For 30 years, nearly every time I introduced myself as Dallas, I was asked if I was from Dallas or Texas.

“Nope, I’m from around Augusta, Georgia.”

“Oh! Augusta! That’s where the Masters is, right? Do you golf?”

I do not. I barely Putt-Putt, and I never found myself caught up in the hubbub of the golf tournament that calls my hometown its own. Growing up, Masters Week was also our spring break, so though I’d occasionally watch the final hole with my family, it’s never been the sport I drop everything I’m doing to put on TV {read: Georgia games}. But when you grow up surrounded by something like that, that even non-golf fans know about and think is a big deal, it’s hard to escape the lore of the course.
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Even our local baseball team is called the Augusta Greenjackets — a play on the prestigious green jackets that winners of the Masters earn and that are also worn by members of the Augusta National. No one but members know how to become members, and most of the membership list is hush-hush (although I did find this 2015 one on Bloomberg), so it’s kind of like the Masons … except with significantly fewer really cool movies, books, History Channel documentaries and an order to protect the Holy Grail. 

lottery for the first-ever Augusta National Women’s Amateur tournament. The first few days of the tournament were held at another area golf course, Champion’s Retreat, but the final was held at the Augusta National. JE and I were given the tickets as part of my 30thbirthday present, and I could not wait to get my hands on a pin for my collection … and my mouth on pimento cheese and egg salad sandwiches.

The recipes for these, especially the pimento cheese, remain 1) an actual mystery and 2) a closely guarded secret. A man named Nick Rangos created the recipes for these two sandwiches and made the pimento cheese mixture himself. In the early 2000s, Augusta National executives decided to have the local restaurant Wife Saver {personal note: I promise I’ll write about this place too; it’s a hometown favorite} make the sandwiches. Well … Wife Saver makes some damn good fried chicken and sides, but its initial pimento cheese sandwich was not up to par — hey look! A golf pun! -- with Rangos’ original recipe. Rangos wasn’t tellin’ nobody his secret recipe, especially the owner of the business that now had his business, so the Wife Saver folks spent a hot minute getting things right. Rangos passed away, and his original pimento cheese recipe died with him. According to Newsweek, the National eventually moved all concession-creation in-house, so I cannot be sure how accurate this year’s sandwich was to the one Nick Rangos developed more than 40 years ago. 
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But I am very accurate when I say it was good. Like, went back and got seconds good. Rivals my Nanny’s pimento cheese good.

There was a tense moment when JE claimed he liked a particular brand of store-bought pimento cheese better, but I think that’s sacrilege. Personally, I think I have more expertise than he does in this situation, because I have tried numerous pimento cheeses over my 30 years and this is top three, for absolute certain. No. 1 is my Nanny’s, the No. 2 spot belongs to Proper Pepper out of Sandersville, Georgia. 

Pimento cheese, for all intents and purposes, is a blend of mayonnaise, cheeses, pimiento peppers and seasonings. Fun fact though, a lot of commercially made pimento cheeses use red bell peppers, not pimiento peppers, in their mixtures because it’s cheaper. Lame sauce, y’all. You gotta have the real thing. Improperly made pimento cheese can also be overly creamy and mushy, so having the right ratio of mayonnaise-to-cheese is muy importante. Especially when enjoyed in sandwich form, a soppy and liquid-y pimento cheese mixture can seep into the bread and cause it to be as great as that PB&J that got squished at the bottom of your lunch box that one day in first grade. The other way improper way pimento cheese can be made is too dry, either because there wasn’t enough mayonnaise to balance the cheese, or the cheese itself was poor quality and winds up with a mealy texture. Gross.

Whether it was Rangos’, Wife Saver’s or some sweetheart in the Augusta National kitchen’s recipe that was lovingly spread between two slices of soft white bread this Saturday, it was the perfect balance of all ingredients. There was texture from the cheeses — definitely some type of cheddar involved, and possibly a white cheese as well; my palate is sadly not that distinctive yet — but it was still creamy and light. The peppers themselves had a nice bite to them too, and the flavor wasn’t exactly spicy, but you could tell there was seasoning added other than salt. 
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Oh, and did I mention these bad boys are like, less than two bucks each? Yeah. Not a joke. That’s less than half the price of a bottle of water at a Georgia football game.

mamas and cooks make on the reg; and there’s nothing pretentious about them, even though they’re sold at one of the most exclusive sporting event in the world. But the simplicity is almost an illusion.
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Think about it. Pimento cheese and egg salad are two very Southern things that you can find in a gazillion places and a basquillion different forms anywhere below the Mason-Dixon. The Augusta National could have hired the freakin’ Kroger across the street to commercially produce enough egg salad and pimento cheese to spread on enough Wonderbread slices for a cheap-enough price for multiple thousands of people to enjoy. Instead, they found a local man, then a local restauranteur, then their own staff to create, re-create and re-re-create Southern classics using ingredients so pristine and perfectly balanced that it adds to the grandeur of the experience of being one of the Chosen Ones to attend an event during Masters Week. I bet there’s not a stale piece of bread within three miles of Washington Road the week leading up to and the week of Masters.

between Jennifer Kupcho and Maria Fassi, the two leaders going into the tournament final. And you get caught up in the beauty of the course, the pinks and magentas and fuchsias of the azalaeas contrasting with the taupe sand-traps and perfect shades of green grass. Even, as my daddy pointed out, the pinestraw is manicured. You get caught up in clapping when everyone else does and gasping when everyone else does, and you wonder to yourself, “Is this what a football game is like for non-football fans and way too many freshman girls?”
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If you have the chance to go, go. Don’t scalp your tickets, those coveted passes that grant you entrance through the heavily guarded gates. Do eat the sandwiches, and the peach ice cream sandwiches they ran out of, and maybe the barbecue too.

