A Gardener's Thoughts on GEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER

I’ve always had a thing for George Washington Carver, ever since I did a report on him in the third grade and discovered a kindred spirit – or at least a man who knew what was important in life.

(Photo by Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1906. U.S. Library of Congress)

I mean I was nuts about peanuts and I loved sweet potatoes. George – who talked to plants and grew up to be director of agriculture at the Tuskegee Institute – knew a thing or two about some of my favorite foods.

He invented peanut butter – that would have been enough – as well as developing more than 300 other products from the lowly legume including ink, soap, facial cream and shampoo. On top of all that he also came up with more than 100 products from sweet potatoes and another 60 from pecans.

But it wasn’t until I became a gardener that I really grew to appreciate the man who actually turned down a $100,000-a-year salary – about a million dollars by today’s count – to work for Thomas Edison. George Washington Carver almost single-handedly saved agriculture in The Land of Cotton with his revolutionary method of crop rotation.

It was a simple idea that he actually convinced southern farmers to embrace – give soil depleted by nutrient-guzzling cotton a break by growing nitrogen-producing peanuts that restored the earth.

His method worked so well that before long Dixie was drowning in peanuts. So Carver went back in his lab at Tuskegee and his got-lemons-make-lemonade approach to life gave the world peanut butter -- and linoleum.

And then he discovered that sweet potatoes and pecans could also enrich the soil. So he found ways to turn them into synthetic rubber and postage stamp glue. When he started his research, the peanut wasn't even considered a crop. But he lived long enough to see it give king cotton a run for its money, becoming the Number Two cash crop in the South by 1940.

George Washington Carver -- a slave's son who preached soil conservation and crop rotation and counted Henry Ford, Gandhi, The Crown Prince of Sweden and Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Delano Roosevelt as friends -- died on January 5, 1943 at the age of 78.

And so, I’ll sit down today with the seed catalogs that have been flooding my mailbox and plot out my vegetable garden. I’ll be sure to make plenty of room for my own favorite legumes – peas and beans and edamame – and I’ll remember to rotate my crops so my soil doesn’t wear out.

And then I’ll eat a peanut butter sandwich in George Washington Carver’s honor.

AND THE WINNERS ARE . . .

Thanks to everyone who entered my "Unplug the Holidays" contest this year. Here are my winners:

First Prize to Leeann Lavin of New Jersey,

who tweaked the holiday color scheme with lime green hypericum berries nestled among rich red roses and carnations.

Leeann also hung her stockings on the arms of silver plant cups filled with roses, carnations and seeded eucalyptus.

But she forgot to take pictures of the table designs she created with kumquats, Peruvian lilies and more hypericum berries surrounded with angel beeswax candles. I would have loved to have seen those.

And the outdoor displays Leeann designed from evergreens, birch branches and pine cones gathered from her yard were buried beneath the snow. You can't get any more natural than that.

Second Prize to Karen Siddiqi of Georgia,who wrote me this lovely note:

I'd like to enter my lampwork glass Christmas ornaments to the "Unplug the Holidays" contest. These really are "unplugged' in the sense that they were made using glass and fire. I'm still a beginner but I'll admit these made me smile not just because I managed to create something with fairly precise detail out of ooey gooey molten glass, but also because they marked the start of the Christmas season for me this year.

I was charmed by the decorations and decided that they not only qualified, but deserved a prize. I checked out Karen's blog, This Little Life of Mine, and found this entry about her handiwork:

"Yesterday, I had a late night inspiration for some ornaments and made these beads. I still have to get the ornament hangers to put on them, but I think they turned out pretty well. They're small -- maybe an inch and a half tall, but they're cute if I do say so myself! I think I'll try to make some today that are a smidge bigger, but I'm not sure if I can accomplish that in my unheated basement with a hothead torch (kind of a beginner's torch...my new one is on order!):"

And now that it's officially 2010, here's to a neater, greener new year.