Growing, Older by Joan Dye Gussow

Author:Joan Dye Gussow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Why Not Try Rice?

By the time I finally got around to it, I’d tolerated years of teasing about how dumb I was not to just grow rice. My friends weren’t pushing me to add grains to the foods I produce; they simply thought I should welcome to my garden at least one species likely to be enthusiastic about the conditions I offered. Given the fact that I crop on land that floods—and floods a lot—most of my friends couldn’t avoid noticing that much of what I grow does not flourish in boggy soil. I do have a bed of “no-bog” cranberries from which I harvest a couple of quarts each year, but I planted them with no intention of testing their desire to become bog cranberries. They seem to survive the floodings, as do most of my fruits and vegetables, sometimes sullenly, but they have given no indication that they are truly gratified to be underwater part of the time.

But multiple floods on successive days late one winter finally convinced me that global warming was telling me something. I needed a reason not to mourn when the garden went underwater; it was time to try something that grows happily in flooded fields—rice. I had a spare plot in which to try it, having learned over time that I could grow much more than I could eat year-round, so I set out to find rice seeds.

They were harder to locate than I had imagined they would be, but ultimately I found them in a catalog from Bountiful Gardens in California. And, with some difficulty—the Web site didn’t work for me, an all-too-frequent condition when you are too old for an iPod—I got the packet of seeds. The instructions said to plant the seeds indoors and transplant them out into “mucky” soil when they had spouted “true leaves.”

I carefully spaced out one hundred seeds in a large, oval pot, watered them in, covered the pot with plastic wrap, and assumed nothing would happen. I tend to be suspicious of things I have never grown, and take for granted that my first, second, and sometimes third attempts will fail. But my skepticism was, at least initially, unwarranted. In no time at all up came one hundred little spear-like shoots, which were soon followed out of the planting mix by a grassy leaf. Was this a “true leaf”? Who knew. I had never grown rice before. I took off the plastic wrap and when the seedlings got very leggy and tall, I cut off the tops as I used to do with onion seedlings, to make them grow thicker. In retrospect, I’m pretty sure that wasn’t a good idea.

Still, the plants kept growing, and that’s when it struck me that I was going to have to plant out one hundred of these skinny little tots, a task similar in its physical demand to planting out onion seedlings. I don’t grow onions from seeds anymore, but from small onions called “sets”—at least partly because

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