Read by Michael Flamel

As with most of these things, it sure seemed like a good idea at the time. However, if I had any sense at all, next time I say out loud, “Hey, THAT seems like a good idea!” my wife would have been previously instructed to place me in an old car, point it at the nearest brick wall and get me to drive the car headfirst right into it. The result would be the same, but the experience would be less painful, AND it would be quickly over.

Like it says in the front of the book, I do a call—in gardening radio show out of WHYY-FM in Phil-Elf-Ya (whose latest motto, I believe, is “The City Where Cheesesteaks Love You Back”). I’ve been doing the show for a good year and a half now, but had only been on the air exactly two weeks when I had to do my first big pledge drive ‘fundraiser’ show.

Terrified that no one would call in to pledge during my hour, I tried to get the station to really load up on the incentives: “Forget them tote bags! We need big thick ‘coffee table’ books (so called because you can put four legs on most of ’em and make an actual coffee table), orchids, greenhouses …!” To up the ante personally, I had the bright idea of promising to send seeds from my garden to everyone who pledged. It was Fall, and there were still a lot of nice Elephant’s Head amaranth plants standing out there looking good, so I decided on them.

Blocky heads with great trunks, let ’em dry for a while and then shove ’em into a big paper grocery bag or “sack” as it’s known on the other side of the Mason-Dixon line, where they call soda ‘pop’ (instead of their father), call their father ‘Paw’ instead of Dad), and try to serve you this weird-looking white runny stuff with your breakfast instead of home fries (or ‘has browns’ as they’re called North of here, in frozen wildernesses like Syracuse [whose residents consider Pennsylvania the deep South and believe Alabama is somewhere near Brazil]) and put ’em away for a while.

Gardening digression: For those not in the know, Elephant’s Head amaranth is an amazing old heirloom variety of this wonderful edible ornamental noxious weed. I seem to remember getting my original seeds from ‘Seeds of Change’ back when they were still in black and white (the company [actually their seed packets, which if you want to get picky [and I expect you do, knowing you were a kinda light puke green and white] not the amaranth). Most grain amaranth has a big orange or red seed head that tends to be largely conical but mostly raggedy in shape. ‘Elephant’s Head,’ however, develops a big beautiful reddish purple blocky-shaped ‘head’, often with two big’ears’ poking out the sides, and almost always with a long ‘trunk’ protruding from the center of the blocky head. Now I will admit that most of the time I say such things in this space, I’m just plain dirt lyin’—but not this time. Every year (you only need to plant amaranth once; it is the world’s most dependable unintentional perennial) a good number of PERFECT plants appear in my garden—plants so like their name that people what sees them for the first time often say, “Hey, that looks just like an elephant’s head!” Really.

Anyway, it got to be the Spring that followed that successful Fall fundraiser, and I realized I hadn’t fulfilled my Elephantine promise yet, so I dug the bag out, massaged loose a few million of the little black (just like poppy) seeds, put a couple hundred into each coin envelope, wrote a cute little diatribe about ’em (history and p!anting instructions (“throw near dirt, light fuse, run away”) and took ’em into the station to send out for me. The seeds were well received, Elephants grew, and all was right with the world (well, that one little tiny corner of it, anyway).

That Summer (this past one—the one without water from the skies) some nice unintentional Elephant amaranths adorned my garden once again, but it was the sunflowers that really shined! I had saved all the faded heads off my ornamental sunflowers the year before and had crushed up a few of those dried heads in one part or another of just about every single one of my 20 or so raised beds with sensational results. There were those really deep red- and orange-colored ones like Autumn Beauty and Sunset and (despite its name) Yellow Disc; and the beautiful ‘off-yellow’ ones like Vanilla Ice and Lemon Queen and Sunrise; and the TRUE Native American sunflowers with one big stalk that will bloom with dozens of colorful flowers.

(I am convinced, by the way, that those sunflowers were a big part of why my garden was such an oasis of life during the drought [OK and maybe the fact that I cheated and kept it watered helped a little bit]; a sanctuary for buzzing, flying happy pollinators.) Anywho, I also saved all of that (last) season’s heads and realized that the seeds therein would make a good incentive for the upcoming Fall pledge drive. So, we played up the seeds during the fundraiser, got lots of pledges once again, and once again, I let those ‘special incentives’ sit until the Wintertime. Well, you know, they say that the ‘off’ season is supposed to b’ time for us gardeners (at least the East Coast ones) to chill out, catch up and do stuff like sort, clean, and pack up seeds for our loyal listeners. But oy—they throw all these big holidays at ‘cha. I wound up shoveling snow—frequently—for the first Winter in a long time. Then, you got your “ooch, ouch my poor achin’ back feels like I haven’t shoveled snow in a long time” days after shoveling snow, and what—you got like three hours of daylight to start with in January.

So Spring was getting ready to uncurl by the time I realized I hadn’t done my chore yet. I quickly dug out the heads, spread newspaper over the dining room table and had been at it about an hour before I reached my first head that had fat sunflower-seed-like sunflower seeds in it. Now, I also had a nice-sized mound of debris that contained lots of stuff that looked like marigold seeds that had come out of tight, packed little heads that I had been certain/hoping/praying were the really ornamental ones.

I was certain I remembered originally planting some ornamental sunflower seeds that looked to all the world like marigold seeds. (Yes, and getting sunflowers in return, oh wise one—look, with my life, hecklers are kind of redundant, you know?) Ah, but even I realize that the line between certainty and self-deception can be so thin sometimes. So, I decide to do a germination test, planting some of this sunflower schmutz in my seed starting set-up to see what happens. Nada. Bupkiss. Nothin’. Sunflower free. Bereft of sunflowers. Totally uncontaminated, in fact, by plants of any kind …

Blind panic ensues (with some side-trip detours to feel up packets of ornamental sunflowers in hardware stores, desperately looking for one without fat seeds). I find another stash of heads—with a pitiful, but larger than what I already have by far—amount of fat seeds. And lots of those ornamental ones that now look like smallish seeds that birds have somehow eaten the insides of. NO! They’re real seeds! They have to be! They’re just different, that’s all! It’s diversity which is good! Get defeat out of your head, man—it’s almost March and you better send these people something!

I decide to try another germination test. I remove most of the chaff, which is tough when you are trying hard to convince yourself that the stuff that you’re now calling ‘chaff’ was ‘seeds’ just as recently as last week … I gather up little fingerfuls of a few obvious seeds and LOTS of stuff that looks like my best hope of being the fabled marigold-like sunflower seeds and plant them. Three days later, rainforests spring up. Other men would now be relieved. I instead am convinced I’ve wasted all the good seeds on these furshlugginer tests! Exhausted, I separate out the obvious (i.e., fat) seeds and put a few into each envelope. Then I go back and pour about three ounces of chaff/’special seeds’ into each one as well. Accompanying each envelope is the following on a small sheet of paper: “Ornamental Sunflower Seeds from Mike McGrath’s garden. Each packet contains enough seed to produce at least four and perhaps as many as sixteen hundred ornamental sunflower plants. Please space your plantings accordingly.” And I don’t care how many of the stinking things you already have! This year it’s tote bags!!!! See you on the radio. ❖