Tommy Markle was sitting around with several school buddies, listening to them gripe about the rising cost of cigarettes.
He got tired of hearing it. OK, he said, how about I just grow you guys some tobacco. They all laughed at the 17-year-old.
That is the thing about Tommy Markle. The kid can grow anything, something he figured out about four years ago when he stuck the first of his pepper plants in the backyard dirt of his parents’ Littleton home.
“I don’t know what it is,” he said. “I just have a green thumb. I like growing things.”
Growing tobacco, he quickly discovered, would not be easy, especially in Colorado. It mostly requires, he learned on the Internet, a coastal climate.
After doing his research, he picked a Tennessee seed company, and ordered a couple of envelopes of “a Connecticut- something” seed.
Tommy then went to his boss at Underground Specialties, a Lakewood tree farm. Did he think tobacco would grow in Littleton? His boss laughed at him.
The seeds arrived in early spring. Tommy prepared a couple of trays filled with a fertilized planting mix. He dropped the seeds in, watered and waited.
A senior at Columbine High, Tommy says everyone he knows thinks he should become a botanist. He just shakes his head.
No, his plan is to enroll at Fort Lewis College in Durango and see where life takes him. He’d rather be self-taught “than go to college for plants. It’s what I love about my job. It’s perfect for me, planting and caring for trees, the kind of job you don’t hate going to.”
Six tobacco plants emerged from the trays. He decided two were strong enough to be transplanted into a large white container, next to his six pepper plants.
Within days, the tobacco plants drooped. His boss and his friends were right, Tommy figured. He gave the plants up for dead, not even bothering to give them water.
And then the summer rains came.
I had never seen a tobacco plant until I walked into Tommy’s backyard. Truthfully, they sort of look like the tall weeds that grow in a corner of my own backyard. The only difference is the two, thick-stalked, 4-foot plants in his white planter are topped with beautiful pink-and-yellow trumpet flowers.
“It means they are ready,” Tommy says.
He has already harvested about nine of the plants’ huge leaves, which now hang brown and bundled from strings he has rigged on two wooden sawhorses in a corner of the yard.
“I’d be really psyched if I smoked,” he says. “Just look at them! I think this has to do with global warming — it has to be, right? These things aren’t supposed to grow here.”
The first of his harvest has been chopped into tiny bits and stored in a small, plastic cottage-cheese tub. It has the faint aroma of an herb I cannot identify, maybe a cross between rosemary and oregano.
No one, by the way, is laughing at Tommy now. It will take him, he says, three weeks at the earliest to strip the plants of their leaves, hang them to dry and shred them for smoking.
The same kids who once laughed at him now have placed orders. As has, he says, his boss.
“The seeds, since they were grown here, should do very well in Colorado,” Tommy says. “And I’m going to go crazy. I’m going to have so many plants. Along with my peppers, of course.”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
