Foxfire 11: Wild Plant Uses, Gardening, Wit, Wisdom, Recipes, Beekeeping, Toolmaking, Fishing, and More Affairs of Plain Living

by Lacy Hunter;Foxfire Students Kaye Carver Collins

  “[The looks are] what sells Red Delicious. [Some of them are just beautiful and taste awful.] I like the Red Delicious that I grow or that somebody else grows in the East that are at just the right stage. I don’t like them mealy; I don’t like them green. I like them just right.”

  In response to a comment made by Lacy Hunter that she liked Granny Smith apples, Mr. Massee jokingly said, “I worry about anybody that likes Granny Smith. That’s the worst apple I ever put in my mouth. It’s so sour, you know. It’s just awful sour. You’d probably like the Lodi apple if you like Granny Smith.

  “The price of apples has not changed a whole lot, but the price of labor and spray material and the cost of land and everything’s gone up. In 1945 my daddy sold a crop of apples for five dollars a bushel. And in 1990 I sold a crop of apples for about five or six dollars a bushel. He was paying fifteen cents an hour for labor, and I pay a minimum of five dollars an hour for labor. That’s probably going to change now that minimum wage is going up.

  “There are anywhere from sixty-four to one hundred thirty-eight apples in a bushel. If it’s sixty-four, they’re big; if it’s one hundred thirty-eight, they’re medium. Then the ones that go in the bags, it takes about one hundred fifty of them to make a bushel. It’s all related to size. The bigger the apple, the smaller the number. The average-sized apple is three inches in diameter.

  “I would only recommend going into the apple business if you were a rich man, had a lot of money, or a rich lady, and could withstand several years of getting into it ’cause it’s real expensive to get started. If you were going to go out, buy the land, get the right site, buy the trees, it costs about fifty dollars per tree to get into production. So if you’re putting one hundred trees per acre, that’s five thousand dollars per acre trying to get into production. You’re going to pay another five thousand to buy the rest; then you’ve got ten thousand dollars in it without any work involved. You’ve got another four or five years, a lot of the time, before that tree comes in. So it takes a lot of investment, and there’s not a banker in the world that’s going to bankroll somebody to do that unless they’ve got a lot of collateral.”

  Another facet of the apple-growing industry in this region is the work it provided for those who did not necessarily own the orchards, but tended them. Alvin Alexander recalled working for John P. Fort as a foreman.

  “I worked in an orchard all my life—ever since I was a kid. I went up there when they was grafting. I told ’em I hadn’t never done that before, but I was gonna give it a try. I watched how they done it, and I got me a knife and a saw and grafted ’em just like they did. Every cherry tree I grafted up there lived, and they didn’t lose a tree.

  PLATE 44 “I didn’t make much in the orchard. About a dollar a day. Finally got to be a dollar and a half, and we thought we was getting rich.”—Alvin Alexander

  “I didn’t make much in the orchard. About a dollar a day. I Finally got to a dollar and a half, and we thought we was getting rich. I was a foreman for the Forts for years and years—six dollars a week. Paid two dollars of it a week for boarding. Then I had four dollars left. I thought I was doing well. Bet I could take that four dollars and buy more than you can with twenty-five now.

  “I worked for Mr. Fort about thirty years. He hired me for a foreman when I was twenty years old. I was a foreman for the Forts for years and years.

  “Mr. Fort was one of the smartest men that was ever in this country. He was just born for apple growin’. He was always experimenting on everything he growed, but his main business was growin’ ’em to sell. He used to ship ’em on the Tallulah Falls Railroad. I used to load eight and ten cars from Baldwin to Cornelia.

  “He was a great orchard man. He came to this area from Athens. He set out the first peach trees that was ever set out in Habersham County. He also had several apple orchards between here and Cornelia, and he had every orchard named. The one in Cornelia on that high hill was Clearview, and the one in Mount Airy was Bright Hope, and he had one between Mount Airy and Cornelia called Esco. Now, the Turkey Cove orchard in Rabun County was about fifty or sixty acres. He named it Turkey Cove because when he first bought it, he seen a bunch of turkeys.

