The Heirloom Tobacco Garden

Book excerpt: If you only want to grow ornamental varieties of tobacco with huge showy leaves and dramatic sprays of colorful flowers as landscape plants around the house, or as container specimens for casual conversation around the barbeque, you won't need this book. The tobacco plant is as easy to grow as tomatoes or green peppers. Once it gets started, it grows with very basic care and attention. If you are not a tobacco smoker, or do not use any tobacco products, this book is not for you. However, if you are a tobacco smoker, or use other tobacco products, if you want to know how to grow natural tobacco and harvest it in such a way that it produces fine high quality tobacco leaf, and if you want to know how to dry and cure it properly for smoking or other uses, then this book is for you! If you don't smoke or otherwise use tobacco products, the joys of heirloom tobacco gardening need not be a reason for you to start. It is for those of us already bound to this deadly plant of the nightshade family to take responsibility for its cultivation. The home tobacco gardener joins ranks with a long diverse history of growers from ancient tobacco shamans to contemporary rural tobacco farmers. The heirloom tobacco garden is a valued tradition just as useful and rewarding for tobacco users today as it has been for ages. My first crop of home grown tobacco was an experiment. I had started smoking a pipe, to break the cigarette habit, and found pipe tobaccos much more flavorful and satisfying, and even less expensive than generic cigarettes. At some point I thought, wouldn't it be great to grow my own natural tobacco and have plenty of good quality leaf to smoke and never have to pay for it again. I looked into it further, found out more about how to do it, and that it is perfectly legal in the USA to grow up to 1/10th an acre per household for personal use, tax free! So, with basic gardening knowledge, I grew a small tobacco garden in containers on my backyard terrace. While it grew, I researched into how to grow and process tobacco, and how to cure it for smoking. I learned many things from that first tobacco garden, as I fought the caterpillars for the first crop, and finally harvested a surprising amount of leaf. After curing, I allowed it to age for a couple of anxious months before the first smoke. The first smoke was a little harsh, but the aroma and flavor was so fresh and rich. I have literally never smoked anything like it before. Several of my smoking friends agreed - it was the best tobacco they had ever smoked! Tobacco mellows with age, and the flavor and aroma just gets richer and smoother and more satisfying. I grew other crops of different varieties of tobacco, and gradually over the years learned much more by further research and experience. Now, my smoking friends wait anxiously with me for a sample of the next crop from my tobacco garden. It is an indescribable experience to discover different varieties of unblended tobacco have their own distinctive taste and aroma. This is the heirloom tobacco garden. By growing my own natural tobacco, I not only dramatically improved the quality of tobacco I smoked, but eventually even changed how and why I smoke. Natural tobacco grown in the home garden is incomparable to commercial tobacco. It is richer in flavor and packs a much more powerful punch. A much smaller amount of natural tobacco is enjoyed much more over a longer period of time. Heirloom tobacco from the home garden is without a doubt the best quality natural tobacco anywhere in the world. Tobacco is not a particularly difficult plant to grow. Across the world and over the ages, tobacco was grown traditionally on farms and in family gardens. It was cultivated by Native American Indians for centuries before colonialists in North America grew so much of it that it became one of their first commodities exported to Europe. The historical record notes that tobacco from the colonies became preferred in Eur