Welcoming the Volunteers

Before there were refrigerated trucks shipping produce from Florida and Mexico and California, people living in the northern latitudes had no access to fresh vegetables in the winter.

Dandelion greens, the first “weeds” to appear in the spring, were a prized spring tonic. My grandfather, Penn Tuttle, would get a jump on both the weeds and the market soon after the ground thawed, digging up dandelions all over the farm with a double-tined hand tool. He’d wash the sandy soil off of them in the deep concrete tubs of the washhouse he and his father had built. He’d pack the greens into crates, load them into his 1915 Jeffrey truck, and drive the three miles from the farm to the town of Dover to sell them wholesale to the many small local groceries that thrived before the first A&P came to town.

A kinder word for “weed” is “volunteer” — a plant that was once grown as a crop but now self-seeds and spreads without any assistance from the farmer. On our farm, it was horseradish. Some Tuttle ancestor decided to plant a field of it. My grandfather and my father never forgave that long-gone and unknown relative. No amount of hoeing or digging or mowing would eradicate that hardy perennial with its gnarly, foot-long roots. When I was a kid, there was an elderly Greek couple who’d come with burlap sacks and a shovel every spring and leave with all the horseradish roots they could carry, but they barely made a dent in the unwanted bounty.

After falling in love with fresh salsa verde on a trip to Mexico a few years ago, I decided to grow tomatillos in my garden. I had no idea what to expect, having never seen them growing. I sent away for a packet of seeds and started them down cellar under grow lights. They grew twice as fast as the tomato seedlings I’d started, and were tall and gangly by the time it was safe to transplant them into the garden. The plants grew into beautiful huge bushes bearing hundreds of what looked like Japanese paper lanterns, each one containing a hard green perfect tomatillo. There were so many I couldn’t possibly use them all; I filled the freezer with them and sold the rest to a Mexican restaurant. Even so, there were many that fell to the ground before the first frost killed the plants.

The next spring, as I rototilled the garden, I saw a clump of familiar-looking “weeds.” I shut down the tiller and looked more closely. Tomatillo seedlings! And instead of being tall and gangly like those struggling under lights in my cellar, these were sturdy and healthy. Every year after that I welcomed the volunteers and never had to buy seeds again.