Alan is also known as The Victoria Addict. In the 2002-2003 season he provided us with a weekly text and photo journal of his experiences as a first time Victoria grower. It is a valuable resource and linked at the bottom of the page.

I was born Alan Gregory Montour on September 27,1961. Let me see, that would make me 22 years old. Yeah, that's it -- 22. My birth certificate says that I was born in Baltimore City, Maryland. That means I started my life as a city boy. I grew up making mud pies, riding bicycles, and cleaning up the neighborhood by collecting soda pop bottles. I took them to the penny candy store where I could get candy with the earnings from another man's trash. Boy, were they the good old days!

Weekends and summers were spent at my mother's parents' homes on the western shores of the Chesapeake Bay. There was no running water, electricity or heat and air conditioning in one of them. And in later years one was next to Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant. But there was the water, vast numbers of fish species, the Maryland Blue Crab, and many forms of aquatic plant and other animal life forms. I remember once we were told we were eating turtle soup for supper. Was this the same turtle that lived under the house? Fireworks were legal then, the Maryland Blue Crab was not threatened, and you could catch Striped Bass, "Rock Fish", in record numbers. Years of over-harvesting, mans' pollution and progress, have now endangered the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries. Please help to restore a valuable and cherished resource and future childhood memories. This was my first association with water and its ecosystems.

The city environment was changing rapidly and my parents sought a better environment to raise their family and that's when we moved to the "country", Baltimore County. Are there wild animals there? Oh my! So what where we doing on a 17 acre farm anyway? After all we were city folk. The farm tractor was purchased, the earth plowed, the seed planted, and we were then vegetable farmers. We as children just had to have a horse, a pony, chickens, one honorary goose, and the story of the possible adoption of a circus elephant that needed a larger home.

	This was my first association with the seed, the plant, and the harvest. The farm was only a rental and, upon the death of its owner, the farm was to be sold. My parents fought hard to purchase this piece of the earth but it wasn't meant to be. But there were more childhood memories to cherish and to prepare me for adulthood. So this is 2003, subtract 1961. Oh my -- I am 42 years old!
		Put all my life's ingredients together, mix them up, shake and stir, and you have a man planting his feet in Owings Mills, Maryland, wishing he was living on the Chesapeake Bay, wishing he was living on a 100 acre farm, but who decided to bring a slice of the farm to him, to bring a body of water to him, and caught a Victoria addiction. Alan, Maryland Victoria Addict and Second Year Ponder