A Weird Hillbilly's Garden

[Ninurta]

Nicotiana rustica tobacco, like most domesticated plants, has different varieties or cultivars. That's because each tribe or culture area developed their own brand of it over time, in isolation from other tribes and culture areas. So mutations and morpholigical changes accumulated over time until what they had was a different variety from what other folks had.

That's different than the difference between nicotiana rustica and nicotiana tabacum, or "Virginia tobacco", which are actually different species.

So the first tobacco I planted this year was Midewiwin, named for the Midewiwin Society of the Great Lakes Algonquian tribes - Ojibwe, Miami, Shawnee, Delaware, etc. from Michigan, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. I've got about 4 grams of those seeds, about 10,000 seeds or thereabouts.

While I was seed shopping, I ran across another variety called "1000 Year Old Tobacco". The story on the internet is that it came from plants grown from ancient seeds found in a clay pot in an archaeological dig. Try as I might, I could find no confirmation of that tale, but it's a nice story. There just isn't any confirmation in any of the science literature I could find that confirmed the story, so it's an apocryphal tale, an internet story, and nothing more. Just a good story to sell seeds.

The description of the plant, however, matched exactly the description of Cherokee Sacred Tobacco, the tobacco grown and used by the Cherokees, an Iroquioan tribe of western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee. It's a shorter plant than the Midewiwin, with slightly smaller leaves of a little different shape from the leaves of the Midewiwin, more round and blunt. So I'm going on the theory that it's really Cherokee Sacred Tobacco that has just been rebranded for sales purposes, unless I can ever find confirmation otherwise.

Both types have trumpet shaped greenish yellow blooms, common to all varieties of rustica, and distinct from Virginia tobacco, which usually has pink blossoms.

So I seeded 12 of the remaining 24 peat plugs with that tobacco at around 5:30 this afternoon. I only got a gram of those seeds, so around 2500 seeds. The way I sew tobacco is to dump a small pile of seeds onto a white piece of paper so I can see them, moisten a finger and poke it into the pile. Some of the seeds stick to the finger, and then I hold it over the peat plug and rub a thumb on the fingertip to drop the seeds onto the peat plug. That's why the tobacco seeds are randomly distributed on the plugs. It's not an exact science. Then, when I'm finished, I fold the paper and dump the remaining seeds back into the seed packet.

Then I mist the top of the peat to wet the seeds. You have to mist them rather than spray or pour water on, because the seeds are so tiny you run the risk of washing them right off of the peat plugs.

This is one of the seeded peat plugs. see if you can pick out the seeds - they're almost the same color as the peat :



This is the Midewiwin seedlings today, day 5 since I seeded the peat:



And, as a bonus, I think this might be a sprouting poppy:



The poppy seeds and tobacco seeds are just about the same size, so tiny. I can't be sure it's a poppy, since those are sewn in the Great Outdoors, and it could equally be a sprout for a wind blown seed of any of the 130 or so different kinds of weeds growing in this immediate area. Only time will tell, I reckon. Or maybe not. We're supposed to get more snow at the end of the week, and that might very well kill it off.

Or it might not.

Only time will tell.

ETA: And the Easter Lillies are already blooming:



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