​And if you think about it, make a dumb nerd joke about whether or not there are sarlaccs at the bottom of those pesky sand traps. 

As a child, I assumed this had some obscure reference to the Pilgrims and Plymouth Rock. Like, these people escaped religious persecution, got on a boat called the Mayflower and in the month of April they weathered a lot of storms to land in North America. Not quite. I then figured the adage prophesized the month of April as the rainiest of the year, and thus all the flowers would bloom in May. This is probably closer to the actual origin of the saying.

Now at the ripe ol’ age of 30, I find “April showers bring May flowers” to have a different meaning. 

I was able to spend some time recently centering myself, which I am sure sounds hippie-dippie-trippy, but I’m being serious. March was, for whatever reason, not my best month in a lot of ways, particularly when it came to achieving some pretty lofty {but hear me, completely doable} goals in my skincare + cosmetics business. I had quite a few wins and high moments, but when March 31 rolled over to April 1 at midnight, I realized what Cinderella must have felt like as her glitter carriage morphed back into a pumpkin. On the plus side, I still had both shoes on my feet.

I digress.

Let me explain. You’ll typically be able to find a weekly or daily sudoku puzzle in your local newspaper. There are nine big squares of nine little squares each, and the goal is for each of your nine big squares, each row and each column to contain the numbers one through nine once each. For most of my life I never bothered to try because I told myself the story that “I am bad with numbers.” Granted, math is not my strong suit, especially in the realm of a classroom, but I didn’t know what I was talking about. I also, fun fact, spent about 15 years calling it “soduku,” pronounced like Count Dooku. So I extra was telling myself a story here.

Tonight as I did my “focus practice” as I’ve been calling it, I pulled out a recent puzzle from the local Athens independent newspaper, Flagpole. My method is to examine each square in detail and see, based on the numbers that are already put there, which numbers could be in that square. I do this for every open square. Then I go back through: Is there any square that could onlybe one number? Over and over again, then crossing out possibilities in other squares. 
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I’m sure someone out there has a different way to do sudoku, but this is my way and I’m cool with it, so calm yourselves. 

I fill one square in — yes! A win! Then spend a few minutes going back over the entire puzzle, looking for the next one. Crossing out the ones that won’t work. Back and forth, up and down, over and over until suddenly, YAAAS! All the pieces start coming together. One number goes in that clears four squares that clear six more and it keeps going and going until the puzzle is completed.  Such a feeling of accomplishment!

Isn’t it interesting how momentum builds, and then all of a sudden everything just comes together?

I could have easily put the puzzle away when it was frustrating. And trust me, when I have gone over rows and columns and squares and can’t seem to find either my error or the next clue, I want to ball the dang paper up and hurl it across the bathroom and open up a book. But because I focused, because I didn’t even let my very cute cats distract me, because I did the work to set the things up and I didn’t stop following up on my work until the thing was done, the thing got done. 

Y’all, I spent two straight days in March at a conference for my company and heard about a dozen entrepreneurs talk about building momentum, and it took a dang sudoku puzzle and a silly old wives tale to hit my mindshift. The teacher appears when the student is ready, amirite?

Last May through this March I was planting seeds. I wasn’t particularly focused about it all the time {hello, last August, October and this January and kind of March}, but I still trudged forward. And now that I’m aware of what a truly focused mindset looks like, I’m going to make it rain all over those seeds in April. That’s called momentum. 

And those showers? They’re going to bring May flowers.

During the early months of 2018, I started following Trysten Molina on Instagram. Molina owns the independent (indie) yarn dyeing and knitwear design brand Dragon Hoard Yarn Co. I was enamored with her yarn from the get-go — lots of speckles, and color themes that played right into my fantasy fiction-loving heart! I bought her “Christmas at Hogwarts” yarn advent for myself last Christmas and delighted each day in December as I opened a tiny new skein of yarn. I was gifted a gift certificate to use in her shop by one of my closest friends, and within a few days of 2019 I knew precisely what color I wanted.

Necromancy is a mottle of greens and grays that bring to mind lying down on a moss-coated forest floor next to a bubbling brook, listening for the faint sounds of Tom Bombadil’s singing to come over a hillside. Or perhaps that’s just my mind. Regardless, I fell in absolute lust with the colorway! There are lime greens and emerald, Kelly and hunter and nearly hidden flecks of bright red. It’s part of Molina’s yarns inspired by the Netflix original show “The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina,” which is an excellent show, although far more macabre than the Melissa Joan Hart version of my childhood. 

Spellman Pullover is a cropped sweater with cables and bobbles (think little knitted balls) on the shoulders and sleeves. I had an excuse to get my Necromancy!
 
