Well let’s see I was around twelve and figured it would be
fun to go over to the Krohn boys house (Blaine and HW) for the weekend so I
gave them a call to see if it was okay. With them and my family both on eight
party lines and it was hard to get through sometimes. So Blaine calls back and I ask what they up
to and is it okay for me to come over and spend the night. He says he is fairly sure it will be okay but
let him ask his parents and call me back.
He says we ain’t doing much just helping Daddy pick the spaghetti bushes. I said well I don’t know that I want to come
over to work digging up them taters last time was hard. He said spaghetti picking was not all that
hard.
So I get my Mom to drive me over and drop me off. So Blaine and HW come out to meet the car and
I said I figured y’all would be out in the field picking spaghetti. They said no we finished that up so we went
inside. After a while I got to thinking
that I wanted to see a spaghetti bush so I ask for them to show me one. They looked at me like they were kind of mad
and said we picked it all and it will just look like a tomato plant. So I stayed on them to see one and they said
they would show me tomorrow. So the
next day we go out to the field and about 20 feet off they point to some tomato
plants and say you can’t go any closer.
It does look like I can see some spaghetti growing on that plant and I
can see baby tomato’s also. They said
look we ain’t suppose to even show it to you.
Dad found out that we told you about them and got mad as hell as he said it was a family
secret he was not ready to share yet.
So years go on by and we all go to high school and I don’t
see as much of the Krohn boys as much as I did during the Woolmarket days but every
time I see Mr. WM Krohn I ask him about them spaghetti bushes. He just smiles and says we had a fairly good
crop this year. So I get out of high school and join the ARMY
for four years and then go to work at the VA Medical Center and start moving
from State to State. Every once in a
while me and my friends would be drinking a few beers and I would tell them
about those tomato and spaghetti bushes.
They would always look at me kind of strange like so that is where they
come from?
So back in 1999 I move from Richmond Virginia to Birmingham, Alabama and down visiting my father in Woolmarket. My father and I always had competitions on the gardens so I figured I would one up him and get me some tomsgetti seeds.
So
I go over while on vacation and start bugging Mr.Krohn's for some seeds. So he said he don’t grow them anymore as they
turned out to be more trouble than they were worth. I ask what the trouble was and he said it was
like this. The tomato’s never got big
cause they were in competition with the spaghetti growing at the same time and
the mixture plant looked too much like wacky tobacco. I said you talking Marijuana and he said yeah
that. He said it would start with the
cops and those DEA folks dropping by wanting to arrest him but they didn’t have
a regulation dealing with a plant that just looked like Marijuana but grew tomatos
and spaghetti. They ask him if he smoked
it and he said nope just picked the tomatos and spaghetti so they had to fire
off a letter to DC to find out how to handle it. Then he said just about the time it really
started putting on the spaghetti (four feet) them damn Hippies from Biloxi
would see it and cut it down at night to smoke.
He had to almost guard his garden which didn’t make it worth it.
So I said too bad as I always wanted to grow some and he
finally had mercy on me. He went back
into the house and came back with a packet of seed that looked somewhat like Squash and Okra seeds mixed. He said, I
have not planted any in years but here is a hand full they may work for you or
not good luck. So I planted them several
years up here in McCalla but just like he said, once they got up around 4 feet
tall the cops would be dropping by for a visit or the neighbors would be
looking over the fence pointing to them saying what you growing there? So I figured there had to be a better way so looked
around the yard and saw my muscadine plant and it all made sense to me. Since
spaghetti grows better in the winter months and the Muscadine’s are usually
gone by the end of August or early September there must be a way to cross the
two. And this took Years of trying folks
so we save this process and adventure till Part II.
Art Nalley
Rooster
Redneck Heritage Network @2013
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