She promised to stay in touch, and she did, with some of us. The friend whose May dinner I mentioned earlier and I would meet with her for lunch or dinner, or have each other over, maybe once a month. And it was at one of these lunches or dinners that she told us she was an alcoholic. She had been one since her son was killed in a freak accident over a decade earlier. Her alcoholism had recently become so bad that she’d tried to kill herself. Her husband, despondent, had insisted that she seek help. She was going to join AA, go to a treatment facility.

It didn’t work. She went again and again, her behavior becoming increasingly erratic. She disappeared for months—once on a trip to Florida that lasted six months—and seldom came to our get-togethers, though she always promised she would. Eventually, her husband filed for divorce, unable to take any more. Her surviving kids disowned her, bullied by their spouses and afraid of her influence on their own children. From the apparently perfect life in the perfect house, she was reduced to living, jobless, cut off from her family, in a virtual tenement. Our mutual friend and I still managed to see her several times a year, and she always assured us that she was staying sober, studying for a new job, making clever little crafts for sale in local shops. Occasionally, we’d get one of those sickeningly upbeat little platitude e-mails from her that people feel compelled to send to all their friends.

The last time our mutual friend and I got together, our alcoholic friend once again failed to show up, though she had of course said she would. The last thing I remember my friend saying was “Next time, we have to make sure to get —— here.” But now she isn’t ever going to get here. She isn’t going to see our friend’s exquisite garden this May. She isn’t ever going to see anything in this life again. Isolated by her addiction, abandoned by her own family, confronted by the wreckage she’d made of her life, she killed herself on tax day, April 15th. The incredible odds she had overcome, the unbelievable successes she had achieved, the perfect life she had made for herself—none of it had been enough to save her from the private demons that drove her to drink.

Over the years, I’ve given a great deal of thought to alcohol and alcoholism. I grew up insulated, in a world as sweet and protected as my parents could manage. My mother’s people were from Kentucky—we were related to pretty much every great bourbon-distilling family in the state—and everybody drank a lot, and drank hard. But, like true Southerners—or true Kentuckians, in their case—they could hold their liquor, and I never saw the least ill effect in them the whole time I was growing up. So I didn’t understand the point of Prohibition. I didn’t understand what made those women so intolerant, why they destroyed a way of life not just for my distiller relatives but for the immigrants from Germany and Italy and France for whom beer or wine were cultural essentials, a way of connecting to the Old Country lifestyle and celebrating happy times. Why they couldn’t just live and let live.

I am ashamed to say that I was far past the age of discretion before it finally dawned on me what Prohibition was all about. It wasn’t about knee-jerk intolerance to what seemed to be Bohemian decadence, I belatedly realized. Instead, it was an attempt by battered women, women whose drunken husbands had broken their bones, bruised them, caused concussion and miscarriage, and spent the family’s life savings in drunken rioting and gambling, to sober them up and put a stop to the oblivious carnage. Doh!!! What an oblivious fool I was myself for not having a clue. To those women, and to millions of men, women, and children today, drinking isn’t a frivolous way to relax or pass the time. It’s a matter of life and death.

Do I think we should go back to Prohibition, outlaw alcohol, forbid wine in church? No, of course not. Fermented beverages have been recognized as gifts from the dawn of our species and long before (bears scooping up fermented honey, crows feasting on fermented fruit). Anthropologists now believe that agriculture came about so that groups of people could brew beer from grain, and that bread was a side effect. Even doctors have recognized the health benefits of a glass of wine with dinner.

But as with everything else, we need to rule our passions and cravings, not let them rule us. And even more to the point, we need to understand ourselves and what drives us. My friend was truly the most sensible, competent person I have ever known. She had an answer for everything, was on top of everything. She had more to give than anyone I knew. And two days ago, she sent herself to a solitary grave, apart from her family, her friends, her beloved pets, her world. It didn’t have to happen. It should never have happened. RIP, darling girl. I already miss you.                    

After reading my “Ben Picks Ten: Tomatoes” post, someone asked our friend Ben why we bothered to grow tomatoes when they were so easy to buy. And I won’t deny that in tomato season, our friend Ben and Silence Dogood load up on all sorts of ripe tomatoes from our local CSA* , Quiet Creek Farm, and the area farmers’ markets. We eat tomato sandwiches, tomato salads, and tomato snacks practically every day while the season lasts. Silence makes and cans all kinds of salsas and tomato sauces. If we never grew a single tomato, we’d have as many delicious, vine-ripened tomatoes available to us as we could eat and preserve.