>> falling short of the cohort
 
As excited as I was to cast on my sweater {knit in a mohair and fingering weight yarn, both in Necromancy}, I was already way behind. I committed to starting the sweater Jan. 11 and finishing it by Feb. 11, and I ordered my yarn on Jan. 9. Then the USPS held it hostage for an extra day or two, and due to some other things going on I didn’t prioritize casting on right away when I got a moment.
Being in a group chat with all the other test knitters, that was hard. I was constantly getting notifications on Facebook Messenger with other knitters speeding along: showing off their yarn a week before I’d even ordered mine; two sets of bobbles done on the shoulders the day I sat down to review the pattern; tossing out edits and suggestions about design terms that were completely new to me.

I almost didn’t start.

I saw all these knitters doing so much better and so much faster and yada yada yada than me and I was embarrassed. There was actually no way on God’s green Earth that I was going to finish a sweater in the given timeframe with how much else I had happening. I was ashamed that I didn’t know some of these terms and I’d never knit a bobble before in my life, and truth be told that I didn’t have much to offer in test knitting this pattern other than helping confirm stitch counts. I sat on my yarn once it came for at least a week going through all this in my mind, continuing to watch the group chat and sitting quietly.

I knew I had the skills to knit this. Like y’all, I design my own patterns all the time and don’t think a second thought about it. It takes me less than a week to knit an entire pair of socks. This is not actually hard to someone who’s got 11 years’ experience putting yarn to needle.

I knew I wantedto knit this. These two yarns held together are so squishy and soft and I already planned out the outfit I would wear in my post-bind-off photo shoot.

I had skills. I had vision. I had passion. Heck, y’all, I even had a deadline! All of the key things one allegedly requires to reach a goal!

So what was my hold-up? The comparison trap. 
 
>> stitching through 
 
What’s the comparison trap? It’s a thing that a lot of people today find themselves falling into, or digging themselves out of, usually thanks to social media. For whatever reason, we have this idea of what we should look like or should be, or the level we should be at, and we beat ourselves up for not being “that.” In my case with the Spellman Pullover, I was comparing my skeins of yarn to the half-completed sweaters on the group chat; and comparing myself to the knitters with said half-completed sweaters.

While stuck in this delightful life-sucking trap, I heard a training from Audrey MacDowell, who is a top director in my skincare + cosmetics business. Now, Audrey MacDowell doesn’t know me from Adam, and I doubt she knits, so this had nothing to do with anything … and yet wham! It had everything to do with everything. In this training she says that comparison is the thief of joy. And while we’re out here comparing ourselves … the people we’re comparing ourselves to are out
w-e-r-k-i-n-g. 

No wonder these women had half-finished sweaters. They weren’t sitting on the group chat lamenting how they hadn’t started yet. They picked up their dang needles, cast on and worked every spare second they had.
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After that gut-punch, I intentionally made a few changes in quite a few places in my life and business, and of course, my progress on the Spellman Pullover. What mattered wasn’t how fast I knit or how much I knew about negative vs. positive ease . Who cares what these complete strangers thought about my knitting skills? We were all knitting the exact same pattern. It wasn't any kind of competition. What matters is that I enjoyed what was being worked on and was pleased with the direction in which it went. What matters is that every day I could I picked up my yarn and needles and worked a few rows. 

>> weaving in the ends
 
By changing a couple habits — namely not checking the group chat every time I pulled up Facebook and choosing to knit nearly every night — I did finish the Spellman Pullover in about a month’s time. Molina extended the deadline to March 1, and at about 2 a.m. the next morning I bound off my last stitch on the final sleeve. 

I missed the deadline to be featured in her pattern and on the Ravelry pattern page. That kind of stunk. But it taught me an important lesson: if I’d spent the time I spent comparing knitting, I’d already be finished and wearing the sweater instead of wondering how many musicals it would take to finish the second sleeve. In case you were wondering, it took me the entirety of the TV versions of “Grease” and “Footloose.”

I love how the sweater turned out, and the first day it was sunny enough to get photos, my boyfriend and I went in the woods and he got some great shots that show off the color variation in Necromancy and the details in the Spellman Pullover sleeves. I felt so accomplished and like I could conquer the world — er, OK, maybe more like conquer my goals for the rest of March. It’s a great feeling, and I know that feeling came about because of the action I took!

Whether I’m knitting a sweater actually or metaphorically, these things I learned through this process will be so instrumental, and I hope they are for you, too:

• Avoid the comparison trap! Instead, look how far you’ve come. Eleven years ago I could barely pull of a wonky-arse scarf, and here I am making bobbles like I’ve done it all my life.
• Remember what Audrey MacDowell said — those people you’re comparing yourself to are working while you’re not. So whatever it is you’re not doing to get to where those folks are, do it. And if you’re working, you won’t have time to compare {see above J}.
• Daily consistent habits are more valuable than a burst of sudden action that’s never backed up. If your goal is to finish a sweater, set aside some time to knit each night or morning or lunch break daily instead of working for 16 hours straight on it, then putting it aside for something else, and suddenly it’s 2020 and you realized you never finished it.
• Empower yourself! If you don’t understand something, don’t sit there and complain about how you don’t get it. Ask someone. Research. Watch 17 tutorials on bobble knitting. 

