It's A Dream Come True

Ya know, so many years ago, as a wee little girl, I had a dream. A dream more beautiful than any princess dare hope. A dream fancier than any dress that could be made. A dream more brilliant than any diamond that could be found. A dream... snif snif- starting to get choked up here... to ride on a rusty old tractor. A dream to dig in the dirt until my fingernails were so caked with mud that I wouldn't be able to get them clean. A dream to sling mucky plants until my clothes were soggy and wet. A dream.... deep breath in followed by a long, dreamy sigh... to be a tobacco farmer.
The past few years I have only been the 'wife' of a tobacco farmer. But this year, due to a contractual policy change at Phi11ip Morris ... sniffle. snort. Anyone have a tissue... I have my very own contract. I. Am. A. Tobacco. Farmer!

Note: please take a moment to get a rag to wipe the dripping sarcasm off your computer screen. I'll wait....

Ah, yes. Tobacco season is in full swing. For those of you who know nothing of Tobacco farming... much like me. But I am learning... I'll give you a brief run down of the process.

Early April- take little teeny tiny green seeds and drop them into a styrofoam try with lots of little individual cells.... not each seed individually. We have this shaker thing that drops around 250 seeds at once... After the trays are "seeded", they are set in "water beds" for about 8 weeks. They sprout up and once they reach a certain size, they are ready to be planted

Early June- After the fields are prepared for planting, the tractor is hooked up to the "setter". There are many kinds of setters. Ours is a 4-seater. It takes two people to set a row which means we can set two rows with our 4-seater setter... that sentence sounds like something out of Dr Seuss... It takes 8000 plants to set 1 acre... it's a good thing I didn't try and keep count of how many plants I set...

September-ish- There is some maintenance during the growing season but not much. By September the plants are ready to be cut and speared onto sticks that have been dropped in the field. There is usually 6 to 8 plants on a stick. They stay in the field until they dry a bit. Then they are "hung" in barns to dry out even more.

December- The sticks are taken down and the leaves pulled from the stalks in a process called "stripping". The leaves are put into 4 different grades then sold to tobacco company. The top, deep red leaves are expensive cigarettes. The middle leaves are just that- middle of the line ash-flickers. The bottom, light brown leaves are the cheap, discount smokes.... the tobacco is sold just in time to buy Christmas presents. Yay!

Wow, this was not supposed to be an informative post but it just kinda wrote itself. I was going to write about what it's like to "set" the plants. But if your like me, and know next to nothing about tobacco, it might be good to have some basic knowledge of what goes into raising tobacco before reading about the "setting" process. I'll save that post for tomorrow.

P.S. Just in case any of you ever find yourself "hanging" or "stripping" tobacco, pay close attention to not get any in your eyes. Burns like you would not believe.