But here at Hawk’s Haven, we also grow ten to twelve different heirloom tomato plants every year, as many as our friend Ben can manage to find space for in our veggie beds. True, we wouldn’t die of tomato deprivation or anything if we didn’t plant them. But I think something would die in our hearts: a sense of the rightness of the world. That’s because, in our friend Ben’s opinion, growing tomatoes shows us the cycle of life made visible, and allows us to find our place in it.

That’s not just because the annual spring ritual of setting out the tender tomato transplants and setting up the tomato ladders and cages around them marks the shift from tentative gardening, when of course we’re planting things but the garden could still be hit by frost, to go-for-it gardening, when the soil is warm and you know that, whatever “it” is, if you plant it, it will grow. It’s like the Kentucky Derby in (very) slow motion: You’ve been walking the horses, grooming them, warming them up for the race. Now, finally, they’re in the starting gate.

It’s not just because watching tomatoes grow is exciting and satisfying, the essence of gardening: First watching the diminutive transplants grow into sturdy, thriving, and finally rampant vines. Then looking on as the tomato flowers, which look like clusters of palest yellow shooting stars, transform into tiny pea-sized green fruits that grow larger from day to day under your watchful eye until they take on their final form and deepest color.

And it’s not just because of the delight of harvesting those sunwarmed tomatoes at their peak of freshness and flavor: Snacking on cherry, pear, or plum tomatoes as you pass the plants while tending to other garden chores and feeling the explosion of flavor on your tongue, the essence of summer made tangible. Bringing in a trugful of mixed heirloom tomatoes for a just-made salsa to go with the tortilla chips and margaritas and kick off a “Mexican Night” gathering under the summer stars (and chile pepper lights). Selecting the biggest, baddest, meatiest tomato for your lunchtime sandwich.

Actually, what gives our friend Ben a sense of the rightness of things is tomato hornworms. Now, tomato hornworms would make pretty much anyone’s—not just our friend Ben’s—top ten list of worst veggie garden pests. But our friend Ben can’t help but admire these finger-sized hawk moth offspring, handsome guacamole-green caterpillars with sharp-looking black-edged white “V”s down their sides and a texture of softest velvet. Big as they are—up to 4 1/2 inches—they often go undetected because their shape and color help them blend into the tomato vines. Undetected, at least, until the chewed-up tomato leaves and concentrated dark green droppings give them away.

Of course, it’s easy to deal with a tomato hornworm once you find it: You can stomp it (eeewww!!!) or feed it to the chickens. But much as our chickens would love to eat a big, succulent hornworm, our friend Ben has never given them the pleasure. That’s because something more important was happening.

We’re lifetime organic gardeners here at Hawk’s Haven—we love birds, toads, butterflies, and the assorted other wild things that share the place with us, and have no interest in harming them or ourselves with toxic chemicals. (And, in fairness, we’re obviously not market gardeners who must turn out perfect produce—and plenty of it—for a picky public.) So we’re much more intimately involved with the whole cycle of nature than those who “solve” their pest problems by dumping something on. Which brings our friend Ben back to tomato hornworms.

Every single time our friend Ben has found a tomato hornworm on a plant, I have noticed that it is carrying rows of white oval “eggs” (actually cocoons) of the parasitic braconid wasp on its back. These garden allies have already found the hornworm and laid their eggs in it, and now the hornworm is nothing more than a meal, helping produce more wasps to help me patrol the garden and keep pest populations in their place.

When I see this natural pest control taking place before my eyes, I am reminded of the wisdom of nature, and the natural cycle of which Hawk’s Haven, Silence, and our friend Ben are a part. Nature is conspiring to help me enjoy ripe tomatoes. In its infinite complexity, it is working in ways I cannot. Tomato plant, tomato hornworm, braconid wasp, ripe tomatoes, tomato sandwiches: the cycle goes on. All is, indeed, right with the world.

* What’s a CSA, you ask? It’s a farm that operates by subscription. (”CSA” stands for “consumer-supported agriculture.”) Members join the CSA and sign up for a half or a full share of produce, pay up front, then pick up produce weekly throughout the growing season. Everybody wins: the farmers, who now have cash up front to finance their growing season, and the consumers, who have a wealth of farm-fresh produce all season.      

