I’m a farmer’s son – Pomeroon farmer, the late Joseph Francis Martins was my father – but the truth is I didn’t take much to planting as a youngster. However, the seed must have been planted somehow, or buried in my jeans, because I started out growing stuff shortly after I bought my first house in Willowdale, Ontario, in northern Toronto, after my first marriage to Dorothy Walker, a Canadian, and particularly after my first two children, Luana and Tony, came along.
Out of nowhere, it seems, Martins started planting, but right from the start in Guyana I wasn’t a flowers man (come to think of it my father was coffee; coconuts, shaddocks and oranges; I never saw him with a flower in his hand). Even when I lived at Vreed-en-Hoop, where the house had a big backyard, I didn’t plant a thing. In Toronto, however, on a fairly small house lot, after I put in the swimming pool, I had enough land left to grow strawberries and some sweet corn. I had this rule: if I can’t eat it, I don’t plant it, so no roses or carnations or other decorative stuff for me.
