Foxfire 11: Wild Plant Uses, Gardening, Wit, Wisdom, Recipes, Beekeeping, Toolmaking, Fishing, and More Affairs of Plain Living
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This chapter focuses on remembrances of old-time gardening and farm life; of planting by the signs; of life on the farm; of gathering as a community to bring in the harvest; of saving seeds; of going to the market; and of the few commercial farms in the area.
The people featured in this section represent years of knowledge and experience passed down from generation to generation. Most of them learned to garden out of necessity, and many of them still have bountiful gardens that produce delicious vegetables. There are many lessons to be learned from these men and women beyond how to make a good garden.
—Lacy Hunter
GARDENING
PLANTING BY THE SIGNS*
At one time, not only was planting by the signs a fairly common practice, it was regarded by many as absolutely necessary to ensure a successful crop, and thus survival. This region of God-fearing people often refer to the Bible as the source of this practice.
Furthermore, experience seemed to prove to many the necessity of planting by the signs, even when reasons as to why the practice worked were not obvious.
Mrs. Leona Carver discovered, as a small child, the consequences of not planting in the correct sign: “One time, the signs were in the heart, and us children were going to plant pole beans for sale. We had our ground ready, and we could not wait to plant them. Dad said, ‘You better wait because the signs are in the heart.’ We went on and planted them, and not one bean came up. We had to plant them over.” As Oakley Justice said, “I plant by the signs. I don’t know what, but there is something about it that makes crops grow better.”
PLATE 34 Leona Carver with Kari Hughes
Never plant when the signs are in the heart. Leona Carver emphatically stated, “You do not want to plant anything in the seasons when the signs are in the heart because they will rot in the ground.” Eva Vinson backs her up with a story about a man who planted when the signs were in the heart, and his crop failed. “The lion’s in the heart, and you know, I want to tell you, when we was a-farmin’, a man sowed a cabbage bed when the signs was in the heart and I told him, I said, ‘Watch ’em rot.’ And you know, they set out that, and they didn’t get one cabbage out of that patch. They all rotted.”
If crops can’t be planted when the signs are in the heart, then when should they be planted? Well, according to the Vinsons, beans, at least, should be planted when the signs are in the arms. As Eva said, “They have more beans on ’em. The vines, they spread out. We had ’em down there, this summer was a year ago, and you never saw as pretty a beans. We didn’t have many rows, and we had more beans than we could use. And it’s just wonderful just to see ’em how pretty they are.” She goes on to list other plants that should be planted when the signs are in the arms. “Anything that runs—a vine—plant when the signs is in the arms. Pumpkins, tomatoes, cucumbers, just anything.” According to Leona Carver, “You should plant in the arms or the feet. Those are good times to plant things.”
For plants that grow underground, however, the arms do not seem to be an auspicious time for planting. When planted on the “dark nights” of the moon (the three nights in the last quarter of the moon before it reaches the new moon), underground plants such as potatoes seem to fare the best. According to Oakley Justice, “Irish potatoes—you plant them on dark nights of the old of the moon. [If you plant them] on the new of the moon, they grow vines and no potatoes much.” Eva Vinson agreed, saying, “Stuff that bears underground, now, that’s another thing. My uncle’s always said that he didn’t plant potaters in the moon. He planted ’em in the ground. And he had a bunch of vines and no potaters, you see. They make vines if you don’t plant ’em when you’re supposed to. That’s on the dark moon and not in the heart or in the bowels. Now, in the heart or in the bowels, like them cabbage, they’ll rot.”
Corn also seems to fare better when planted on the dark nights.
Eva’s husband, Frank Vinson, told us, “You want to plant corn on the dark moon. When you plant it on the new moon, that stuff’ll grow fifteen feet high and the ears [will stick] right straight up. The shuck won’t come over the end of it and then water gets in there and, why, it rots! And on the dark moon, [the ears will] grow out there and hang right over. Now, there was a feller down here at Otto [North Carolina] years ago when I lived down there, [and] he had ten acres of corn to plant. He didn’t believe in the moon, and he planted half of it on the new moon, and it done just like I told you about that new moon stuff. He waited about ten days (it had rained and got the ground wet), and he planted on the dark of the moon, and them ears just hung over [like they were supposed to]. He said he’d never plant no more on the new moon!”