  “He set this orchard out way back years ago. Two men come with him from Cornelia. They thought he was going crazy. They got suspicious of him and were about to slip off and go back to Cornelia. He’d stop all along, put his ear to the ground, and listen. He was listenin’ to air breezes. If the wind blows, it won’t frost. Turkey Cove’s up on a high mountain in a gap that comes across there. He went on up there, and the air come through that gap all the time. You hardly ever go up there but what the wind’s not blowin’ right in your face. I don’t think it’s ever failed havin’ a crop of apples because of that.

  “That Fort’s Prize apple was just a big of red apple up here in the country somewhere. He pulled up some sprouts where they’d come up and set ’em out, and they made big red apples. They was having a big state fair for apples, and he carried some of those apples to the fair and took the prize for the whole state of Georgia. That’s why he called ’em Fort’s Prize.

  “I never was the foreman at Turkey Cove. I was a foreman between Cornelia and Baldwin. But one year, when the foreman at Turkey Cove died, I took a crew of men and gathered the Turkey Cove crop for Mr. Fort. I think we gathered almost fifty hundred [five thousand] bushels there that year. That’s a lot of apples.

  “I stayed with ’em till all of ’em went away, and that left me settin’ out in the cold, because they finally let somebody else have the orchard. So then I came to work in Rabun County for the Catheys in 1934.

  “The Catheys had a large operation for growing apples. Over at Mr. Cathey’s, we grafted several hundred trees at one time for his great big orchard. We’d go over there and graft trees of a night ’til ten or eleven o’clock. Then just lay off some rows in the garden, heave ’em out, and throw a little loose dirt over ’em. Then let ’em go for about a year, take ’em up, and set ’em out.

  “When they first got ready to spray the trees, they had a pump house that contained large cement vats in which they mixed water and chemicals together to spray on the apples. Then they pumped the mixture out through a three-quarter-inch pipe that run underground all over the orchard. Every two-hundred-foot section of hose was hooked for spraying the trees. The first spray was when the trees first bloomed and then one more time in the middle of the year.”

  Another veteran of the apple orchards is Hugh Holcomb. Mr. Holcomb pointed out some of the changes that took place while he worked in the apple orchards and some of the changes since he left.

  “Back in the early twenties, Mr. [Julian] Roberts came here from Florida and bought Glassy Mountain. He set out an apple orchard, but he knew very little about growing apples. My dad, Jeff Holcomb, took it over and looked after it for him.

  PLATE 45 Hugh Holcomb

  “They cleared the land with a crosscut saw and chopping ax. They would pile up big sawed logs and burn ’em. The land was steep and hard to work on. They went with a wagon anywhere they could and used a sled anywhere else. In later years, they built roads with picks, shovels, and a drag scoop pulled by a mule.

  “We used a pick and shovel and a crowbar and a mattock up there to plant the trees. It was so rocky you had to shovel the dirt. There wasn’t no such thing as an auger to bore the holes with, so you had to go in there with just a shovel and mattock and dig your holes. And it was so rocky that sometimes you had to pry big rocks out of the holes and then get dirt to fill it back up.

  “We’d dig a hole about eighteen inches around, and [the depth was] according to your tree. Some would be a lot deeper than the others on account of the rocks. And sometimes you’d have to plant ’em between rocks—anywhere that you could find to get a place to put it. You couldn’t keep direct rows like you can now where there aren’t so many rocks.

  “There wasn’t many apples made while Mr. Roberts had the orchard because he had nothing but Stark’s
Delicious, and they would not pollinize theirselves. You know Stark’s Delicious apple trees have to have a pollinator, something like a Grime’s Golden or Arkansas Black or Yates to make them bear. In the spring of the year, when it’d come time for the apple trees to bloom, we would go over at the Tiger orchards here and cut blooms off the Winesap trees and Yates trees and all the trees that were pollinizers and haul them to Glassy [Mountain]. We’d nail buckets up in the trees and also set big barrels full of water around in the orchard and put those blooms in those buckets and barrels. That’s the way he got his apples to bearing at Glassy, until he had time to get some trees planted for pollinizers.

  “Wild bees came off of the mountain, and they did the pollinizing. Bees was all over the mountain. The wind might carry some pollen, but bees was the biggest pollination that’s done. The wind might blow some from tree to tree, but it wouldn’t blow it very far.

