“Some of the children said they was gonna stop by,
show us what they plan to grow on that land we give
’em last week.”
Even as he spoke, a couple of pickups drove up and
several of my nieces and nephews tumbled out—Zach’s
Lee and Emma, Seth’s Jessie, Haywood’s Jane Ann, and
Robert’s Bobby, who carried a large sunflower that he
handed to me with a flourish.
“Sunflowers?” I laughed. “You’re going to grow sun-
flowers?”
“Hey, they’re real trendy now,” he told me.
“The short ones make great cut flowers,” said Jane
Ann, “but those that we don’t sell fresh, we can wire the
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dried heads and sell as organic sunflower seeds to hang
from a bird feeder. Cardinals go crazy over them.”
“But this is going to be our real moneymaker.” Jessie
set a bud vase with a single stem of pure white flowers
on the table and an incredibly sweet fragrance met me
even before I leaned forward to smell. “
and we can market them for fifty cents to a dollar a stem
depending on whether we sell them retail or wholesale.
This one cost me two-fifty at the florist shop in Cotton
Grove and he said he’d much rather buy locally than
getting them shipped in from Mexico.”
“Yeah,” said Lee. “Judy Johnson, Mother’s cousin up
near Richmond, has an acre that she and her husband
tend pretty much by themselves. She says we’ll probably
be able to cut ours from the end of July till frost. Up
there, they cut anywhere from a hundred and fifty to six
hundred stems a day.”
“That’s a gross of close to nine thousand dollars an
acre,” said Emma, who seemed to be channeling the
soul of an accountant these days.
“What about fertilizer?” Daddy asked. “I hear that
organic stuff ’s right expensive.”
“Chicken manure,” said Bobby. “You know that poul-
try place over on Old Forty-eight? He raises the biddies
from hatching to six weeks and he’s got a mountain of
it out back. Says we can have it for the hauling. We’ll
compost the new stuff and go ahead and spread the old
soon as we can afford a spreader.”
Daddy laughed. “Y’all ever take a good look at some
of them things a-setting under the shelters back of those
old stick barns?”
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Lee’s face lit up. “You’ve got a manure spreader?”