PLATE 35 Frank Vinson
Not only do the signs appear to affect the success of crops, they also seem to hold the fate of other activities as well. Pickling, for instance, is not done when the signs are in the bowels. As Leona Carver said, “When the signs is in the bowels, then you better not pickle anything from the garden because it would smell real bad.”
The signs don’t just affect planting and pickling. As Eva Vinson told us, mothers watched the signs when weaning their babies. “Now, people used to, when a baby was on the breast, they would start weaning that baby when the signs was in the knees, and [when the signs would] go out the foot, the baby was weaned. That’s right.”
The heart seems to be a bad time not only for planting but also for activities that might cause bleeding. Frank Vinson illustrated this point. “I know about that heart business. They’s a woman down here had her tooth pulled when the signs was in the heart, and it liked to bled her to death. She sent for my uncle to stop the blood, and whenever they told him, why it stopped. [He knew how to stop bleeding] [But] it liked to [have] killed her.” (For faith healing, see The Foxfire Book, pages 346–68.)
Times are changing, and fewer people strictly follow the signs when planting. Most families do not depend on the signs, but rather on the weather, the time of year, and when time permits. But when we asked Jimmie and Juanita Kilby, they told us that there was truth to what the old-timers said, and both remembered their parents planting by the signs. However, they couldn’t really remember which signs were favorable for planting what, and their garden has been beautiful every year for as long as can be remembered. Still, Eva Vinson gives a compelling argument for planting by the signs. “That’s God’s work. The Bible says the moon’s for signs and seasons. And that’s the handiwork of God, that moon business, and these signs and all that. People’s just follered it up, you know, all the way ’til they just know it works.”
PLATE 36 Jimmie and Juanita Kilby
BEAN STRINGINGS, PEA THRASHINGS,
AND CORN SHUCKINGS
Once the plants in the garden had matured, the hard work had just begun. Even today, the gathering, stringing, shucking, and shelling of various garden vegetables to be frozen or canned for the winter is a summertime ritual for many families. Although the task is often tedious, the friendly, ever-inventive mountaineers find it a good excuse for a social gathering.
Adam Foster told us about bean stringings and pea thrashings. “When I was growin’ up, we’d have old-timey bean stringings. When we had a lot of beans, we’d get out and pick fifteen to twenty bushels, bring ’em in, and throw ’em down in the middle of the floor. Put sheets or quilts on the floor to keep from getting dirty. We’d ask all our neighbors in to help string them beans. So they’d come in and string beans and throw beans at one another, the boys and girls would. Yeah, we had lots of good times back then. Just enjoyed ourselves.
PLATE 37 Mr. and Mrs. Adam Foster
“We growed corn and wheat and stuff like that. Corn, wheat, and Irish potatoes, peas, rye, and sweet potatoes. That was the stuff we had to eat here on the farm. The year me and my wife was married, we growed sixty-five bushels of old clay peas. You’ve heard tell of them. [We] picked that many peas right up there on the pasture ground. We didn’t pick ’em all, though. We had two acres in peas, and we let other people pick on the halves. They’d
give us half of what they picked. So that’s how come us to have sixty-five bushels. We wouldn’t never [have] gotten so many. We had to thrash ’em. They was dry peas. We thrashed ’em with big poles—just let the peas lay out in the sun a day or two, then lay them peas on a sheet. We’d take the poles and beat the peas out. Get a bucket and pour them into it.”
Bernice Taylor recalled times when all the neighbors would gather to help shuck corn and then share a big meal afterward as a reward for an evening of hard work. “We had corn shuckings, but not barn dances. Back then they would church you if you danced. When we had our corn shuckings, the whole community would come help us gather our corn and haul it up. They would come back the next day and go to another house and do the same thing. We had a good time. When we had them shuckings, everybody would come in, both the women and the men. But the women didn’t go to the shucking business until after dinner. Everybody that came brought a dish of something. Then Mama would cook what she was gonna cook, and we had plenty to eat.”