  “The high elevations in Rabun County make this good apple-growing country. We plant at elevations above the frost line. If you go up there at Glassy, they had a frost line, and you could almost tell, after the summertime come, where this had hit. Your trees would have more apples on ’em after the orchard got up to a certain height on the mountain. And the higher the elevation, the better the apples grew.

  “Sometimes the frost would maybe kill one out of ten or maybe two out of five or something like that, and you’d still have plenty of apples on your tree for a good crop of apples. Sometimes the frost would help you thin your apples if there was too heavy a bloom. We never used a heater of any kind to keep frost or freeze down, but in later years, we’d go build fires in the orchard, and the smoke from the fires sometimes would keep the frost off if it didn’t get down too cold.

  “Robert Massee, who owns that orchard now, [used] gas when it [got] cold. He [had] gas burners which [would] blow the heat and would keep the moisture in the air stirring and keep the frost from getting on the trees. Ice, just like frost, would freeze your buds, freeze your little apples.

  “It does make a difference which side of the mountain the apples are planted on, because of the frost. The north side doesn’t have as much frost as the south side of the hills. That’s the reason your north side of your hills was better than the south side to grow apples—on account of frost and weather in the spring of the year. You’d have an earlier frost on the south side and it would cause your apples to get killed during blooming. Down low in the valleys, your trees would get bigger, but you’d only get a good crop of apples maybe every three or four years. The frost’d come and kill the ones that was low down, although they was bigger trees.

  “Too much rainfall could hurt if you couldn’t spray insecticide. Insects cause scab and bitter rot and stuff like that on your apples. It would cause your apples to get infected if you had too much rain. That was the only time rain would hurt. The more rain you have during the growing season, the better the apples are. Then you need a lot of sunshine to make ’em color when they start ripening.

  “We grafted all over the orchard on all those Delicious trees with different kinds of apples. Arkansas Black was a good one, and Black Twig and Yates were good grafting trees. We had one old-timey tree there, Streak o’June, on the branch right down in the middle of the orchard, and you could see where that tree was because it was a good pollinizer when it bloomed. There would be apples for about four or five trees out from it—just loaded—and the trees out from that didn’t have as many.

  “We pruned in the winter, the dormant season, and it was awful cold up there on Glassy Mountain. We depended on a pair of straight pruners and a saw. We would prune the trees, but the orchard owners back then wouldn’t let us do nothing but cut the water sprouts out. The higher the trees got, the better they like it. There was no spreading of the limbs, they wanted ’em to grow straight up. And they didn’t thin ’em out none; they just let the trees grow straight up. Therefore, the sun didn’t get in much on the trees, on the apples on the inside.

  “We’d go up there on Glassy with big mowing blades, sickles they called ’em, and mow the weeds down to where we could get through it two or three times a year. There was snakes everywhere you went up at Glassy. We’d kill a rattlesnake or two or three pilots [copperheads] every day when we was mowing. I remember one time I was mowing and a big rattlesnake struck where I’d stepped and went between my legs, and the man below me slapped his mower on it. I think it had eight rattlers. It struck at me and just barely went by my leg as I stepped. They was every day killing a rattlesnake or a pilot one. But nobody never got bit. We was always lucky.

  “When I came back from the CCC’s, I went to workin’ up at Glassy for Mr. Massee all the time, and we set out another orchard about like that first one I was telling you about. After we got this one started, we set out about thirty or forty acres of Red Delicious and some Golden Delicious, Yates, Arkansas Black, and several other kinds of apples that would pollinize the Red Delicious. We didn’t put in any kind of fertilizer at the time we planted them. After a year, then we just put regular commercial fertilizer on ’em, lime and some ammonia nitrate, but not very much. Back then they didn’t put as much fertilizer as they do today. We never did put ashes around them. We’d haul manure out of cow barns or horse barns and put that around ’em when we could find it.

  “In the summertime, when we weren’t mowing, we were spraying. When Mr. Roberts owned the orchard, we used a barrel spray pulled by mules on an old sled, and I remember I’d ride on that sled and pump it. You pumped it like an old water pump, and that sprayed. My dad sprayed the trees, and one of my brothers would drive the mule, and I’d stand on that spray and ride and pump that thing.