You can do anything you set your mind to, ladies and gents. But first, you have to set your mind to it. And second … you have to do it. 

Nathan Nelms came on board in 2017 after Jake Sapp, coordinator of program operations for ESP, contacted his parents about Nelms working with Java Joy.

“We did like a practice,” Nelms said. “We would like, fill the coffee filter thing an then we’ll have to pour the coffee powder stuff and then we’ll have to shake it a little bit and put it in the thing, and we’ll have to turn the coffee thing on and wait ‘til it says ‘ready to go.’”
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Going on two years later, Nelms and McCutcheon are experts at running the coffee maker and the coffee cart.

joyristas bring their coffee cart or coffee trailer to the business and serve complimentary cups of Jittery Joe’s, and plenty of complimentary hugs. Though many Athens-area businesses have hired Java Joy since 2016, the word is spreading.

“The coolest place is the downtown in Atlanta,” McCutcheon said of a recent event at Colony Square in Midtown. “We helped to do 500 muffins.”

Joyristas made about $100 each in tips that day, and celebrated a job well-done with lunch at Cracker Barrel.

“It’s better than [previous jobs] because you get to go out in the community and serve coffee and hang out with your friends,” Nelms said.

Graben said most of the time, the cart is wheeled into a business’ lobby, lounge or meeting room, but for this event, the trailer was on the street food truck style. She said this will be the first of several bookings at this locale as part of Java Joy’s new subscription program: companies that book at least four times in one year can receive a discounted rate. 
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“We’re really great at grand openings or holidays, parties where businesses are celebrating certain big events,” Graben said. “At the same time, we’re plugged into businesses on a weekly, monthly basis that just want us there simply for their staff.”

In the Classic City, Java Joy launched a new partnership with the YMCA on weekends inviting businesses to sponsor coffee, and joyristas now have the chance to work directly at the Jittery Joe’s roastery on Monday a month.

“YMCA is like, we do events with basketball games. People play games, and we serve coffee for them,” McCutcheon said.

Her work with Java Joy inspired McCutcheon to create her own business — Meg’s Mess. She said the name in part comes from the mess she tends to leave in the kitchen, like red velvet on her mom’s mixer after making a cake.

As for Nelms, he gets the most out of being hands-on.

“Nathan really enjoys the kind of behind-the-scenes aspect of it,” Graben said. “You don’t tell him what needs to be loaded, he just grabs the cambros and takes them to the van.”

The other barrier Java Joy’s staff hopes to lessen is interacting with adults of different abilities.
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“That’s an amazing thing to witness. Some people have hesitancies with interacting with people with disabilities, and they don’t know how to get past it,” Graben said. “You see someone taken aback at first … by the end of it they leave with the biggest smile on their face. That’s what’s so special about our brand. We meet you where you are and you end up having this experience you didn’t’ expect, and a lot of people’s lives are changed because of it.”

Karida Collins, owner and founder of Neighborhood Fiber Co., said she was shocked that the conversation was happening, but added that it was inevitable.

“The first trade show I went to was in 2007 and from what I could tell I was the only black person there. I was also one of the youngest people there,” Collins said. “It was definitely a space that was older and whiter than my life normally included.”

She attributes it to people being more comfortable with expressing their political opinions in public spaces.

“I might have a black friend and we might say something about a shop, like, ‘Oh yeah, I went in there and the person ignored me, of course.’ But we wouldn’t necessarily share that information with a white person who asked about that store,” Collins said. “It’s like Pandora’s Box. All of a sudden all of these feelings and experiences that have been there for years, it’s not new. It’s not like just now people started being a little racist. Now I think the main difference is that … knitting has a much younger constituency. Younger in their 20s and 30s. These are people who statistically are much more progressive than the group that preceded them. So this is a group of people who has grown up with the idea that they are the ones who challenge the status quo.”

Another thing that makes it easier is that there are more women of color visible as knitters, designers and dyers, Collins included.
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“It’s easier to raise your voice when you know that you’re not the only one,” she said. “I definitely feel like it’s not my responsibility to educate white people about racism. White people created it; white people can fix it.”

“I felt like it was upsetting the status quo a little bit … because the knitting community, especially when I was living in DC, the knitting community was almost entirely white. So I felt like just being who I was, was entirely unexpected,” she said. “I wanted to convey a distinctly urban aesthetic and idea — urban meaning ‘city’ and also meaning that like, with the connotation of being black.”

Sometimes the color names are based on aspects of a neighborhood, like the aforementioned Roland Park. And Canton is a Baltimore neighborhood with a lot of waterfront property, so the name fit a blue-green colorway. Other times they’re based on inside jokes, like a friend of Collins’ who suggested they needed a bright yellow — so they named their yellow after the neighborhood that friend lived in. 

“My favorite is one that we’ve actually discontinued. It was 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and I came up with it sort of inspired by Michelle Obama,” Collins said. “In the beginning of the Obama presidency everyone was really excited and hopeful. I was really kind of amped up of the idea of reaching across the aisle and collaborating to make America better for everyone. That color is a purple — it’s kind of an eggplant — but it’s got spots of red and spots of blue. There’s a lot of feeling in that yarn.”

