I’m a farmer’s son – Pomeroon farmer, the late Joseph Francis Martins was my father – but the truth is I didn’t take much to planting as a youngster. However, the seed must have been planted somehow, or buried in my jeans, because I started out growing stuff shortly after I bought my first house in Willowdale, Ontario, in northern Toronto, after my first marriage to Dorothy Walker, a Canadian, and particularly after my first two children, Luana and Tony, came along.
Out of nowhere, it seems, Martins started planting, but right from the start in Guyana I wasn’t a flowers man (come to think of it my father was coffee; coconuts, shaddocks and oranges; I never saw him with a flower in his hand). Even when I lived at Vreed-en-Hoop, where the house had a big backyard, I didn’t plant a thing. In Toronto, however, on a fairly small house lot, after I put in the swimming pool, I had enough land left to grow strawberries and some sweet corn. I had this rule: if I can’t eat it, I don’t plant it, so no roses or carnations or other decorative stuff for me.
However, when I moved to Cayman in 1980, during my second marriage, to Caymanian Angela, the planting turned serious. Part of it, of course, was no more Canadian winter, but on top of that I had managed to buy, from a lady I knew respectfully as Miss Doris, almost three acres of land in the eastern part of the island, an area called Northward, known for its lovely gardens and fruit trees. The property had a few big trees on it (one was a locust, known to Guyanese as stinking-toe, the only one on the island), and there were two towering trees, local mangoes (not the best mango in the world, but look, mango is mango, yeah?). The area had been a cow pasture originally (it even had a well on it providing fresh water for livestock) but cattle wasn’t my thing; somehow, however, the Pomeroon genes kicked in big time as I got a local tractor man to clear the bush (with strict orders to leave the locust and mango trees alone) and then I hired a jovial backhoe dude, who dug me some holes in the red ‘mole’ for fruit trees. Here, too, notice I was planting only what I could nyam – star apple, guava, coconuts, passion fruit, sapodilla, ackee (I brought in young plants from Jamaica), breadnut (I brought seeds from Guyana and had the only breadnut tree on the island), and carambola (Guyanese call it five-finger from its shape), and what Guyanese know as Golden Apple, Trinis call Pommecythere, and Jamaicans know as June Plum. Also, naturally, I planted mangoes. I had eight different varieties (grown from seedlings brought in from Miami): Julie, East Indian, Nam Doc Mai, Bombay, Tommy Atkins, Keitt, and, my favourite, Southern Blush.
So, I was eating mangoes from March to September and even selling some produce to the Farmer’s Market in town. Of course, I wasn’t really a farmer – it was a sideline for me, as was doing woodwork for the house – but Cayman is a great place to grow stuff. The red mole soil on the island is very fertile, there are not many insects attacking your plants, and the Farmer’s Market is a ready-made outlet for your excess produce. The ackee tree I had behind the house bore fruit like crazy; I often picked a wheelbarrow full. I made enough money selling it to cover my fertilizer bill for all the fruit trees year round. The only drawback to planting was that the island has no rivers or lakes and you usually get a long dry spell from November through March, but I had a freshwater well on my property and also piped water from the city George Town, so I was off and running.
In very short order, I was hooked. Part of it may have been the genes, but I had become truly fascinated by this amazing cycle of plants bearing delicious fruits and vegetables and it still amazes me to this day – the almost magical process of plants growing with very little attention from me (okay, pruning a full-grown mango tree can be a pretty taxing process, as is picking ripe breadfruit in a tree known for its brittle limbs that can tumble your backside to the ground below with no warning) but basically the tree does most of its stuff without you.
To this day, I remain amazed by how magical things growing are. You see a coconut tree, nuts 50 feet in the air, and everything up there comes up that trunk from the mud, way below, and water, and ends up at the top into these perfectly formed fruits, every one the same. How the hell is that happening? It’s truly magical. Even grass growing, unbelievable, but there it is, on its own, nobody tending it. Look around you, the next time you’re inside or near to a forest, could be in Canada, or Trinidad, or here, scores of trees, every one of them growing dead straight, at a perfect right angle to the ground, with no attention of any kind from mankind. You never see one of them leaning or growing crooked; everybody 90 degrees to the earth. How is that? Similarly, with the corn I used to grow in Canada; every ear of corn you tear open there you have these perfectly shaped corn kernels, all the same size and colour, each one an exact replica of the other. It leaves me gaping; how to explain all this perfection. Nobody tended it or shaped it. I know the spiritual explanation, but it still blows me away, to see 200 mangoes on my Nam Doc Mai tree in Oleander Gardens, some bigger than others, but all of them with exactly the same colour, shape, texture and taste. I’ve seen this miracle all my life – first in the Pomeroon, then in Ontario, same thing in Cayman, and now here in East Demerara – and the precision of it still hits me and leaves me feeling moved to be seeing that miracle happening over and over again, with me supplying some water occasionally, and maybe some fertilizer, but basically just looking on as the process unfolds on its own, and then reaping the harvest.
Just last week: where I live in Oleander Gardens, an apartment building is going up on the adjacent property. From where I was reclining downstairs in the hammock, I can look across at the new building and see its pillars, a perfect 90 degrees to the ground – exactly the same angle as the ackee tree I planted on my side eight years ago. I saw the workers with their spirit-levels making the wooden forms to create the concrete pillars, but when I planted the ackee tree a spirit-level was nowhere in sight; all I did was put the seedling in the ground and water it and somehow it ended up dead vertical just like the concrete post. How did that happen? Amazing.
As I type that word, I know that somebody is going to educate me, in a post or in person, using some choice language, perhaps, concerning the spiritual processes at work there. Thanks, but don’t waste your time. I sort of sense the explanation already. No debate there. At the same time, I just looked at my ackee tree and I still find it amazing; no debate there either.
