Speaking of odd things in the garden, I want to tell you about a couple of things my dad grew when I was growing up.

My dad grew up on a farm in Kentucky, and moved to St. Louis, MO, during WW2 when jobs were plentiful. (He was discharged for medical reasons after a short stint in the Army.) I was born in St. Louis and grew up there.

In our tiny backyard garden, he regularly grew tomatoes, lettuce, radishes, and maybe a few things I have forgotten. Those were the useful things. But he planted quite a few things that were either experimental or nostalgic—they were things he remembered from the farm.

He planted an apple tree and a peach tree, but the apples and peaches were wormy because he didn't spray them. (I don't know if he was against spraying, or thought it was too much trouble, or didn't know how; I suspect he tried it a couple of times and gave up, but the trees remained.) Also, the squirrels ate them, so we didn't get much.

Likewise, he planted grapevines, but birds ate the grapes. Various contraptions he built to scare birds away didn't work very well.

Maybe harvesting apples, peaches and grapes wasn't really the point.

The most extraordinary thing he ever planted was cotton. Now, there's nothing practical you can do with 3 or 4 cotton plants, unless you want to stuff the tops of a few aspirin bottles. I think he did it mainly for me: it was a part of my heritage that he wanted me to know about. He wanted me to know what it meant that he (and my mother, too, as kids) used to pick cotton for a dollar a day.

I took a few cotton bolls to school for show-and-tell.

Later, I even built a working model of Eli Whitney's cotton gin, and tried it out with real cotton containing real seeds. It didn't really work, but it illustrated the principle of how it was supposed to work. I suppose I made my dad proud, but I really didn't think of that at the time.

Looking back, I wish I had appreciated it more then. I appreciate it now.