Collins said she doesn’t expect every knitter or designer of color to take part in the discussion.
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“Everyone has to act at their own comfort level, because it is emotional labor to engage in conversations and educate people about diversity and being inclusive and not even about overt racism, this is just about things that most people don’t notice or think about,” she said. “I would encourage everyone to own or embrace their identity, but whether or not you want to make your voice heard, that’s your business.”

and felt called to do something in the wake of Gray’s death. So they created a color and donated all of the money collected from the sale of those skeins. 

“We were able to raise $10,000. It was the first time we did it and it far exceeded my expectation,” Collins said. “We donated it to a Baltimore charity foundation. I felt like it was something that no matter your politics, you could get behind rebuilding a city. … I was very careful to pick a fund that would be palatable to everyone. I didn’t donate the money to Black Lives Matter … and then eventually as time went on, our voice got a little louder. I started letting more of my own politics show through and it’s just part of who I am and it’s part of the ethos of this company.”
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They’ve donated to causes of all sizes, but it’s the smaller or local ones where she feels the most good has been done.

​“I really want to focus on helping the community in a really tangible way. When we donated $10,000 to Doctors Without Borders, that was amazing, but they’re a huge organization. Whereas we donated $10,000 to one of these gun safety advocate organizations and … they sent us the most gushing email that said, ‘Thank you so much! We can now hire this person we’ve been trying to find the money for.’ It was just really overwhelming,” Collins said. 

decide to stay in south Georgia instead of moving to Atlanta?
 
Sarah: Both mine and my husband’s families are from Turner County. I’m married to my high-school sweetheart. He’s the reason I love ag because he was president of the FFA when I was in high school — he taught me how to show sheep. When I graduated college, we moved back to Ashburn [Georgia] on purpose because we loved south Georgia. We knew we were going to have kids one day and we needed the support of our families with both of us working and traveling.
 
Atlanta is so busy and we’ve been used to this lifestyle pretty much our whole lives, except for college, and the traffic is a little crazy. Here I have all the perks of small town life, plus if I need to be in Atlanta, I can be there in two hours and 15 minutes. 
 
After 10 years in an office setting, what’s it been like adjusting to a home office?
 
When I started working from home, I said, “I’m going to get up every single day and get dressed as if I was going to be at an office.” That lasted about four months. It helps because I have a designated office in my house — there’s no television; the snacks are all downstairs, so it’s like I have to go and eat my lunch downstairs. And sometimes I get on a roll up here and work through lunch, so it’s nice to have that designated space.
 
I am the primary person who runs the kids to school in the morning. I have to put on … not pajamas, so that helps. I just feel like it jump-starts me to go ahead and have a shower in the morning even if I’m putting on jeans and something casual. 
 
The struggle to adapting to working from home, on a personal level, has been kind of tricky because I have to make plans to see people. It’s not just seeing them in the kitchen and heating up my lunch, it’s a lot more planning.

effort for are really important to keep up a good network. Setting aside time for a one-on-one conversation is important. Keeping those relationships fresh and active is important not only in our industry, but with people I went to high school with, too. They’re working, they have kids, they’re juggling all the things; it’s nice to have a sanity check.
 
You mentioned your email calendar and planner. Why are these the tools that work best for you?
 
When I graduated high school, I was such a technology nerd [my now-husband] bought me a Palm Pilot for college. Like, syllabus day was my favorite day in college because I would go ahead and put in deadlines and tests. That’s a personality thing — some people cannot live by a calendar. But with technology, we all walk around with a smart phone in our hand at all times. I can be driving down the road and tell Siri, “call the car dealership and set up that appointment,” or “put that reminder on for Tuesday morning” and it’ll pop up and remind me. 
 
I operate out of Outlook for work for my email system. That shows up on my native iPhone calendar, so that just works nicely. I also have a physical planner that I utilize because sometimes it’s nice just to have it in my hand. Once a week I’ll just double-check to make sure [an event] is in both places.
 
I use a planner that’s like a perpetual planner. So when the month goes by, I’ll stick the January tab in the back and add some more planner pages that have the week-at-a-time view. I always have a full 12 months. 
 
How do you set boundaries between work and home, especially since they’re in the same place?
 
I utilize the “do not disturb” feature on my iPhone and I have all of my notifications turned off for emails. If somebody texts me for work it’ll still pop up, but honestly a lot of times when it’s time to sit down and eat supper, all the cell phones are not in the kitchen. Personal phones, work phones, they’re put away because we only have a few hours at night.

drive themselves one day. If you’re fortunate like I am to have a mother and mother-in-law and sister to help fill in the gaps, that’s great. If not, have a reliable babysitter or friend. The kids need a break from us as well, and that alleviates that.
 
Women, especially women that work from home and are juggling all the things, just need to remind themselves to give themselves some grace. You really only have 100 percent of yourself, so unless you quit your job and not have a partner … you do have to balance it. So don’t hold yourself to an impossible standard. The same thing with maintaining friendships and if you’re in a religion. Just know what’s important, and make sure you’re giving what you want to it, but not letting it run you over.

