Buy regular pepper plant sprouts early in the spring.
Green, yellow, red.
Buy a bunch of tomato plants, too.
Roma, cherry, Big Boy.
Plant the pepper plants very close to the tomato plants.
A few inches, a foot at most.
Wait.
The tomato plants will grow large and bushy.
They will hog the light, forcing the pepper plants to cower and cringe.
The resulting peppers will be undernourished, puny, shrunken.
We haven't picked any yet, so we don't know if they will be all the sweeter for having suffered so, or bitter. But they are kind of cute.
---
Here is one of Brautigan's earliest published poems, from the series printed on seed packets and bound together as "Please Plant This Book."
Shasta Daisy
I pray that in thirty-two years
passing that flowers and vegetables
will water the Twenty-First Cent-
ury with their voices telling that
they were once a book turned by
loving hands into life.
I love the conversational style. And the parallels to Brautigan are not lost on me.
ReplyDeleteCracking stuff, I'll be back.
So far, I think Kabuki Circus is the best thing I've read all year.
It's light and heavy at the same time.
Thank you.