The Tomato That Paid Off a House in Six Years. Appalachian Grandpas Knew Why Yours Is All Leaves.

🔗 90 things every Appalachian grandmother knew about the ground. How many are left in your family? https://burlsizemore.com/porch-almanac The year I turned eight, my grandfather drove all the way over the mountain to Logan and paid a whole dollar for one tomato plant. My grandmother would not speak to him until supper. The man who sold it to him was not a farmer. He fixed radiators, at the foot of a long steep hill in West Virginia where the coal trucks boiled over, and in the hard times of the thirties he crossed the biggest tomatoes he could find in a circle in his yard, year after year, until he had one that would cover a dinner plate. He sold the little plants for a dollar apiece, and in six years he paid off the mortgage on his house. Everybody called it the Mortgage Lifter. Now go look at your own tomato plants. Taller than you, green as a jungle, and maybe six little tomatoes on the whole thing. It never happened to my Papaw one time in fifty years. In this video I give you the nine things the old men up our creek knew about why a tomato goes all to leaves. The manure pile, and why the tomatoes only got one shovel of it. The sunniest spot on the whole place, along the south wall of the smokehouse. Laying the plant down sideways in a ditch. Pinching the little thieves before breakfast. Why a tomato ought to be a little thirsty. Black locust stakes and strips of an old bedsheet. The blossoms that fall off in July, and the knock on the stake that wakes them up. Waiting on blackberry winter. And the jelly jar in the kitchen window. Three of the nine I laughed at until I was past fifty, and I tell you which three as we come to them. I also tell you about the year the seed companies came out with a tomato you could not save seed from, the envelope that saved the Cherokee Purple, and what became of that one dollar plant. It came over the mountain in a coffee can between my knees, and it is not finished yet. Papaw never wrote down a single word of what he knew. Not the manure, not the ditch, not the knock on the stake. So I sat down at the kitchen table and put it on paper: ninety things the old people of these mountains knew about a garden, every season of the year, and why they did it the way they did. I am Burl Sizemore. Thank you for staying with me to the end of the row. https://burlsizemore.com/porch-almanac