Esco Pitts also remembered corn shuckings and told us about how the teenagers in the community would use those times as an opportunity for courting and flirting. “We had corn shuckings. People farmed in those days, and they lived on the farm. They’d gather their corn in the fall of the year and pile it under the shed in the crib. Then they’d go out in the community and invite all their neighbors to come in and help husk the corn. They’d come in, and the womenfolks, a lot of them would help at the corn pile, and a lot of the older women would gather in and prepare the meal for the people. Have a big dinner. They’d have a great spread of something to eat. So they did that, and they had a good time. After the corn shucking was over in the evening (if they got it all shucked and put up in the barn and had everything cleaned up), lots of times there was plenty left over from the midday meal for the evening meal. After they’d eat supper, they’d have a party, and we’d have a candy drawing [candy pulling].
“Sometimes they’d have a box supper—a cake sale—and the young folks would bring in cakes, and they would auction them off. Whoever bought this cake got to court the girl that made it. That’s the way they got their money out of it. The money was taken up for different purposes. They had different interests that they wanted to raise a little money for. I think most of it went to the church. They’d say, ‘Now, here’s a cake baked by a certain young girl in the audience.’ And the young men would go to bidding on that, and if [a girl] had a special friend there, he’d bid just as long as he had any money. And the other boys tried to keep, him from winning it because they wanted to make him pay for it. They did too!”
SEED SAVING
Almost every aspect of the old ways of life points to a time of self-sufficiency and independence. Just as most of the food, clothing, and other necessities were made on the farm, so were the seeds needed for planting. Today when a farmer plants his garden, he goes to the feed-store and buys hybrid seeds that produce a slightly better yield. Every year he repeats the process for three reasons: because the hybrid plants don’t reproduce their own seeds; because he can afford to do so; and because it is easier than saving seeds. Many years ago, however, not only were hybrid crops that didn’t produce seeds unheard-of, money was so rare that when families had some, they used it for necessities that couldn’t be grown on the farm. Because seeds could be gathered from the crop, families simply made a habit of saving seeds from year to year, thus ensuring the success of their gardens and their survival. Although the practice is slowly dying out, a few people do still save their seeds. One of them is Numerous Marcus. Here he tells about what he grows and how he saves his seed from year to year.
PLATE 38 Numerous Marcus
“I try to make a garden every year. We grow most of our vegetables like tomatoes, potatoes, and cabbage. I save most of my seeds, all I can of them. I’ve got some old-fashioned seed corn, field corn. I pick out the biggest, prettiest ears and save the best I’ve got for my seeds. You have to let the kernels get hard on the darned things or they’ll mold up on you. You can take the kernels off the cob if you want to, but I usually just rub the tip end off and get the faulty grains out and save the center of it—keep it in a box or something where it can get plenty of air. You could tie a string around it and hang it up if you wanted to. If it’s good and dry it won’t freeze and bust.
“We’d save our tomato seeds too. We’d put the tomatoes on a paper and let the tomatoes dry up, and the seeds would be left. Let them dry real good. Don’t let them get too hot or get wet. If they get damp, they’ll mold and rot. When you get them good and dry, you can put them in a container of some kind with holes in it so they can get plenty of air. They’ve got to have a little air or by gosh, they’ll mold over on you. If you leave the tomatoes on the vine and let them rot, then you could have volunteers [plants that come back on their own] the next year.
“You could take a cabbage and grow them up good and mature and leave them over ’til next year and set them out again, and they’ll grow up and make seed. Collards are the same way. You could set collards out again, and they’ll bloom and form a head. They’ll make seeds, and turnips are the same way. Just one cabbage head or one collard green would make all the seeds you would want. You could put the cabbage seed in a paper sack or something just so it could get air. To store the cabbage head until you get ready to set it back out, you can dig a hole out in the ground where the land drains good. Turn the cabbage upside down so the root is pointing up to the sky. This way the water will drain off. The other way, it would catch the water, and [the] cabbage would rot. Then you put tarpaper over the cabbage and cover it up with a bit of dirt so it won’t freeze too bad.”
