The Lettuce Bed

My hubby is descended of a long line of farmers.  His father farmed, his grandfathers farmed, his great-grandfathers farmed and so on and so on.  After so long a time the farming instinct is programed onto the very chromosomes of his makeup.  He can no more ignore their urgings than a beagle can ignore the urge to trail a scent.  It's part of their genes.  So with the advent of warm weather he is overcome with a frantic desire to plow and plant, regardless of the fact that we grow no crops and have few acres that are tillable.

There is no fighting genetic instinct.  As the days warm, out comes the old tractor and the even older plow.  As soon as the ground dries past the mud stage he is hooking the tractor and plow up and hunting someplace to play in the dirt.  He immediately heads to our garden spot and with a sigh of contentment drops the plows and revs up the old tractor.  Soon the steady chug of the tractor can be heard and the neat rows of turned earth begin to extend out from my window.  Instead of quiet contentment I feel a surge of panic.  The garden wars have begun!

You see, once he gets started plowing, if I don't watch him closely he will plow every inch of space he can reach.  Each year the garden spot gets a little longer and little wider.  Then true to his ancestors teachings of not wasting an inch of usable land, he will happily plant it all.  Then, he will hurry on to the more important aspects of farming for the rest of the season and leave the weeding, picking, canning and freezing to the women--or in this case woman, me!  So the bigger it gets the more I fuss and demand he cease and desist or at least help.  It's a rite of spring.

Another rite of sping, is the burning of the lettuce bed.  Once the garden is worked up hubby starts to gather all the fallen limbs and branches from the fields, cleaning up so pastures can be clipped  and hay cut.  Then he goes through the barns and looks for any burnable trash that has collected over the winter.  This might be paper feed sacks, scrap lumber, broken tier poles from the tobacco barn, or broken tobacco sticks.  After the barns he will clean up around the house and woodpile gathering twigs, bark, scraps of left over stove wood or, if I don't watch him, broken yard furniture!  In short, anything that will burn is tossed onto a square in the corner of the garden.  This must have been a messy winter because the pile soon grew to be nearly six feet tall. 

The purpose of burning this pile is to use the heat of the fire to sterilize the soil of any weed seeds or roots so that only lettuce seeds will sprout in that area and we won't have to pick weeds out of our salad.  After the lettuce seeds are sown, the area is covered with a piece of tobacco canvas to keep other seeds from blowing in from the surrounding fields and to protect the tender young sprouts of lettuce.  This is also the way old time farmers prepared tobacco beds for planting the little seeds for plants for their tobacco patch before the advent of float beds and purchased plants.

Finally, the last rite of spring, the hot dog roast.  When the kids were little we would have the first hot dog roast of the year gathered around the glowing embers of the lettuce bed.  We would spread blankets on the cold ground and happily eat a supper of charred dogs, dripping catsup.  Then we would polish off this nutritious meal with blackened, melting marshmallows.  So hubby happily called all the grandchildren and their friends to come to the farm for the annual hot dog roast.  "When are you planning to do this?" I inquired.  "Tonight" he replied.  I looked at the clock, it was then approaching 3 pm.  "Um, you'd might want to go on and start the fire", I suggested.  "Not, yet, we'll do it later when the breeze dies a little".  "Honey, that's a lot of wood.  If you don't start it now you could be roasting hot dogs about 3 am!" 

The bonfire was a huge success.  The kids stood around in awe as flames shot through the big pile of brush and leaped into the heavens.  The fire raged and got hotter and hotter.  The men backed up and decided to let it burn a while.  Two hours later the kids were beginning to get mutinous.  "We're hungry!  We want to roast hot dogs!" Seven little expectant faces looked up at me.  With resignation, I opened the gas grill and started cooking hot dogs. 

It took the promise of a cook-out at a later date on the creek with a small fire to convince them to give up and eat.

I missed the timing on the lettuce bed -- I think it would have cooked perfectly the next morning.

I"ll bet we don't have any weeds in our lettuce!