It’s me, Richard Saunders of Poor Richard’s Almanac fame, back today to get your brain cells working with a little quotation quiz. Below, I’ve listed ten memorable quotes. Do you know who said them? I’ve also listed the speakers’ names. But guess what, they’re all mixed up! (And to make things a little harder, I’ve added two “extra” speakers to the mix, but haven’t provided quotes from them.) See how many speakers you can match to their quotes. (And yes, of course I give you the answers. But no cheating, now!) Let’s get started:

1. If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.

2. We have nothing to fear but fear itself.*

3. Though an old man, I am but a young gardener.

4. When you can do the common things of life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world.

5. We are not amused.

6. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

7. A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.

8. Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.

9. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

10. Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.

a. George Washington Carver

b. George Washington

c. Albert Einstein

d. Queen Victoria

e. Confucius

f. Benjamin Franklin

g. Martin Luther King, Jr.

h. Mahatma Gandhi

i. Thomas Jefferson

j. Dorothy Parker

k. Oscar Wilde

l. Franklin Delano Roosevelt

* This is actually a misquote, though it’s the one we all know. The real quote is “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

And now, the answers: 1-j, 2-l, 3-i, 4-a, 5-d, 6-f, 7-k, 8-e, 9-g, 10-h.

The “bonus quotees” were Albert Einstein and George Washington.  

Silence Dogood here. I realize there must be those tee-shirts and sweatshirts out there with “Advice from a Cat” or “Life Lessons from a Cat” or whatever they call them. (After all, I’ve seen shirts for sale featuring advice from penguins, moose, turtles, even zebras.) But our cats, Linus, Layla, and Athena, let me know that they had some advice of their own to share today. Here’s what they had to say:

* Play hard, sleep soft. Balance in all things.

* Follow the sun. You know you’ll feel better.

* Use your imagination. Anything can be a toy! Entertainment is where you find it.

* Eat just enough. There’ll be more when you want it.

* Stay alert. Excitement’s always just around the corner—or outside the window.

* Keep your own schedule. Night owl, dawn bird? Don’t fight your body, enjoy the times you feel most alert and alive.

* Live in the moment. It’s all we ever have.

* Be flexible. A cat specialty! Linus says: A reed bends and survives where a rigid stem snaps off.

* Curl up with someone you love. It’s so much more comfy than sleeping alone.

* Tell your loved ones how you feel about them. Early and often, too. A good, loud purr is hard to beat, and none of us can ever hear it often enough.

Our golden retriever, Molly, just informed me that she felt really left out here, and she would like to add her own advice to the above: Feed your dog!!! 

It has to be said: We gardeners have a thing about tomatoes. If the only tomatoes you’ve ever encountered are the hard, plastic, tasteless objects in the produce aisle, you may wonder why. But anyone who’s ever bitten into a thick, meaty, sunwarmed slice of tomato on a bacon-and-tomato sandwich (keep those napkins handy and your face over the plate!) or experienced the blast of flavor from a fresh-picked cherry tomato popped whole into the mouth doesn’t need to ask. If the sun had a flavor, “tomato” would be it.

It may seem a little out of sync to be focusing on tomatoes in April, especially if you live in a climate like our friend Ben’s where this morning’s temperatures are crawling towards the mid-thirties. But if you haven’t yet selected your tomato seeds for this year, or if you plan to buy transplants and would like to try a few new varieties, it’s not a moment too soon. It’s time for the One-Ben Awards for all-time best tomatoes! (What are One-Ben Awards, you ask? Check out my earlier post, “Ben Picks Ten: Music” to read all about ‘em.)

