Photos by Laura Lee Rose

Like our beloved Editor, choirs have been a part of my life. My family sang, and growing up we sang both kinds of music: sacred and irreligious. Harmony in families is well known. Mother, even in her nineties with dementia, would pick the part we weren’t singing. She and my sister, who majored in music therapy and is a retired soloist, had/have perfect pitch. My dad met my stepmom as members of the choir. My maternal grandparents were gardeners, and Big Dale certainly sang to her petunias.

We all loved summertime when Big Catherine (paternal grandmother) would go to the farmers market at the fairgrounds in Columbia and buy tomatoes, okra, butterbeans, and corn. At Sunday dinner those butterbeans were so good with sliced tomatoes, fresh peaches, and ice cream. In those days I would have rather walked the plank at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm than eat okra or cooked tomatoes. I’ve seen the Light, and now I love okra most any way you can cook it, but grilled is my favorite.

In the vegetable garden, beans and corn are good companion plants. They can also be used in crop rotation because corn uses lots of Nitrogen and beans (legumes) add Nitrogen to the soil by a bacterial association with their roots, which converts atmospheric N into a water- soluble and useable form. Okra and tomatoes cooked together are a perfect duet over rice or grits. Both are sun lovers, growing best in full sun, well drained soil with a pH around 6.5. Okra’s song is “Pick Me Every Day” because the pods are best small 2”-3”. There are also many varieties of tomatoes available at the market and in seed catalogues. They perform in a rainbow of colors, an assortment of shapes, textures, and a range of acidity.

Gardening is a form of orchestration – preparing the soil, assembling instruments and tools, ordering seeds, understanding which plants and herbs sing well together or which ones throw the others off key. Some plants are not good companions. Too much water, fertilizers, or mulch can be worse than not enough. Timing is essential. Luckily, we have planting, spacing, and harvesting charts. If music is a salve to cure our ills, then gardening is a close second. Music is a vibration in the brain, and we also resonate with the breezes, birds, and soil biota as gardeners.

Our Summertime choir has depth of flavor thanks to the accompaniment of basil, dill, oregano, peppers, and some salt sprinkled in. The songs and melodies can be solos, duets, trios, and quartets with names like “Corn Pie,” “Succotash,” and “Gumbo.” We are so fortunate to live in a time so many fruits and vegetables are to be had in supermarkets and farmers markets. Guy Clark wrote a song called “Homegrown Tomatoes.” The last line in the chorus is “Only two things in life money can’t buy. And that’s true love and homegrown tomatoes.”