Inside Looking In: Landscaping in a Target-Rich Environment

Kudzu. When I moved here, I was disturbed at the sight of roadside trees taken over by the stuff. It's simply everywhere, and once it gets a foothold it can't be stopped. Supposedly, it's edible - but if demon flesh were edible, I wouldn't want to eat that either, for many of the same reasons.


This is Jeremy again, guest-posting and giving a little perspective. Kudzu seems so ubiquitous that I think you all need an outsider's point of view to really understand the thing you all seem happy enough to live with. When I tell people that I'm trying to get rid of the kudzu patch next to our house, they tell me with all the saged wisdom of the Oracle of Delphi that it simply can't be done. And I tend to agree, in the end: it grows by about a foot and a half hourly, so any progress you make is, ultimately, temporary at best.

Target-rich environment (n): when you can't swing a cat without hitting something that needs to die

Kudzu. It's mentioned several times as a force of unstoppable evil in the book Monster Hunter International (which I just finished, and recommend to anyone not put-off by the title). The author equates it with zombies and ghouls, except that the zombies and ghouls can be killed.


It's an incredible vine, from a neutral perspective. It grows aggressively, and its vines are strong. You can dry them and weave it into wicker baskets. Let it grow a week and you can weave an entire house, and all the furniture to go inside it. Not for nothing is it called "the vine that ate the South". To locals, it's a force of nature, just like ice in winter and storms in spring. Kudzu rules the summer, and to most people, you're better off just accepting that.


I haven't lived here long enough to give up, though. Ever since we bought our house two summers ago, I've been waging holy war against the unholy vine. The first front of attack was the lawnmower: over a couple months that first summer, I reclaimed about 30 square feet of yard space. No small accomplishment, if you ask me. I celebrated a little bit the first time I located the home root of a large vine complex (the cursed thing sprouts new roots along its length, but there's surely benefit to uprooting the original). Digging the root up was almost enough to make me give up entirely. The root is ten times stronger than the vine, and it went at least three feet deep into the ground.


Over the winter I went a little farther, pulling trailing vines out of the trees, but in the end that made no discernible difference at all. Still, by spring I had pushed it back far enough that Katie was able to spy the blossoms of a pear tree somewhere in the interior. I had my goal.


All last summer I worked my way to that tree, and by August I had it mostly uncovered. Unfortunately, there were living vines in the treetop itself; I despaired of ever rescuing it. By autumn, though, I had the nearby ground mostly cleared of kudzu. This spring, my goal has been to (1) kill and cut down any vines reaching the tree from the ground or other plants; and (2) kill and cut down the nearby growth so as to better display the lovely pear tree to our neighbors and prevent any new vines from making the leap across the gap.


To this end, I bought some nicer gardening tools this spring. The chief among these was a hedge trimmer, quite handy for snipping overhead vines and, as I found out, very useful for making my way through the curtains of kudzu between myself and the trunks of the bush/tree things I need to cut down. That's how I spent most of this afternoon: cutting away small growth with the hedge trimmers, then taking out the source with a fireman's axe (which was a gift not for gardening but zombie preparedness - but it's doing double-duty).


Today, the kudzu patch is smaller than ever, but it hasn't yet begun its true summer growth. Just a few early explorers, to see if the coast is clear (it isn't). But this victory has not been without cost: my nice hedge trimmers broke an important rivet on their way through the thick kudzu, and now they no longer work (and I can't seem to replace it with a bolt, it needs a very low-profile head). If I don't manage to fix it or find a replacement soon, there's no telling what kind of progress the Kudzu will make. 


I don't doubt for a minute that this is the very chance it's been waiting for: tonight, the invasion will begin in earnest. I am not dismayed. Tomorrow, I spray the whole area down with a strong dose of herbicide. Even if all I have left is a handheld shovel and a dull knife to hold dramatically in my teeth, I'll never stop hating and trying to kill kudzu. Unfortunately, even if I had a flamethrower and an industrual chainsaw, I'd never be able to stop kudzu from hating and trying to kill me.

Inside Looking In: The Universal Element

Katie's Note: Another guest post from my man. Here he offers an explanation of his compulsion to make fire. Enjoy!

“And I am he that searched out the source of fire, by stealth borne-off inclosed in a fennel-rod, which has shown itself a teacher of every art to mortals, and a great resource.”

I come from a different place, and now I live here; that's part of my identity. But I am a man, and I make fire. It’s something I have to do. Fire is both a force of nature and a fundamental element of society. Ancient man first began to form civilizations around the idea of fire. Fire was difficult to move and harder to start, so some people stayed home to tend it while others foraged and hunted. Then we made beer, and things pretty much progressed the way you’d expect from that point.



Every single culture on Earth uses fire to cook. Grilling, in one form or another, is the true universal common ground. If aliens ever visit Earth, chances are good that if they come from an atmosphere somewhat similar to ours they also will know about grilling. 

So this Inside Looking In post isn’t so much about the differences between the South and the non-Yankee area I come from that is technically further north than here (Jefferson State - I won’t say “Californian” because it’s terribly misleading, and the idea of secession gives me some local credibility). I’d rather talk about this one thing we have in common - fire. Specifically, today, we'll talk about fire in two aspects - one of cooking, one of eating. This can be easily accomplished with the use of hot sauce and chicken wings.

You can’t just go with the off-the-shelf wings sauce; you gotta mix your own. Here’s what I use

Inside Looking In: "What's a grit?"

More than any other region in America, the South has a distinct flavor. That's not news to anyone, I suppose, but to an outsider, the unique ingredients can seem pretty exotic, maybe even confusing. Everyone is familiar with fried chicken, but pairing chicken with waffles is not as wide-spread, even if it is delicious. "Chitlins" are famous, but outsiders tend to focus more on the source more than the product, which makes them a kind of unfortunate ambassador of Southern food - and they're not nearly as common as people seem to think.

One of the more enigmatic food items, virtually unknown outside the Southern states, is (are?) grits. A person of northern persuasion might ask, "What's a grit?" To be honest, I don't know myself, and I've lived here for years now.

Grits are measured in estimates. This is one "mess" of grits.

Inside Looking In - The Glorious Bounty of the Swamp

I interrupt your regularly scheduled food blog to bring you this special guest announcement:
Good food comes from many places. Swamps are most definitely one of them.

I'm Jeremy; Katie asked me to weigh in on here. Offer an outsider's perspective, so to speak. I was born in Oregon, but raised in northern California - not any part you've heard of, I'm sure. My whole life, until a few years ago, was lived in an area that ought to be Jefferson State. It's a great place with a culinary history of its own (so to speak), but the call of the South reached me even there.

Long, romantic story short, here I am, and I couldn't be happier. Southern food suits my stomach nicely. There are 700 ways to cook a pig, and I haven't had one I didn't like. But that's a topic for another day - really, the pig is a topic for either a doctoral thesis or a religious cult, more than there's time for now.

No, today I want to talk about all the good things that come a dirty place. Swamp food.

Eat me, will you? We'll see who has the last laugh.