Billy Long elaborated on how his father picked which plants to use for seed and which to eat. “We always saved different kinds of seeds—bean seeds, potatoes, and corn. You wanted to kinda pick the [best]. In corn, you always picked a good straight grain. You could see it when you shucked it. My daddy always wanted to plant that kind. When he was shuckin’, he would lay them out.
“[With beans] he’d let some of them go to seed. They’d turn yellow, then he’d pick ’em, let ’em dry, and hull them out. We used to make all of our soup beans that way.
“With sweet potatoes you usually just take so many, bed them down in a tub or something, and they’d sprout out and get big enough to set out. We’d slip them eyes off and reset them.”
GOING TO THE MARKET
Most of what farm families grew went toward family needs. The few surplus crops that were grown, however, along with the occasional chicken or eggs, were taken to market to provide money, one of the few items that could not be grown or raised.
Amanda Turpin described the reasons for this practice. “We didn’t have any crops for sale much. We just grew enough stuff for ourselves—corn, beans, other vegetables like that. We would keep a few chickens and have a few eggs to sell. We’d get a little money that way, but we didn’t have much money.
“In the fall, my daddy would haul produce to sell down in Royston or Athens. We called it ‘going down in the country.’ He’d take apples and chestnuts and cabbages, mostly. We didn’t have too much way to haul produce in and out. People would have to go in wagons and bring it up here. The train just came to Tallulah Falls, and there wasn’t too much shipped up here, just things people had to have like flour, sugar, and coffee. We mostly had to grow what we ate.”
PLATE 39 “We’d get a little money that way, but we didn’t have much money.”—Amanda Turpin
Adam Foster gave a touching account of taking produce to the market with his father when he was a child, and later, as a teenager by himself for his ailing father.
“When I was a kid, me and my daddy went to Clarkesville with a load of Irish potatoes, and we were gone three days from Tiger to Clarkesville. I was four years old, and I can remember that trip. We started, and my mother went with us. She had a sister that lived over there in Habersham County. The first day, she rode with us over there, and she stayed all night, and w
e did too.
“The next night me and my daddy started, and my mother stayed there with her sister. Well, I was just a four-year-old kid. We got a way down there next to Clarkesville—five miles from Clarkesville—and it was getting dark. There was a camp alongside the road there where people camped with their wagons. [Daddy] said, ‘We’ll stop right here and stay all night.’ I can remember that just as well if you’d told me five minutes ago. Said, ‘We’ll stay all night right here.’ Well, it was comin’ up a storm. I never have heard better in my life. Thunder and lightnin’, but he got his mules tied to the wagon, and he just left me a-sittin’ up in it—an old covered wagon. We had our taters back in the back. I was sittin’ there and went to sleep ‘fore the rain ever come—the storm. And them mules got scared, and they got to jumpin’ and surging about there, and they broke loose from the wagon, and they was just backwards and forwards, up and down that road. Them mules would run five hundred yards that way, and then here they’d go back the other way that far. They wouldn’t leave. So it was just back and forth nearly all night. They didn’t even take time to eat hardly.
“So next mornin’ Daddy got up and them mules was standin’ right there at the back of the wagon. He just walked up, tied ’em, and fed ’em. They wouldn’t leave a wagon. They thought that was home. They was trained mules. They knowed just as well what to do as I did.
“I was fifteen years old when me and my father started off to Athens with a load of apples—dried fruit. We got down to Cornelia, and my oldest brother lived there. So we drove in there and stayed all night with him, and we was a-goin’ the next mornin’. Another one of my brothers was goin’ with us. Next mornin’ my daddy was sick with a cold, the flu, you know. He wasn’t able to get out and go on. I was fifteen years old, and he said, Adam, I reckon you can go. Take this load on to Athens with the wagon.’