Hurricane Michael made landfall in October 2018. According to the National Weather Service, it was the first major hurricane to “directly impact” Georgia since the 1890s. Being a forever agriculture nerd, I was shocked at the affect Hurricane Michael had on farms in south and central Georgia, where high wind gusts hit between 70 and 115 miles per hour. Cotton and pecan crops were the hardest hit. Approximately 51 percent of the pecan crop was directly affected, according to University of Georgia Extension.
 
I recently learned about a newer pecan cultivar, the Avalon, which is touted as one producers should consider as they look to recover from Hurricane Michael. I was intrigued — so I reached out to Patrick Conner, the UGA pecan {and muscadine} breeder who brought this cultivar to life. He was gracious enough to spend a few minutes and answer my plethora of questions about pecans, scab and how the Avalon can help.

The pecan growers really pushed the University of Georgia to get this breeding program. There was only one other breeding program in pecans in the United States [in Texas]. It’s much drier in Texas in the pecan-growing region, so scab is not as big of a problem there. They released several cultivars for the US pecan industry that were planted on a fairly widespread basis. Some of those were so susceptible to scab they had to cut the orchards down. 
 
From what I’ve gathered, aside from wind damage, it seems that a big concern with how 
Hurricane Michael affected our pecan crop is the spread of pecan scab. What is pecan scab, and why is it so devastating?
 
This was an issue even without the hurricane, but due to the frequency of the rainfall, it just kept raining every day. 

One of the problems is cultivars tend to become more susceptible to scab over time. Desirable, when it was first released in the 1940s, was extremely resistant to scab and now it’s one of the most susceptible things we grow.
 
In nature, the tree is in balance with the pathogen. If you take pecan scab off one cultivar and transfer it to another oftentimes it can’t infect the cultivar. You don’t get a big buildup of scab most years. But what we’ve done in Georgia is we’ve planted the entire state with just a few cultivars. When you have an orchard and all the trees are the same, the pathogen gets adapted to that cultivar. By reducing the variability from what’s seen in nature to almost no variability in our orchards, we set ourselves up to have a lot of scab.

Caddo — with Gloria Grande being large and resistant, but having a thick shell, and ​Caddo is more productive with a thinner shell — this one had fairly large nuts, it did not scab; had decent quality; so we went on to test it. It performed well in our replicated yield trials. Gloria Grande is the female parent and Caddo is the pollen parent.
 
How long did it take for crossbreeding to produce the desired pecan? And why did you decide to use traditional breeding methods instead of using genetic modification or CRISPR technology?
 
Well, this cross was made in the year 2000 and I released it in 2016. Which was actually a little bit shorter than it normally takes. We take a large tree that was already bearing, and you graft on new limbs of the selection you’re trialing. That tree very quickly regrows and acts like a more mature tree.
 
Right now, we don’t have any genetic protocols for pecans. Usually when you’re doing that, you’re tissue culturing, and a pecan is extremely difficult to place through tissue culture. It’s not clear that [a genetically modified pecan] would be allowed to be released, because pecan is a native crop. It’s wind-pollinated and the animals carry it off. So if you were to genetically modify a pecan, it would immediately be out there in the environment.

What’s been the response since Avalon was released? Have people been clamoring for it?
 
Yeah. They’re driving the nurseries crazy because we aren’t able to produce enough trees to meet the demand. Pecan sales have been in a boom for the last five years because of high prices and will continue to be so because we lost so many trees in the hurricane.
 
If people want to switch over to Avalon, and are able to get their hands on some, how exactly does this transition occur? Would they be grafting limbs as was done to create Avalon initially?
 
That’s not really practical on a wide scale. When you change over a tree like that, not only does it take probably an hour or two to do the initial graft, but you have to follow it back and make sure it doesn’t sprout new branches of the original cultivar. If you wanted a new cultivar in general — what growers typically do, unless it’s a disaster you wouldn’t cut down your tree — just plant new trees as you phase out. Over time you’re changing the makeup of the orchard.
 
We’re not telling people to cut down their Desirable orchards … but a lot of them are going to make the choice to plant something else. 
 
You have to contact the nursery at least a year, sometimes two years, before you’re going to plant so you can get on the list of cultivars you want. There are other cultivars that have better levels of resistance, things like a Sumner. I would encourage them not to plant Desirable anymore in the south part of the state — it’s just too difficult to control scab.

Chops & Hops is one of those places that I’ve been to at least a dozen times over the years, with every intention of writing about it … and it just never happened. Thus, I’ve got lots of different dishes I could write about. Some are on the menu. Some are not. Some I took photos of while learning how to properly plan and execute a beer dinner.

Everything I’ve had at Chops & Hops is spot-on, including the rare steaks {you don’t want to know what happens when you bring me a steak that’s anything more done than “bordering on medium-rare”}, fresh catch — a seafood special that changes often, the cocktails and the desserts. Given the name, it’s no surprise that there’s an extensive and rotating beer program, both on draft and off. But what I’m going to talk about today, now that I finally sat down to write this dayum thang, is a hamburger.

Shocking, I’m sure.

