Local sustains herself by cooking,

growing own food

Karen Hawtrey, with her turtle Ferd Farkle, pose before the Alabama peanut plant that in a few months will be ready for harvesting.

For all the love between Karen Hawtrey and her mother, her mother’s cooking was never a strong point to put it mildly.

“If you were raised on sugar sandwiches on white bread, ketchup sandwiches and boiled sauerkraut and weenies, you’d learn to cook at a very young age and you’d learn to cook what you could,” Hawtrey said. “It was a matter of desperation.”

“I was the only one who cared about cooking,” Hawtrey said. To that extent, it is a running joke between Hawtrey and her sister that the best thing she can make is reservations.

Here in Lakeview, the youngest of four daughters in the family, Hawtrey grows nearly everything she eats, opting for the benefits and self-satisfaction of homegrown food, within the premises of her modest home.

A rather inconspicuous garden is home to, in her estimation, more than fifty fruits and vegetables. She grows spinach, bananas, eggplant, squash, zucchini, tomatoes, asparagus, strawberries, horseradish, concord grapes, dill, green onions, five colors of carrots, squash, pickles, onions, celery cilantro, rosemary cauliflower and garlic to name a few. 

One of her legumes has a special significance. In an orange flower pot feet outside her front door are Alabama peanuts, a delicacy in the south when boiled. 

“It’s the best piece of meat you’ve ever had in your life,” Hawtrey said. “It just has a meaty hearty taste to it.”

The weather in Oregon, which Hawtrey called unpredictable, fails to suit the growth of the peanuts as kindly as a place like Alabama does with more consistent heat. Neither does the soil.

Hawtrey receives the raw peanuts, which themselves function as seeds, from one of her sisters. From there, she buries the raw peanuts in a sandy soil characteristic of the south. Outside her house, there sits such a setup on a small scale. She has a flowerpot in which the raw peanuts are dug into the sandy soil. It will take nearly three months before the nuts are ready to harvest and should an early freeze arrive, the harvest will in all likelihood spoil.

Hawtrey’s attachment to growing nearly all of the food she eats she claimed is not done as a political or environmental statement. Her motivations are more basic.

“I just love to do it,” she said. 

“To get quality (food), you have to have quality ingredients,” she said.