“Come on in,” I told Daddy, “and I’ll fix us something to eat.”
“Naw, Maidie’s making supper. Why don’t you come eat with us? You know there’s always extra.”
“Okay,” I said, but he didn’t get up.
“Are we expecting somebody?” I asked.
“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 sunflowers?”
“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 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. “Polianthes tuberosa. Almost no pests, doesn’t need a lot of fertilizer, 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 poultry 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?”
Lee’s face lit up. “You’ve got a manure spreader?”
“Parked it there twenty-five years ago when we got rid of the last of the mules and cows. It probably needs new tires and some WD-40, but y’all can have it if you want.”
Jane Ann jumped up and gave him a big hug that almost knocked his hat off. “You just saved us four hundred dollars and trucking one down from Burlington, Granddaddy!”
They all rushed off to check it out before dark, as excited as if Daddy had told them he had an old spaceship they could use to fly to the moon.
He straightened his hat and stood to go. “What you reckon Robert’s gonna say when they drag that old thing out?”
I laughed. “Myself, I can’t wait to hear what Haywood and Isabel have to say about growing flowers for a crop.”
“Beats ostriches,” he said slyly.
“What about you?” I asked as we walked out to his truck. The hounds jumped up in back and I put Bandit in the cab between us. “What do you think about growing flowers?”
He smiled. “Tell you what, shug. Flowers or mushrooms or even ostriches—it don’t matter one little bit. Anything that keeps ’em here on the farm another generation’s just fine with me.”
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