My grandparents have this little farm, 80 acres with another 80 on the back of it that belongs to my uncle. It used to be an active farm, growing whatever was the cash crop that year- soybeans, corn, even gladiolas at one point. Sod nowadays. But my grandparents have long since retired and their son Sonny had to cut back on his farming to work in the machine shop on the farm. They do tractor repairs, mostly, just welding together farm equipment that broke. Recently an old feller brought my grandpa a pump, and said, "It broke, and you should be able to fix it, because you welded it together for me in 1939!" That kind of shop.

However, my grandparents still run a little u-pick-we-pick garden on a couple of acres. They grow and sell onions, rutabagas, cabbage, potatos, gourds, broccoli, snap beans, turnips, tomatos, blackberries, butterbeans, peas, scuppernogs, squash, mayhaws, chestnuts, okra, pecans, cukes, field peas, kumquats, pole beans, persimmons, satsumas, figs, beets, corn, honey, and eggs. Of course, within any of those types of fruits and vegetables you have your individual breeds, such as Baldwin County Silver Queen corn or Cherry 1000 tomatoes. They are every bit as geeky about plants as I am about bikes.

They refuse to eat store-bought vegetables. Out-of-season foods are spoken of as if you couldn't just go down to the market and get some that were shipped in. If you'd ever had English Peas that were two hours old, you'd understand. I never thought peas could be toe-curlingly good. At one meal my grandpa said, "Them peas were picked just an hour ago, but the taters were dug before 9 AM, they're stale." He was joking, of course, but it reflects their mentality.

Butter beans are the most expensive produce, costing more than steak by the pound. Like the corn, we usually just end up eating most of them ourselves.

It's so exciting to be a part of this, as many of my ancestors up to my parents were, and see cucumbers starting to form, knowing that in a week or two there will be a bowl of iced vinegar filled with cuke slices at every meal. I'm not getting sick of onions and cabbage, like I thought I would. I shoulda come down for tomato season.

The onions this year look a little flat for their strain, though. Too many of them are coming up rotten, and some are purple. "I've never seen a 1049-A rot," my grandpa says, so they drove 300 miles with a handful of onions to show them to the breeder. Turns out there must have been a mixup with the seeds. On the way back, outside of Tallahasee, my grandma found some corn, no doubt trucked up from lower Florida. She eats so much corn that she's eaten her diabetes allotment "up to 2017".

I always perceived farming as the process of encouraging little planties to grow and live. It's not that way at all. Stuff grows so fast here in the subtropics that farming is a process of killing off whatever you don't want to grow. So many vicious weeds to hoe and trim. Killing and eating the chickens who aren't laying. Feeding the scraps to pigs who will be made into bacon. Farming, I've discovered, is about killing in order to live.