Mind you, anything that inspires passion also inspires controversy. There are thousands of tomato cultivars out there, and (I’ll admit it) most of them are good, unless they were bred specifically to withstand the horrors of shipping. Our friend Ben has been fortunate enough to try a whole lot of tomatoes, both heirlooms and hybrids, over the years, but there are plenty I haven’t tried (yet). So of course this is a very personal “best-of” list. You will not go wrong with any of these tomatoes; in fact, if you plant all these “love apples,” you’ll feel like you’ve stumbled into the Garden of Eden before the snake got his bright idea. But for those of you who feel that I’ve unjustly neglected your all-time fave, please write and let our friend Ben know all about it. There must be room around here somewhere for a few more plants…

Okay, without more ado, I’d like to present Ben’s Top Ten Tomatoes:

1. All-time best flavor. It has to be ‘Brandywine’, a Pennsylvania heirloom variety. Our friend Ben is not the only one who thinks so—blind taste tests across the country have found ‘Brandywine’ to be the winner for flavor. This is what a tomato should taste like! But there’s one little problem: Would the real ‘Brandywine’ please stand up?! Some claim that the pink ‘Brandywine’ is the true variety, and our friend Ben agrees with that assessment. But there are also red, yellow, and black ‘Brandywines’, as well as regular and potato-leaved types. (And no, the leaves don’t actually look like potatoes. They look like the leaves of potato plants, thick and crinkly.) Our friend Ben has this to say: They’re all luscious, so don’t sweat it. Try one, try all, sit back, take a bite… yum!!!

2. Best yellow tomato. Okay, they’re really orange. And our friend Ben has a slight problem here, too, because I simply love yellow/orange tomatoes. I’m not sure I’ve ever met one I didn’t like. The competition is really tough in this category, too, with ‘Yellow Brandywine’, ‘Dr. Wyche’s Yellow’, ‘Amana Orange’, ‘Persimmon’, ‘Woodle Orange’, and ‘Golden Sunray’ among the contenders. Our friend Ben loves all of these and enthusiastically recommends them. But if I had to pick just one, ‘Dad’s Sunset’ would be it. Great flavor, great yield, great color, great keeper. 

3. Best paste tomato. Yes, our friend Ben has tried the marvelous heirlooms like ‘Amish Paste’ and ‘Cherokee Purple’, and the modern hybrids like ‘Juliet’, all renowned for their flavor. But my hands-down favorite is still ‘San Marzano’. The flavor is just unbeatable, and it’s every bit as delicious in sandwiches and salads as it is in sauces. (Our friend Ben loves paste tomatoes on sandwiches and in salads, at least when eating them in front of anyone else—no disintegrating slices or juice all over everything!) 

4. Best cherry tomato. Our friend Ben is going to outrage a lot of people with this choice, but it’s the simple truth: The best cherry tomato is the orange hybrid ‘Sungold’. Hybrids don’t come true from seed, so they have to be repeatedly purchased. This is disappointing to thrifty gardeners who enjoy saving seed, and it’s scary to anyone who’s concerned about preserving as large a gene pool of open-pollinated vegetable cultivars as possible. Our friend Ben agrees with both these groups; perhaps (hint, hint) someone could breed out ‘Sungold’ and come up with an open-pollinated version. Meanwhile, if you simply can’t stand the idea of growing a hybrid, try the red heirloom variety ’Camp Joy’, a favorite of Renee Shepherd of Renee’s Garden because, unlike many cherry tomato cultivars, it has real tomato flavor. But if you pass up ‘Sungold’ because of its hybrid status, you’ll really be missing something. 

5. Best snacking tomatoes. Our friend Ben needed to sneak a few more little tomatoes in here, so I opted for “snacking tomatoes” because these aren’t round like cherry tomatoes. But boy, are they good!!! I have grown both ‘Yellow Pear’ and ‘Yellow Plum’ tomatoes every year since I first started growing tomatoes, because I just love them. Great flavor and prolific production over a long season, with pop-in-your-mouth ease. (Of course, they’re great in salads, too.) What more could you ask? If you can only choose one, go with ‘Yellow Plum’, which has a deeper flavor. But they’re both winners!  

6. Most beautiful tomato. Ack, this is another tough category. Our friend Ben thinks the striped tomatoes are the loveliest, and I favor red-and-gold striped over green-and-gold, like the famous heirloom ‘Green Zebra’. But there are plenty of contenders in the red-and-gold category: the paste tomato ‘Striped Roman’, ‘Red Zebra’, ‘Pineapple’, ‘Copia’, ‘Beauty King’. For flavor and that amazing striped color, though, our friend Ben is going with ‘Marvel Stripe’.

