FATHER DECIDED THAT WE SHOULD GROW OUR OWN TOBACCO

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 302, 17 September 1936, Page 7

FATHER DECIDED THAT WE SHOULD GROW OUR OWN TOBACCO

By

O.M.H.

“Tobacco,” said my husband, “is an expensive luxury,” with whiA deep utterance he seated himself preparatory to holding forth at length on the subject.

There are times when the proverbial canniness of the Jew from Aberdeen is as nothing compared with my husband’s. .During my married life most thinugs have, at some time, come under the verbal (but merely verbal) ban of luxuries—but tobacco, surely the very last thing to be regarded as a luxury! Often have I been told to be careful about ordering undue quantities of such definite luxuries as flour, tea, coffee, sugar, but never before had tobacco been regarded as anything else than an absolute, undoubted necessity. What, in the face of such a definite devastating statement as that, could one do but sit and listen?

Fixing me with an impressive eye, he continued:' “Here in- this district we have one of the finest climates in a land of wonderful climates, combined with a. soil , which will literally grow anything.” (There have been many occasions when I have heard him refer to both climate and soil in very much less eulogistic terms.) “There seems to me," he went on, “no reason on earth why we should not grow our own tobacco.” Instantly understanding came to me. I am not addicted to smoking nowadays, so the “we” could only mean one thing. I was do the growing and all the odd jobs while the other half of the “we” would, all being well,” later smoke “our” tobacco. One learns much in 16 years of married life.

At this juncture my husband, by one of those disconcerting Jack-in-the-box movements men affect at such moments of stress, produced a tin box. "Here in this tin,” he continued, “is a quantity of good acclimatised tobacco seed. Old Jack Smith gave it to me. He has grown and smoked his own tobacco for years, and it’s great stuff. Smells just like Havana cigars.” This last I knew was sheer exaggeration. A friend had recently attended a concert and been nearly choked to death, or suffocated or something, by the fumes from the pipe of what she thought was a Maori on the back seat smoking “torore.” It turned out to be our friend and neighbour, Mr. John Smith, smoking his famous home-grown tobacco with the scent of Havana cigars. All I can say is that if the natives of Havana smoke their own cigars I’d hate to live there. In addition to the seed, my enterprising husband had secured complete written instructions from the same source. Apparently all I had to do in order to produce this wonderfully aromatic tobacco was to follow the book of words and all would be well. Even my jaded enthusiasm was by tjiis time

fully aroused, and I saw myself in headlines in my mind’s eye as the “millionaire tobacco planter who started this great industry in a kitchen garden.” In an extra, expansive moment I even wrote to my brother-in-law offering him some when the crop had been duly grown, harvested and cured. He wisely refrained from replying. Family ruptures have been caused by less.

Step one, I discovered, was the plant-, ing of the seed in a “prepared” bed of 1 rich loam, further enriched by woodash. So on the first suitable day I dug and weeded, hoed and raked the site of the proposed seed-bed. Then I gathered armfuls of wattle twigs and heaped thtem in a neat little bonfire on top of the bed, which, when duly burned, had the required effect of leaving wood-ash, which once more I raked. Spreading a newspaper on the kitchen table, I mixed my seed thereon with fine sand, which I then sprinkled over my seed bed. In an excess of zeal I covered this over with wdre-netting to keep birds off. The newspaper I shook over my flower garden to get rid of such seed that had lodged in the folds and crevices.

Weeks passed and no seedlings appeared until, finally, even my optimistic husband lost heart Then one day I was weeding my flowdr garden whilst a Maori girl leaned over the fence and talked to me. Selecting an aggressively healthy looking “weed,” I said, “Look, this is a queer weed. I’ve never seen it before.” The Maori girl said, with amazement, "Why, that’s tobacco, and you’ve lots more of it.” And, sure enough, all my seeds in the newspaper must have germinated and produced really healthy little seedlings. The family barometer went up again and I proceeded to plant out my tobacco plants in the kitchen garden, where they made history by outgrowing even the fastest of my usual crops of weeds. It seemed no time before the leaves were ready to harvest arid dry. ' I spent many weary hours getting these leaves to the right stage, but eventually my husband nodded complacently and said they were ready to cure.

Instructions were once again consulted and I found myself boiling a most evil concoction of licorice and rum and various other equally strongsmelling ingredients with which, when cold, I had to spray the leaf. A particularly nasty sticky job. This, how? ever, completed my share of the to-bacco-making process. My husband had evolved a really ingenious press, which, when used in conjunction with a vice, made a very good job of the pressing. The plugs, when finished were a lovely dark brown, and looked, at any rate, like the real thing, although, even to my nose! definitely prejudiced in its favour, there wasn’t altogether the aroma of Havana cigars. However, I hadn’t to smoke it, so why worry over such small details? Eventually the plugs were pronounced dry enough to smoke, so my husband thoughtfully betook himself to the shed to try it out. As he carefully pared a plug into shavings ready for his pipe, he held forth at length on the economy of making one’s own tobacco and (to him, of course), the

small amount of labour involved, “Growing it ourselves, as we have done," he paid, “we could sell it at a profit at 1/- a lb. Next year we’ll go in for cigarette tobacco as well." With which remark he lit bis pipe. His triumph was short-lived. Alas for the perfumes of Havana! Never did I smell such tobacco. I have heard the American expression of “Out Burbanking Burbank,” but in this case I really think we’d out-Smithed Smith. Never did torore smell like that! The head of the house had to admit that, as an experiment,-our tobacco-making was a

ghastly failure, but characteristically he blamed the curing, which really meant the person who did the curing, although he was too polite to say so. I did discover afterward that actually in error, I had been told to use double the amount of licorice necessary. That may, in small part, account for it, but I am too old in the head to suggest we should try tobaccomaking again. So, once more, tobacco is a necessity, and figures in our household accounts as such. Did anyone ever dare to suggest it was a luxury?