PART 2 — ADA MAES THREE PAGES
Here it is, word for word, the way my great-grandmother Ada Mae wrote it in that notebook, with my own notes where I finally figured out what she meant.
First, she said, feed the hole before you feed the plant. In the bottom of every hole she dropped a big handful of crushed eggshells she had saved all winter in a coffee can, a spoonful of Epsom salt, and a handful of cold wood ash from the stove. The eggshells and the ash, I learned, are what stopped my tomatoes from splitting and rotting on the bottom. Forty years I never knew.
Second, bury a banana peel and an old rusty nail down beside the roots. She swore by it, and she was right. The peel feeds them slow all summer, and the nail gives them iron. My plants went from pale and tired to dark green in two weeks.
Third, water deep and water low. Never on the leaves, and only in the early morning. She wrote do not skip this twice and underlined it. Wet leaves in the Kentucky heat is exactly how you get the blight. I had been sprinkling the tops of mine for forty years like a fool.
Everything that had gone wrong in my garden for four decades, Ada Mae had already solved in a coffee can before I was ever born.
For the cucumbers she had her own trick. Once a week she mixed a spoonful of baking soda into a gallon of water and poured it around the roots. That is what takes the bitterness out and keeps the yellow off. Not one bitter cuke all summer.
She mulched thick, too, a good four inches of grass clippings and straw around every plant, to keep the soil from going wet, then dry, then wet again. That swing is what splits a tomato, she wrote. Keep her even and she will keep her skin.
And last, she planted marigolds and basil in between the rows. The bugs cannot stand them, and they leave the tomatoes alone. I did not spray one drop of poison all season.
That is the whole of it. Nothing to order online, nothing you cannot find in your own kitchen and garage. Ada Mae raised eleven children on this method through the Depression and never bought a vegetable from a store.
I am sixty-four, and this was the best garden of my life. Now it is yours too. Save it in your own coffee can, and pass it on to somebody who loves to dig in the dirt. That is what she would have wanted.