What they were was Coonties. For what its worth, they are Cycads. How that's different from a palm is beyond me but they are one of a few plants that look good planted around a house that actually want to grow in North Florida. I was no stranger to Coonties. I had seen them in a couple of North Florida graveyards and at some old houses where old relatives lived when I was very young. My Grandfather put them by his Father's headstone and then put them at the corners of my Grandmother's family plot where he would, one day, rest next to her.
Coonties were a popular plant a long time ago because they look good and, like I said, they want to grow in North Florida. They are making a come back of sorts now that everybody has decided to stop trying to force plants that have no business being in Florida to grow here. They like poor, sandy soil. They Don't really mind drought and can survive occasional flooding. They thrive in the filtered, shady sunlight of an upland hammock but can also do well in the sun. Heat? Turn it up. Cold? Florida can't get cold enough to hurt one. Old folks would plant them near the corners of their houses. When my brother and I went to see what was left of the old settlement on Atsena Oatie Key, it was coonties that told us where the houses were before the big hurricane washed most everybody away. We noticed big clumps of coonties and found piles of bricks next to them. Those were the piers that the houses were built on. We also found the brick outline of a fireplace. We stood amongst the coonties where someone had built their living room back in the 1870s. Had we not known their significance, we would have just walked on by.
It wasn't but a couple of months after getting the $100 each speech, that the Lovely Bride and I happened to be at a place called The Hand Me Down Nursery, looking for azaleas. The Hand Me Down Nursery was a kind of a strange place. It was situated in the middle of a residential subdivision but had been there a lot longer than the subdivision so it was grandfathered in. You'd drive through the gate and wait in the car while the dogs barked at you. Pretty soon, a little old lady that looked about like Granny Clampett's older sister would come out and ask what you were looking for. The dogs would calm down and you'd have free run of the place.
We went there looking for azaleas but it turned out to be coontie potting day. Granny's family was working in a potting shed splitting up coonties. Hundreds and hundreds of 'em. They were big enough that I recognized what they were so I asked her the price. The small ones were two dollars and fifty cents each and they went up from there all the way to twelve dollars for a nice big one. Her small ones were bigger than the $100 ones the lawyer's coontie-expert wife had bought on line. I forgot about the azaleas and bought half a dozen medium ones. Several years later, we went back and Granny was gone. Her daughter was selling off the last of the stock and we got ten big ones for five bucks each.
The thing about coonties is that they look like a cross between a sabal palm and a fern and they have seeds. Big, bright orange seeds that look like giant kernels of corn. The seeds grow on a cone at the base of the plant and start to fall off along about May. Then they do everything they can to avoid germinating. If the big orange corn kernel doesn't attract a certain kind of beetle to eat the outside away, it shrivels up into a hard shell. I have been told that they only germinate after forest fires once that happens. I tried throwing a handful into a pile of burning pine straw and it didn't work. I have read that nurseries will use acid to eat the coating away from the seed. Its well-adapted to living in a place that wants to kill everything like Florida does.
So, last May, here I was with coonties growing in two different places in the yard, hundreds of fresh, bright orange coontie seeds and the idea that there had to be a way to make the danged seeds grow. I found some info in the internet and eventually stumbled onto a site called the Cycad Jungle. That fellow knows more about coonties than just about anybody and he uses an enzyme to remove the shell. I called him to get some enzyme and he said to just soak them in water for a couple of days and peel the orange off with a paring knife unless I had ten thousand or so to do. Well dang. It took a couple of hours to peel the orange off fifty seeds but I got it done and I planted them in some sandy soil that I shoveled into one of those cheap, plastic pans that they sell for mixing small batches of concrete. I fastened a piece of hardware cloth over it to keep squirrels out and waited.
Nothing happened except that I grew one hell of a crop of weeds. The Cycad Jungle guy had said that it would take two or three months for them to germinate so I didn't worry when we passed the two month mark. Three months came and went and I just had bigger weeds. The Lovely Bride wanted me to dump the whole thing in the yard and try again next year. I checked it every couple of days for any sign of coontie life and there was just nothing until last Friday. I looked at the pile of weeds and there was familiar frond sticking up through the hardware cloth. I got down closer to it and saw more. I started cutting and pulling weeds so I could get the hardware cloth off the pan and see what I had and found fourteen little coontie seedlings.
Fourteen out of fifty isn't the greatest yield but it beats letting the seeds sit around forever. Come next May, I'll be at a couple of cemeteries not that far from the Suwannee River. Besides a fist full of plastic flowers from the Dollar General, I'll have a couple of paper sacks for coontie seeds. I will grow coonties from seeds off the ones my Grandfather planted seventy five years ago. We will be connected .
No comments:
Post a Comment