  “They didn’t spray but two or three times during the whole season, and the biggest thing they used back then was lime and sulfur and arsenic of lead. They started off spraying with lime barrels. That was for your wood, to coat the back and kill insects’ eggs, same as the oil is used today. That was for your first spray, to protect the wood. I don’t remember what proportions it came in, but it was strong. It’d eat you up. A many a time my fingers’d be eaten around my fingernails, and it’d be round my eyes where it’d get on them, and I’d come home and have to scrub half the night to get it off my face and hands before I could eat supper. It wouldn’t come off very easy. You’ve smelt sulfur, and you know what sulfur smells like. And we used arsenic of lead mostly spraying for insects.

  “They didn’t use too many fungicides then. They used arsenic of lead, and then they had a Black Flag stuff they mixed with that to kill the insects. It was very poison, and it’d kill all the birds.

  “The chemicals was worse then than they are today. They’re outlawed today. They won’t let ’em use that kind of stuff today in the orchards. Lead and stuff like that is against the law to use. They’ve got new chemicals, which I don’t know about. They’ve come out since I quit working. I haven’t worked much in apple orchards in thirty years.

  “Sometimes it’d be two or three weeks or longer after the last spray before you started picking. You had to let that stuff get off of the apples.

  “After Mr. Massee took the orchard over, he put a pump house at the upper end of the orchard and run a pipeline, a three-quarter-inch galvanized pipe, all the way down the mountain. Every two hundred foot, he’d put a standpipe, and we had a spray gun with just one nozzle on it and a big two-hundred-foot-long black hose. One man’d use the spray gun, and two of us’d pull that hose around all them rocks and bushes. He had the pipes about every three to four hundred foot apart so we could hook on from one to the other. The pipes’d go out, and then down the line. He would have ’em about a hundred foot apart where we could spray and reach further in and could go around the orchard. One team would go two hundred foot, and then the other two men on your other line would come the other way and meet you coming down the mountain. Be three or four crews a-spraying.

  “It did better than the hand pump. You could get the tops of the trees. After Mr. Massee took it over, he cut some of
the trees back, cut the tops off.

  “There was a natural spring coming off of Glassy Mountain, and he had a big reservoir there that he held his water in. He didn’t put any chemicals in that reservoir. He had a tank sitting there with his pump. I think it was about a five-hundred-gallon tank. It was made of wood. Then he had a pump gasoline engine settin’ on the end of it. No electricity. You’d crank that engine and run your pump. You’d get about three hundred pound pressure on the pump, and that would spray it into the lines. The spray nozzles were in a cone shape—nozzles were like the same guns they use today. They didn’t have the pressure they have now, and it came out in a heavier mist.

  “They didn’t spray much ’til after the apples bloomed and started shedding. Then’s when you put on your spray, because if you put on this poison spray during the blooming season, you’d kill all your bees, and then you wouldn’t have anything to set your pollen.

  “To irrigate, there was two or three ‘branches coming off the mountain, and when it got dry, Mr. Massee would turn that water down into his reservoir and open it up through his spray pipes and let it run out over his orchard down through there. Just gravity flow. It wasn’t run by no pump or anything, just gravity force would force it down into the orchard. You could see a lot of difference if it was real dry. Where the water went around the trees, your apples would be bigger than the ones you couldn’t get water to. It’d run around the hill and then seep down to maybe two or three trees. You couldn’t get all over your orchard ’cause there wasn’t enough water coming through this three-quarter-inch pipe to do much except right down the line where the trees run.

  “We thinned all the time by hand. We’d climb up into the trees and pick off some of the green apples and throw ’em down so there wouldn’t be so many apples that the limbs would break off. We’d cut poles and nail ’em together to make a brace or cut a fork in the pole and prop up the limbs to keep ’em from splittin’ the trees. You couldn’t hardly get through the orchard with a sled or a wagon or anything else when there were so many props under the trees. If you had a big crop, props were standin’ thick under the trees. You couldn’t ever get enough thinned off these big long limbs, if you had a big bumper crop, to what they’d bust off or break if you didn’t put a prop under ’em. You could thin half of ’em off, and then there’d be sometimes more than the trees could hold after the apples got up a big size. If you had too heavy a crop on your trees, and you didn’t thin them out well, you wouldn’t have a productive crop the next year. You usually had all the apples that a tree would stand to hold, if the frost didn’t get ’em, even when you thinned them out a lot.