by Ree Drummond
One variety of rose I became especially enamored with was named “Hot Cocoa” for the deep, rich shade of brownish-red petals. The color was stunning, but so was the shape of the blooms—and after I successfully grew a gorgeous bush one summer, the following spring I planted eleven more. They were a triumph, and the foundation of all the decorative vegetation around my front porch. Over the following year, my Hot Cocoa roses grew gorgeous and thick, and my gardening pride was at an all-time high.
But one day, to my great dismay, one of the Hot Cocoa rosebushes started failing. It slowly lost its parchmentlike blooms, then quit flowering altogether. I tried special rose food and fertilizer, as well as pesticide and fungicide, but soon the leaves started dropping off, and within three weeks, it was completely dead. Meanwhile, the other eleven Hot Cocoa bushes were absolutely thriving, with no sign of disease at all. I was completely puzzled, and I hated the idea of starting a young new bush from scratch. It had taken a year to get these all to full glory. The dead bush left a hole in my landscaping and in my heart.
A few evenings later, I found out the cause. It was accidental but fortuitous. I happened to walk by a window at the front of our house just in time to see Ladd peeing off the porch . . . right in the spot of the deceased rosebush. And it’s not like I didn’t know Ladd peed outside. He does it, the cowboys do it, my boys do it—just like millennia of country boys have done before. It saves water and it’s convenient . . . and let’s face it, there are no neighbors to see it happening. But it hadn’t once occurred to me that any peeing was taking place off the porch, let alone on my flowers, let alone on one of my prized Hot Cocoa rosebushes. But there was my answer. My poor, beloved plant had experienced death by urine, also known as nitrogen burn. To put it bluntly: Ladd had killed my rosebush by peeing on it repeatedly. If that doesn’t sum up everything that’s wrong with country boys, I don’t know what does.
I whipped open the front door, shrieked, “What are you doing?!?” and startled Ladd so badly that he told me he couldn’t pee anymore. Which was good, I replied, because if he couldn’t start being more responsible about his pee, it wasn’t something he needed to be doing anyway.
Back to the vegetable world for a second. Did I ever tell you my cherry tomato story?
Growing tomatoes in Oklahoma is a no-brainer, and they’re always the main focus of my garden. They love nothing more than hot, full sun in the summertime, and we have that in abundance in my state. Back in my tomato heyday years ago, I was always happiest when I had an eclectic variety of tomato plants, so I made it a point to plant beefsteaks, heirlooms, big boys, steakhouses—in all the colors you can imagine.
I always grew tomatoes from starter plants that I sometimes ordered but usually bought at local garden spots. I never grew them from seeds, because when it comes to tomatoes I’m impatient and always want to get the show on the road as fast as possible. One summer I bought all my tomato plants in one go, to save time, and hauled them back to the ranch to start planting. I should also mention that this particular year, I was extra excited for spring, so I went overboard and got almost twice as many tomato plants as I’d bought the year before. I pictured entertaining for friends and setting out big white platters of tomato slices in gorgeous shades of yellow, red, maroon, and brown. I could almost hear their oohs and aahs, and the tomatoes hadn’t even started growing yet. I couldn’t wait to show off my bounty!
When the plants started bearing fruit, I discovered to my (relative) horror that every single tomato plant in my garden was growing . . . cherry tomatoes. All of them. Every single one. Evidently, wherever they’d originated, an employee had gotten distracted and mislabeled an entire truckload of tomato plants. Bottom line, I harvested approximately 12,098,234,151,223 cherry tomatoes that summer, and it was many, many years before I could eat them again. Have you ever tried to fill big white platters with sliced cherry tomatoes?
It takes a while. A good, sharp knife is recommended.
If you’ve ever grown a sunflower—and many elementary school children in America have—you understand the wonder of watching a single seed grow into a stalk that’s six or seven feet tall (sometimes more), and finally develop the big, beautiful bloom on top. They’re absolute happiness in the form of a plant, and one summer, to give me and my vegetable garden a rest, I decided to plant nothing but different heights, sizes, and colors of sunflowers.
