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October 17, 2012

The Suwannee Scribbler - A sweet tale

Jim Holmes Suwannee Democrat The Suwannee Democrat Wed Oct 17, 2012, 05:14 PM EDT

Live Oak — My wife doesn’t have a lot of memories about her maternal grandfather. That’s not surprising, because he died when she was still a little girl. But the few that she has are both vivid and treasured.

In the grand scheme of things, Thee (short for Theodore) Kemp wasn’t anyone particularly special. He wasn’t rich or famous. He was simply a hardworking Florida cracker, with little formal education but holding an advanced graduate degree from the College of Hard Knocks. Lynda describes the elderly gentleman she knew as small and portly…an old man with a limp who was seldom seen in public without his Stetson and long-sleeved, white shirt.

On those occasions when she visited her grandparents’ home, she remembers watching him hand-feed peanuts to squirrels, as they sat on the arm of an aging lawn chair he kept beneath an old oak …or staring at him in awe as he gobbled-down red hot peppers like they were the tree-ripened peaches he also loved so much.

But even more memorable to Lynda is the ever present garden plot behind her grandfather’s small Fort Pierce home and the tiny stand of sugarcane she’d always find there. Armed with a sharp knife, Lynda says Grandpa Kemp appeared to take great joy in cutting off a small stalk of his homegrown “chew.” She’d then spend hours savoring it. She maintains no candy bar has ever tasted so sweet.

It is memories like those that stay with us forever…memories we’d love to be able to duplicate as much as possible for our own “citified” grandchildren when they visit “Nonny & Poppy” in Live Oak.

Lynda’s memories sent me on a quest earlier this year to find some local sugarcane we could try to grow in our own garden. The search proved to be more difficult than I would have initially thought. I’m told that at one time, most Suwannee Valley farmers had their own stand of cane. That’s no longer the case today, however.

Fortunately for me, I was finally lucky enough to come across one local resident who was willing to help. I’ll just call him Charlie, so he’s not flooded with phone calls from strangers, looking for cane cuttings.

You see, Charlie has memories similar to Lynda’s. As a boy, his father always grew some sugarcane on the family farm and the annual harvest was something he looked forward to every fall.  Like many of Suwannee County’s youth, when he finished school, Charlie headed elsewhere in the state so as to earn a decent living…only to return to the family’s 300-acre homestead in the mid-1990s. It wasn’t long before Charlie decided to follow his late father’s lead and plant some sugarcane of his own. One row became two, then three and so on. And while I didn’t count them, I think Charlie currently has the better part of 20 rows, as well as different cane varieties. From what I gather, most of his annual crop ends up as syrup. Each November, he produces a couple hundred gallons…much of which is spoken for by the owners of a Lake City restaurant. The cane cuttings Charlie was kind enough to provide us---and which we’ve since planted in our garden---may not be exactly the same as Grandpa Kemp’s “chew” (it apparently doesn’t grow too well in North Florida), but we’re confident it will do the job when our grandkids come to visit.

In the meanwhile, Charlie says he’ll give Lynda and me a phone call when he fires up his gear next month and makes this year’s batch of syrup. We’re looking forward to it…even hoping to learn a thing or two.

If you’d like to join Lynda and me as budding sugarcane growers, I’d suggest you talk to the folks at the county Extension Office.

Jim lives in Live Oak.

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