There are five burgers regularly on the Chops & Hops menu right now, including the Local Steakhouse burger. Per the menu, it features barbecue-glazed shallots, house steak sauce, an herbed cheese spread and ground beef from Watkinsville, Georgia, farm Pastures of Rose Creek. I happened to stop in on the restaurant’s ninth anniversary, when it hosted a $9 burger special, so I indulged in what would have been the most expensive burger on the menu for a few dollars off. 

That herbed goat cheese is divine. Every bite of this burger melted in my mouth, and the creaminess of this cheese just added to the effect. I haven’t had steak sauce in I couldn’t tell you how long, but my one critique of the burger is that I felt the barbecue sauce on the shallots and the steak sauce competed with each other. Perhaps you’ll love it; maybe it’s just that I tend to not like steak sauce.
That’s my take on the toppings. But the real star of this show is the beef. Holy Smoky Mountains, Batman … this beef.
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Pastures of Rose Creek raises Piedmontese beef, which is one you may not have heard of before. Honestly, the only reason I did is because I used to work for Georgia Cattlemen’s Association, and the Piedmontese producers would put an occasional ad in the Georgia Cattleman magazine I was in charge of. But there weren’t a whole lot of folks back then who produced Piedmontese beef in Georgia — and still don’t appear to be, according to my haphazard Google search just now. Most of our farmers here are Angus, Hereford, some cross thereof or commercial cattle, which is the industry term for cattle that aren’t purebred.

want to finish their cattle on grain or on grass. Now, I haven’t spoken with the owners of Pastures of Rose Creek, though I plan to for an upcoming local business feature, but grass-finished beef tends to have a deeper, more gamey flavor than the buttery taste of say, a Certified Angus or Certified Hereford animal, because of what the cattle eat up until harvest. In addition, because grain-finishing helps cattle put on fast fat and thus that buttery flavor, grass-finished beef tends to be naturally leaner. I once found out the hard way that means it cooks up faster and can have less moisture content. 
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Perhaps it’s the way these cattle are finished; perhaps it’s the breed itself; perhaps a bit of both; but whatever happened between calf being born and ground beef hitting the kitchen at Chops & Hops made this patty otherworldly.

growth in cattle. Piedmontese cattle have a mutation on this gene that causes a specific protein deletion, which leads to muscular hypertrophy {that’s a technical term for muscle growth}. They’re one of a few breeds that fall under the double-muscled cattle-gory, if you will. 

Per this article from Animals: an Open Access Journal, “carcasses of [double-muscled] animals are very lean, and intramuscular fat content is low.” 

Usually beef tenderness is indicated by the amount of intramuscular fat {think about those little white flecks in a raw steak}. But if a Piedmontese animal is lean, without a lot of that intramuscular fat … how did my burger get so melty-in-my-mouthy?! 

Well, also per that article, “collagen content of the meat is lower, so that meat from double-muscled animals is mostly more tender.” 

Oh. Well. That answers that.

Those conclusions — which in large part could be visual, and therefore more subjective than scientific — are further proven by the Warner-Bratzler Shear Force Test. AKA, animal scientists are awesome and came up with a way to measure just how tender meat is by measuring how easily it can be cut through. As you’d imagine, the less force it takes your knife to slice through your steak, the more tender it is. And according to the North American Piedmontese Association website, Piedmontese ranked as the most tender beef compared to other breeds.
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Though my mouth isn’t nearly as reliable as the steel blade that performs the shear force test … after destroying that burger in about five minutes, I must say, my dear Watson, I do concur.

While a college student at then-Augusta State University, management major Cole Watkins took a class that challenged him to create a business. Inspired by past times he’d taken his friends out kayaking, he conceptualized Cole Watkins Tours — now rated the No. 4 thing to do in Evans, Georgia, on TripAdvisor. 

At the time Cole Watkins Tours was in development, there was an outdoors store already in Evans that offered kayak rentals, but Watkins saw a need with his model and decided to fill it.
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“If you were done kayaking when Escape Outdoors closed, you had to bring it back the next day,” he said, adding that for some folks, that was fine, but it could be an inconvenience or deterrent to others. 

“With my company I didn’t want to have a storefront because that was going to cost money. I didn’t have money. What I wanted to do was start slowly building my inventory of kayaks,” Watkins said.
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When he started, Watkins had three kayaks in inventory — so he could take a husband and wife on a tour, but if they had a kid, one of the three had to sit out. 
​
“Now I’m up to 19 kayaks. I don’t want to get any more than that,” he said.

now. I’m going to start it and I’m going to start making money year one,’” he said. “I didn’t show her up but like, why borrow if my plan doesn’t need it?”

His plan was voted top in the class, and several classmates were assigned to his team to put together the official business plan. That was about the time Watkins got serious about the potential Cole Watkins Tours had.

“I thought we could really make money with this. I got on Vistaprint to get business cards. When I tallied it up, it was $20. I was like, I don’t know if I want to spend $20. … For $20, I could get three or four drinks tonight at the bar. If I spend $20, will I make it back? So — ugh, click,” he said. “Then my first phone call came.”

Watkins’ first tour earned him $90. A portion of his profits went back into building up his kayak inventory, first getting to seven, then eight, then finally the 19 he has now. 