I researched the varieties and mail-ordered the seeds, then planted them in stages so that the entire garden, the tall and the short, would be in full bloom at the exact same time. I waited. And watered. (And enjoyed not maintaining my veggie garden that year. Mama needed a break after that cherry tomato saga.)
The location for the sunflower garden was perfect—away from the house a little ways and protected by an old rock wall that was built around the perimeter of our house back in the 1930s. The textured sandstone was the perfect backdrop for the growing sunflowers, and every day I got such joy from watching the plants get closer and closer to maturity. And it seemed like it truly did happen overnight; out of the blue, sunflowers opened up and revealed their gorgeousness left and right. Some blooms were as small as appetizer plates; others were as large as dinner plates. My dream—my sunflowers—had finally arrived! It was real! I made plans to photograph the garden the next morning as the sun was rising in the east, and imagined the dreamy photos I could take with my kids skipping through the stalks.
I headed outside the next morning with my camera and noticed a gorgeous light fog, which was sure to provide the perfect vibe for an entire album’s worth of garden portraits. But when I turned the corner and caught a glimpse, I discovered that my sunflower garden was completely missing its blooms, except for the five small plants in the very front row. The rest of the stalks—around sixty of them, some as tall as eight feet—just stood there, waving gently in the morning breeze like skinny green headless horsemen. My knees went weak. My sunflowers! They were gone, faster than presents are opened on Christmas morning. My throat started to swell a little.
I heard a rustle in the back, so I walked around to the edge of the garden and looked on the other side of the rock wall. Our seven ranch horses—Snip, L.B., Red, Pepper, Peso, Old Yeller, and Jack—all stood there staring at me, chomping on what I immediately realized were the very last bites of the most luxuriant breakfast they’d probably ever had: an entire buffet of my long-awaited sunflower blooms. In my years of gardening, I’d never experienced the horses eating anything I’d grown—they don’t like the taste of tomato plants, and that alone kept them away from my veggies. So I had a false sense of security with the sunflowers. I’d just wasted nearly three months of my life growing the equine buttheads one single, enormous meal.
I think the sunflower garden incident was my most heartbreaking garden heartbreak of all, because not only did I lose my sunflowers in one fell swoop, they disappeared at the hands (mouths) of my now-ex equine friends. I secretly hoped they’d all get a two-day bellyache after their gluttonous stunt, but nothing. In fact, their coats were especially shiny for the next couple of weeks.
Today I’m back to planting vegetables, and I just admire sunflowers from afar. I can’t ever let myself be hurt like that again.
Horses on Drummond Ranch
Despite their tendency to eat my sunflowers, horses are a huge part of our family, and they have really cute names. Here are some loyal fellas who’ve carried Ladd, Tim, the cowboys, and the kids through the years. Some are no longer with us, some still report for duty every day. There’s nothing like the love of a good ranch horse!
Old Yeller
Snip
Jack
L.B.
Buddy
Peso
Pokey
Flash
Ford
Cutter
Pepper
Red
Goose
Zero
Mighty Mouse
Lizard
Sheldon
Tigger
Joey
>
Peanut
Moonshine
Little Bit
Batman
Beemer
Shooter
Buster
Bubba
Church
Shopping in Bulk
Growing up in a normal town, within normal distance of grocery and other types of stores, I learned the practice of shopping for things as they’re needed. Oh, I guess my mom would stock up a little bit when she’d go to the grocery store—for instance, she might shop on Monday for the rest of the week’s groceries. Or toward the end of summer, we’d buy school supplies for the year. Or before the weather got cold, we’d buy a couple of sweaters and maybe a new coat. But generally speaking, I enjoyed the luxury of being able to run to the supermarket, the pharmacy, the clothing store as needed, for the first twenty-five-plus years of my life.