7. Tomato with the best name. Heirloom tomatoes have fantastic names, and our friend Ben loves them all: ‘German Lunchbox’, ‘Green Sausage’, ‘Banana Fingers’, ‘Arkansas Traveler’, ‘Royal Hillbilly’, ‘Deppe’s Pink Firefly’, ‘Henderson’s Crimson Cushion’, ‘Thai Red Turtle Egg’, ‘Mule Team’, ‘Bloody Butcher’, ‘Striped Cavern’, ‘Roman Candle’, ‘Pink Quartz’. What’s not to love?!! However, our friend Ben simply has to give the One-Ben Award in this category to ‘Radiator Charley’s Mortgage Lifter’. You can read an entertaining history of this variety by Michael Nolan at Tomato Casual (www.tomatocasual.com), a marvelous site for “all things tomato” in its own right.  

8. Best dark-fleshed tomato. Tomatoes in this category may be purplish or tend towards chocolate, though you often find them listed as “black.” Many tomato enthusiasts maintain that ‘Black Krim’ is the finest of them all, and yep, it’s a great tomato. But our friend Ben thinks ‘Paul Robeson’ is even better. (Wish I had one right now!!!) Do your own taste test at home by planting both!

9. Best tomatoes for home greenhouses. Our friend Ben is lucky enough to have a home greenhouse here at Hawk’s Haven, and it has an in-ground bed designed to let me grow peppers, tomatoes and other tender veggies and extend the season for fresh produce. If you do, too, here’s a tip: I’ve consistently found that small-fruited tomatoes produce wonderfully in the greenhouse—cherry, pear, and plum tomatoes—but larger-fruited types, even paste tomatoes, tend not to produce at all. Tomatoes are wind-pollinated, so even with good ventilation, I always shake the plants and flick the blossoms to make sure pollination takes place. If you’d like to grow greenhouse tomatoes, our friend Ben suggests putting a plant apiece of ‘Sungold’, ‘Camp Joy’, ‘Yellow Pear’, and ‘Yellow Plum’ in the greenhouse along with the ones you plant outside. When you’re still enjoying homegrown tomatoes in November, you’ll be glad you did!

10. Best big, fat tomatoes for sandwiches. Our friend Ben admits that topping a burger or bacon-and-tomato sandwich with a huge, thick, juicy beefsteak-type tomato slice has a lot to be said for it. (We love ‘em on multigrain bread with Swiss and Muenster cheese, Romaine lettuce, grapeseed mayo, and Jack Daniel’s honey mustard, too. Homemade hot/sweet pickles on the side.) Our previously mentioned favorites, ‘Brandywine’, ’Paul Robeson’, and ‘Dad’s Sunset’, are all great choices for sandwiches. ’Henderson’s Pink Ponderosa’ is another option, as are ‘Yellow Brandywine’, ‘Chianti Rose’ and ‘Marvel Stripe’. But you might also want to give ‘Big Beef’ some space in your beds. After all, when you want a big, fat, flavorful tomato slice, you don’t want to end up asking “Where’s the beef?”     

And the bonus:

11. Chickens’ top tomato pick. Our friend Ben’s chickens are tomato connoisseurs. True, they never met a tomato they wouldn’t at least eat (unlike zucchini—our friend Ben can only sympathize), but it’s easy to see which ones they really like by how enthusiastically they consume them. And, just like people, their top choice is ‘Brandywine’ every time.

Where to look for these wonderful tomato varieties? Fortunately for gardeners, most veggie seed catalogs offer a wide list to choose from. Our friend Ben especially enjoys the selections at Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds (www.rareseeds.com), Seed Savers Exchange (www.seedsavers.org), Tomato Growers Supply (www.tomatogrowers.com), and Renee’s Garden Seeds (www.reneesgarden.com).

If you’re lucky enough to live near Bowers, PA, you can also get heirloom transplants from Jim Weaver’s Meadow View Farm. (See my earlier post, “Scotch Bonnets and Dutchy gunpowder: a preview” for more about Meadow View.) But our friend Ben suspects that there are plenty of tomato enthusiasts growing heirloom tomato transplants for sale in other locations, too. And if you simply enjoy eating great tomatoes rather than growing them, consider joining your local CSA (consumer-supported agriculture) and patronizing your local farmers’ market. After all, there’s no such thing as too many tomatoes, especially now that they have the imprimatur of the health gurus as cancer-fighters. Our friend Ben says, a tomato a day (or two or three) keeps the doctor away!!!!