In addition to the exercise benefits of kayaking, getting out on the water is a good way to de-stress and explore the Augusta area. The routes offered by Cole Watkins Tours take paddlers through Savannah River tributary Betty’s Branch, down the Augusta Canal, to visit wild donkeys at Stallings Island or to a close-up visit to the J. Strom Thurmond Dam.
​
“We’ve had kids as young as 1 in the kayaks with their parents and as old as, I didn’t ask, but upper 70s, maybe 80s. It’s not a hard thing to do. Augusta is a great spot to learn because there’s no crazy rapids. Most of the routes we offer are still or float downstream, like a lazy river,” Watkins said. 

types. Girls are way more balanced at kayaking. Their center of gravity is in their hips. Guys, especially muscled-up guys, are a little more wobbly,” Watkins said. “I was thinking [my first customer] was going to be fine in this kayak, and he fell in on a very cold 8 a.m. morning. My very first person I slid in tipped over.”
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Since then, he’s only had five or six paddlers take unintended dips in the water.

One of the plus-sides of business ownership is that at times when Watkins needed the extra income, he could make the decision and  give himself a raise.

“2016 is when I found out my son was coming, so I worked my butt off and had my best year yet. That’s all side money on the weekend,” Watkins said. “I put in a lot more hours. I was getting a lot more progressive at using money on Facebook to do group tours, even on weeknights. Normally when I got off work I go home. That year I was doing every Tuesday and Thursday [on the water], even Fridays. Anything I got, I accepted, and tried to make it work.”

Now that he’s both a husband and a father, and soon a father of two, Watkins dialed back how much he’s out on the water so he can spend more time with his family. He focuses a lot on rentals and tries to capitalize on having three waves of kayakers out each weekend day the business is open, and he reserves time to go on family vacations twice a year or so. 
​
Since he is more selective now than in previous years, Watkins will refer kayakers to his competitors if the situation calls for it.

kayaks out on the water with an individual he only sort-of knew. “I took him out there and he gave me $25 each. I was like, ‘Shoot, I just made $50, which was a lot of money for me when I was 21. I didn’t have to do anything but pick it up. So my whole plan changed.”

Today, about 66 percent of his business comes from kayak rentals.
​
“That was a thing that made me uncomfortable, but wound up being the best thing for this model,” he said.

In a recent issue of Vogue Knitting, there’s a story about how expressing beliefs through art is “as old as civilization,” said Atlanta, Georgia, resident and knitter Jill Vogin. In the US, it’s older than the country itself. According to the story, during the American Revolution British wool was taxed — and the American handspun yarn industry began.

“The American women, what they decided to do was stop using the fine wool that was coming out and using handspuns. There was a whole cottage industry during the Revolution of what women were making out of these scratchy fleeces that they were getting locally. … The American flag? It’s a quilt. Betsy Ross sewed it to express a baby country’s yearning for independence and its own identity,” Vogin said. “To me this is not a new phenomenon. This is as old as the hills. It’s just the materials we have are more sophisticated in some ways.”
​
For Vogin, those materials are a pair of knitting needles and a skein or 17 of yarn. Though she’s been knitting on behalf of causes she supports for several years, in late 2018 she debuted the next phase of her creativity.

“I said, ‘Find a knitter and buy the pattern,’” Vogin said. “We’ve sold a handful of them, a few hats and a few patterns. My goal is to just keep developing that over time. It really seemed to me that there is a niche there for people who want to be able to express themselves in these ways because so many women are going to the Capitol now to protest or to lobby. I can take that same basic hat pattern and put a powerful message on it.”

She’s developing a follow-up pattern in time for the 2019 Women’s Marches, inspired by people who share her political views being called snowflakes. Though she wouldn’t share all the details yet, Vogin did say that the phrase will be “I am the storm.”
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“I think about this whole concept of ‘liberal snowflakes’ and feeling like yeah, one snowflake is pretty weak, but a bunch of snowflakes together? Watch out. Winter is coming,” she said. 

>> color speaks

One of the first memories I have of Vogin is seeing her stand at the front of the room during the “show and tell” portion of an Atlanta Knitting Guild meeting and talk about her Elvis sweater. She knitted his portrait on a sweater in one of the most fabulous displays of colorwork I’ve ever seen, and it was followed by her John Lennon sweater. That one featured not only a portrait, but song lyrics as well. The techniques she learned making these pieces springboarded her craftivism — colorwork displays of motifs and words pertaining to causes and candidates she’s passionate about. 

When Jon Ossoff ran for Georgia’s 6th Congressional district, her sweater encouraged Georgians to “vote your Ossoff.” She knitted an abstract Statue of Liberty with “persist” emblazoned on it in day-glo neons, and recently finished a “speak truth to power” top that was featured in Atlanta Senior Life magazine.

“That’s kind of where I’ve been evolving to instead of, ‘hey, vote for this person,’ and more showing my love of the country and distain for some of the things that are going on,” Vogin said.
Much of her colorwork touches on hotbed topics, but Vogin hesitates to call her patterns and finished apparel political.
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“It’s beyond that, it’s more of who I am as a person. What I believe is so challenged right now by what’s going on with the government that it looks political, but it’s deeper than that,” Vogin said. “I’m using color and I’m using design to basically express what I’m feeling about what’s going on.”