When I married Ladd and moved to the country, I was still conditioned in this way, and probably a little worse: I’d gone to school in California and lived alone there for long enough that I’d become accustomed to shopping each day for that evening’s dinner. So for the first few months of my marriage to Ladd, I took that same approach—which was taxing considering we lived many miles from town and I had morning sickness because of something that happened on our honeymoon. So, for example, I’d drive to town and grab some chicken breasts, pasta, and the makings for a simple sauce, then I’d drive back home, completely nauseated at the idea that I had raw poultry in my vehicle. Then I’d do it again the next day, and it wouldn’t go any more smoothly.
Bless Ladd’s heart, now that I think about it, because he would make subtle suggestions to me like “If you make a list of what you need, I’ll go to Ponca City and get a big load” and “We can go to the store together on Saturday if you make your list.” For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what he meant. He was describing, of course, buying in bulk—taking one big trip to the store to get many weeks’ worth of supplies—which was the way he’d always seen it done growing up. But at the time, the idea of filling an entire vehicle (even sometimes a horse trailer) with groceries was a foreign concept.
Nan, my mother-in-law, began to teach me the ropes. She excelled at bulk buying and approached it with all the pragmatism of a home economics major: Why buy one pack of diapers on multiple drives to the supermarket an hour away when I could buy fifteen packs of diapers on just one supermarket visit? Why buy a pound of butter in each of twenty trips when I could buy twenty pounds in one trip? The math, the gas savings, and the time savings (not to mention the decreased wear and tear on the tires and on me) just made sense. Nan had a lot of experience in this department.
In the early days on the ranch, during the first few years Chuck and Nan were married, there had definitely been a feast-or-famine quality to the cash flow. Cattle were sold once or twice a year, which meant that all the household income flowed into the bank on one or two (very blessed) days annually. Credit cards weren’t a big thing, and interest rates were high, which made borrowing money during the drier months possible but never ideal. So Nan learned quickly that when the cattle were sold, it was time for her to get what she needed—because if she waited too long, Chuck would buy a tractor or make a down payment on another parcel of land, and the cash would start to get low. She’d make a huge trip to the city for nonperishable (and freezable) supplies that would last her many months—then just fill in her perishables (milk, eggs, bread) as needed at the local grocery store in town.
It carried over into the non-food world as well. When Chuck sold the ranch’s cattle, Nan would go shopping for clothing for her three sons—enough to last for months or more. She’d hit the department stores and sometimes come out with twenty-five pairs of jeans (for three sons plus Chuck), forty work shirts, fifty pairs of socks, and more underwear than some stores even stocked. She was swift, merciless, and full of purpose. She told me that once, on a post-cattle-sale shopping day, she bit off more than she could chew and had to call Chuck from Tulsa and have him make the hour-and-a-half drive to pick up some of her purchases.
Ironically, Nan was not a shopaholic. This bulk-buying practice was in no way reflective of materialism or hoarding on her part; she simply knew that she had few ideal windows in which to get the things she would need for her ranching family for a several-month period, and instead of pacing them out over the normal span of a year, she’d get in there and get ’er done.
The complication came later, when Nan’s boys were grown and out of the house. Christmas would roll around, and when Ladd opened a gift from her, inside the box would be nine shirts. If she found a night cream she liked, she had a hard time not buying eight jars. It took years for her to break the habit of stocking her pantry, bathroom shelves, and closet with multiples.
So this was my bulk-buying mentor: Nan, the bulk buying queen herself. Under her tutelage and influence, I became a pro at making very infrequent trips to the supermarket and the discount club. It was less about cash flow, as times were different in ranching, and operating on a line of credit from the bank (interest rates are better now) mitigated the feast-or-famine phenomenon Nan had experienced. But it was very much about making the decision not to spend my life in the car, driving hours a day with four babies and coming back with only a week or two’s worth of supplies to show for it. So I became a scholar. I learned quickly and became entirely comfortable with buying dozens of bars of soap at a time. And don’t get me started on canned tomatoes. Dozens were not enough.
