Page 36 of Finding Basil
“Didn’t Basil tell ya? I’m your farmhand today. Brought a lot of good seeds with me, gonna have to charge you for ‘em, but I’m not those super stores. I won’t charge an arm and a leg.”
She made her way into the kitchen to scowl more at the new fixtures. “Too damn fancy for these parts.”
“I wasn’t as concerned with fancy as much as the fact that water would come out of them.”
“Right. Your troubles. You have any more of ‘em?”
After she sat at the kitchen table, she said, “I take ‘em over easy, not medium and not hard. I can’t stand an overcooked egg.”
He took it; he was making her breakfast. “Okay, um, sure. Let me get started on that.”
He got out a skillet and set it on the stove, turning it onto medium high before getting out the oil, the carton of eggs and the salt and pepper. “Do you take milk in your coffee?”
“No, just three sugars.”
“Three. Okay, great.”
He started the pot of coffee brewing then poured oil in the hopt skillet.
When he opened what he thought was a brand-new carton of eggs, however, he saw there were four missing. He knew he didn’t use them because the shells would have still been in the carton. “Weird.”
“Weird eggs? What, they got chickens hatching?”
“No, no, it’s just…” He thought about it, and knew he couldn’t prove anything so he said, “Just thought I had more.”
“Getting old man’s brain at your age? Doesn’t bode well for your golden years.”
The juice, too, had been brand-new, but it was open and a third was gone.
Maybe he was losing his mind.
After he made them a breakfast of eggs, toast and applesauce, Lila had him trek out to her truck, where she had boxes and boxes of metal cans with lids that fit over the top. Each one had a neat label on the lid, displaying what seeds were kept inside the canisters.
“Heft that first one back to the greenhouse.”
He did, finding a box of seeds surprisingly heavy. She brought in a box behind him and they both left to get the last two. Basil came while she was showing him the seeds, and he slipped in, quietly watching.
“You don’t want those GMO, lab crap. Heirloom seeds, always use them. You don’t know what the hell they did to the others. Supposedly just pest and disease resistant, my fanny. They can track those seeds! Every last one of them. If a plant gets into your crop from one of their seeds, they can take your whole farm, so you just be extra careful. They do it on purpose too, let their crops go to seed, just to let a few fly into your field.”
He almost laughed at her conspiracy theory, but saw Basil’s face, serious and nodding along with her. Herb asked him, “Is she right?”
“Look it up. They have the DNA mapped for each and every plant they sell seed for, and they will sue you to oblivion.”
“Jesus.”
“So, these, and those that Basil has, all Heirloom. Right from our own plants. We, here in Foggy Basin and the surrounding county, we share our seeds and harvest our own too. We keep our lines going. If Basil, here, makes a hybrid, he patents it and it’s his. That’s the only modified seeds we use.”
He was happily surprised. “You make your own hybrids?”
“Sure. I’ve been playing around with it since I was a kid. Better yields for some, and others, better drought tolerance. Whatever I can do. I did make a few stinkers.”
“Trial and error, but the guy was made for this. He’s good, and we always worry we’ll lose him to one of those big companies.”
“Not a chance. I could never do what they do. Driving real farmers out of business and doing those big factory farms.”
Lila spat, “Warding off bugs and such just to taste like nothing. Ever take a tomato grown from the ground, picked when it was ripe?”
“No, ma’am.”
