(W.Shakespeare, in Hamlet)
It was a revelation. A hot tip. Plant some seeds and grow a cherry pie. Stuff that heady dreams are made of. You, too, can grow cherry pie.
Out in the garden of our dreams this season, we were forced into playing a most diabolical game of "guess what" with a patch of unidentified but prolific and sprawling plants. "
"To be or not to be" was the real question.
They were purported to be ground cherries –real cherry pie stuff.--at least when we planted them .
The elegant fruiting pattern complete with huge, deceptively delicate paper lanterns with sticky green marbles inside them --and the huge 1" stems on the plants sprawling every-which-way made it difficult to decide which were what, which were not, which were ripe, and um....what on earth was it we planted anyway?
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| A heap of left-over Tomatillo-Ground-Cherry Wannabe's |
The dastardly Clever Seed Company complicated the E&S.P. ( exchange & switch plan) issue by answering our urgent email, saying we were indeed sent seeds for something called "Granny’s ground cherries" or some similar political-style misnomer.
A switch or replacement, said the clever seed company, was a non-starter in October, so we ended up with "Granny's ground cherries" , --"misnomered " or not.
In reality, anyone in Mexico with precise gardening acumen would know the plants are indeed tomatilloes, no matter which brand of seed -babble is flung about by feeble excuse-making purveyors of unidentifiable and non-switchable seeds.
Confusing? Not really, the plants are in fact related, reminding one of some obfuscated connection unlike the crystal-clear and easily-understood relationship between coconuts and muskoxen.
In spite of that clarification, it appears we ended up with the salsa-related, tomatillo-green-tomato-wannabee kind of seed instead of the sweet and delicious gold-coloured Cherry-Flavoured- Pie-Related ground-cherry kind of seeds we spotted in the catalog, ordered, paid for, waited for, dreamed of, and planted, watered, weeded and watched--- turn into something else.
Somehow we don't qualify for a refund from the C. D. S. C. (Clever Diabolical Seed Company) either. Something totally irrelevant-- about the seeds already having been planted, sprouted, grown and harvested already. I did not like that part much, the seed packet being $1.89 plus tax or not.
How diabolical was that anyway? Shocking and diabolic enough to prevent the making of cherry pie --or getting a refund, --and that's a pretty powerful pair of critical guidelines to cross, don't you think?
The said results attained were clearly "Outside of Any Reasonable Expectations for Cherry Pie". Maybe we'll include that ominous phrase in our next threatening legal-official-sounding email to the C.D.S.C. along with some other promising evil lawyer's tricks.
Believe it or not, legally, there is an obscure correlation between the following two subjects : Pie, and No Pie.
"What is it?" the dedicated Incoming Bytes reader may feel the need to ask, suddenly calmed by the lure and perplexity of an evil, faded Sudoku puzzle in last year’s “Fun Gardening Stuff ”mag.
The fact is that nothing excites the alert reader faster than the prospect of ground cherry seeds that produce tomatilloes. The one exception may be the allure of studying and compiling the scientific flung-dung excuses offered by clever seed companies which clearly result in the worst possible combination of results,-- no cherry pie, and no refund either.
As dedicated gardeners, do you think we should unite, raise funds for that project, and protest or something?
Not me. I'm too busy checking out the latest gardening hot tips.
Here’s the hottest and newest tomatillo-growing tip for you.
“ Plant "Granny's Ground Cherries” . No refunds allowed. “
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