After a while, though, times started to change. Online shopping became more prevalent, and because the kids became involved in different sports (some through a homeschooling league in the big city), I found myself having to leave the ranch more and more anyway. So I never became the full-blown, necessity-based bulk buyer that Nan was in the old days of the ranch. And besides that, an incident happened early on that had dampened my enthusiasm.
I’d made the trek to Walmart, two of my four kids in tow, and spent two exhausting hours going up and down every aisle, ticking off my list until I’d filled four—yes, four—large carts. I was very proud of the work I’d done, and the carts were orderly and organized according to category: dry goods, clothing, toiletries, housecleaning products, storage and paper goods, and perishables. The four carts were mounded and bulging, and as I lined them up in the checkout lane, a man in the next aisle looked in my direction. As I started emptying the cart full of toiletries, he stared at my eight twelve-packs of Dove soap and said, very loudly, “Dang, lady! Are you one of them shopaholics? You a spendthrift or somethin’?”
“No,” I answered. “I . . .”
I wanted to explain the whole thing—that we live out in the country, and that it is a much more efficient use of time and resources for me to do fewer shopping trips a year. That I’m married to a busy cattle rancher and raising four kids, and there are hardly enough hours in the day if I stay home 24-7, let alone drive up and down the road all the time, and the fewer treks I can make to the city, the more sane a person I’ll be. Plus, my mother-in-law said so! You should listen to her, sir!!! I decided I wasn’t comfortable with that kind of attention, especially in the checkout line.
“I’m . . . buying it for my church,” I lied, blinking coyly and flashing him an angelic smile.
(I hope God didn’t mind too much.)
Stockin’ Up
Even though I’m no longer deep in the bulk-buying years, I still love having a well-stocked kitchen in case something crazy like a zombie apocalypse (or a pandemic) happens and I can’t get to civilization for supplies. Here’s my working list!
PANTRY
Baking
Baking ingredients: bulk flour (all-purpose, whole wheat, cake, self-rising), sugar, brown sugar, powdered sugar, baking powder, baking soda, yeast, cream of tartar
Chocolate chips, cocoa powder, and other kinds of baking chocolate
Evaporated milk and sweetened condensed milk
Shortening
Canned and Jarred
Artichoke hearts: throw in a pasta sauce, make artichoke dip, or put on pizza
Assorted olives, jalapeños, pepperoncini
Canned beans: great for salads and soups. Rinse before adding!
Canned tomatoes: crushed, whole, diced, stewed, paste
Chipotle peppers in adobo sauce: add to soups and roasts, mix with mayo, add to dip
Jarred pesto and specialty relishes and chutneys
Jellies: strawberry, apricot, jalapeño
Peanut butter
Roasted red peppers: place them on panini, puree and make a soup or pasta sauce, chop for bruschetta
Ro*tel canned tomatoes with green chilies
Stocks and broths: chicken, beef, vegetable
Condiments, Flavorings, Herbs, and Spices
Barbecue sauce
Dried herbs and spices
Honey
Hot sauce
Ketchup, different mustards, relish
Maple syrup, pancake syrup
Mayonnaise
Olive oil, vegetable oil, peanut oil, coconut oil
Rice wine (mirin)
Salt: iodized, kosher, sea salt, salt blends
Soy sauce, fish sauce, teriyaki sauce, hoisin
Vinegars: distilled white, red wine, white wine, apple cider, rice wine
Worcestershire
Boxed and packaged
Cornmeal
Dried beans: pinto, black, Great Northern, navy
Dried pasta in every shape and size
Oatmeal and other breakfast grains
Masa: corn flour, sold in the Hispanic foods aisle; use to make tortillas, add to chili
