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

  When we heared it a-comin’ so bad, my dad rolled out of the bed on his knees and started prayin’. Course the rest of us was prayin’ too, the ones of us that prayed, and askin’ the Lord to take care of us. We just lived in an old common house. You know, that storm, it was a-comin’ right towards us; but, instead, it just took the whole mountain above us down, just blowed ever’ bit of it down, all the timber and a big of tree right above the house, so big around I couldn’t reach around it. It blowed it down just right above our house. Then it went on across the mountain, but it come down there at our house, went on across the mountain, and come down at Sylvan Lake. They’d built a big of dance hall down there, right pretty close to the lake, and a whole lot of cabins. Well, it blowed all them cabins and that dance hall—piano and all—into the lake.

  I guess I was about sixteen or seventeen years old when this happened. It was the worst storm I’ve ever been in. And after that, then we had a little place Papa dug out in the bank and fixed us a cellar to put our canned stuff in so it wouldn’t freeze, and when it’d come pretty bad wind and start stormin’ like windy, my daddy’d say, “Let’s go get in that cellar.” So we’d go get in that cellar and stay ’til it got gone. That storm didn’t even touch our house. I don’t know, the Lord just blessed us, I reckon. It just passed, just barely heard a little wind hit it one time, and it just went on by. Everything was just fine; our barn, you know, it was just an old shack of a barn, but it was still a-standin’ the next morning, and our cattle and everythin’ was all right, and everythin’ we had was all right. There wasn’t nothin’ blowed away nowhere, but it sure destroyed the stuff on down the hill.

  We didn’t stay there very long ’til we moved down on Wolffork. Then we moved from Wolffork up in here to Mountain City, and we’ve been up in here ever since. We ain’t had but about one since then I reckon, a pretty bad one that blowed the apple house away over yonder on the Cathey farm, but we’ve got a dugout down there in the bank. When it gets to blowin’ pretty hard, we usually take off down there and get in it.

  PLATE 158

  [Later,] when we moved down from up in little Germany, we moved down to Wolffork at the Rickman place over there, and we lived there, I don’t remember just how long, but we lived there a pretty good little while. We tended all them big old bottoms. Course, my daddy wasn’t hardly able to work; he had a nervous breakdown. Me and my older brother, we worked a lot, you know. We worked in the field, and then we worked out for people too, to buy his medicine. Then, after he got better, they moved back out here to what they call Turkey Cove. I still stayed over on Wolffork. I stayed with my sister that lived over there awhile, and then, after I got married, why, we lived up there a little while up at the upper end of Black’s Creek.

  Then we moved off—well, we moved several times. We moved to the same house where my younger sister was born, where we lived on Wolffork. We put in a big crop over there, and we had to get my daddy’s horse and buggy to do our plowing. So we got that horse and buggy and we got through plowing. We had a little A-model car, and so my husband said, “Y’uns can drive the buggy,” ’cause I couldn’t drive the car—never did learn to drive. He said, “And y’uns can drive the horse an’ buggy back up here, and I’ll take the car for us to come back home in.”

  Well, he told us, said, “Now, I’ll beat y’uns up there.” I had my two daughters, Mary Ethel and Laurie Anne, with me. Mary Ethel was about five years old ’cause Laurie Anne was just a small child, about a year, I guess. Anyhow, we got in the buggy, and we took off, and, buddy, we was there a long time before he got there ’cause he had a flat tire and had to fix it. He said, “Well, I won’t never tell y’uns no more that I’ll beat y’uns there, ’cause I had bad luck.”

  Then we moved from there. My daddy had a big farm over there on Wolffork, below the Baptist Church on Wolffork. He tended all that land in here and we lived in that little house there awhile, in front o’ the church. We had a garden there too—we had big, big ol’ fields of beans, corn, and all kind of stuff like that. Of course, my children, we’d send them out to work in the garden, and they’d leave the weeds and cut the stuff down, you know. We had a whole lot of field peas planted in the corn, and they left the ragweed—thought they was the peas—and cut the peas down. I told ’em I believed they done that just to keep from hoeing in the garden. They laughed at me, but I think they finally found out, you know, what to do.

  I’ve just worked and worked and worked and worked, farming and building houses. Well, I’ve helped build two houses. We built one up yonder [above her present house] first, and I helped build it. Then I helped build this’un. And my brother-in-law that’s dead, Mark Chastain, he built a house up in North Carolina, so we went up there and helped him work on it some. I told ’em I reckon I’d done everything but work in a sawmill. I ain’t never worked at no sawmill, but I’ve sawed wood and cleared pine mountains and everything like that, and built pasture fences and milked cows and fed hogs and chickens and just a little of everything.

  Of course, my children, after they got up a bit older, they knowed how to work in the gardens and everything, but Mary Ethel ain’t never had a garden. Laurie had one. She likes to garden. Mary Ethel set her out a ‘mater plant or two, but she’d rather work out on a public job as to farm.

  I really love to work in the dirt. Last year, I just prayed and asked the Lord to give me strength to be able to plant some beans and be able to work. Then I went down there and planted me five rows of beans in the garden, and planted them and covered them and everything. And then, when they come up, I asked Him for strength to be able to hoe them, and I worked them beans, and I made quite a few beans last year. I didn’t even have to buy none. I usually have to buy beans every year, but last year I didn’t even have to buy none, and I had beans to can, and some I give my neighbors and all.

  I’ve done got two little pea patches planted this year. I got my English peas up about two inches high, one patch of them; the other ones was up about that high, the tender ones that you eat hull and all. They’re growing faster than the tough ones. They’re really a-comin’ on. By the last of May anyhow, they’ll be having peas on them. Irvin, my husband, planted a few potatoes down there, and he said they’s comin’ up.

  Somebody called me the other day and asked me if I was happy. I said yeah. They asked me if I’d been happy all my life, or if I’d been sad, and I told them, I said, “Well, I’ve been happy. When I was seventeen years old, I give my heart to the Lord, and I’ve been trying to live fer Him ever since, and He’s blessed me and give me strength fer almost eighty-three years.” If I live to the twenty-first of July, I’ll be eighty-three. And that’s how old my brother-in-law was that was buried yesterday. He was from the twenty-fifth of March ’til the twenty-first of July older than me, [that] was all the difference in our ages. They said, “You mean you’ve been happy?” and I said yeah. I said, “The Lord’s been with me,” and I said, “He keeps me happy.”

  Then they asked about my family, if I had any family, and I said, “Yes, I’ve got some. I’ve got a husband and two daughters, and I got a brother, and I got three sisters.” Said, “You ain’t got a mama and a daddy?” and I said, “No, they’re both dead.” I said, “I’ve got three brothers dead and a sister dead.” And they said, “Well, and you mean you’ve still been happy?” and I said, “Well, it was sad when I lost ’em, but I can’t bring ’em back, but I can go to them ’cause they all said they’s ready to go when they left here, and that’s a good feeling fer ’em to tell you that they’re ready to go, because He promised us a mansion. When He went to prepare us a mansion, He said He’d come back and receive us unto Hisself. Where He was, we’d be also, and so I’m a-looking fer it.” The Bible said to lay up our treasures in heaven where moths and rust won’t corrupt and thieves won’t break through to steal, so I just talk to the Lord. Irvin goes to work at the Forest Service, but seems like I’m not alone. I can talk to the Lord and seems like I’ve got company all the time. I just feel
happy about it.

  BILLY LONG

  “A garden is about half a living.”

  Billy and Annie Long live in the extreme northern part of Rabun County near the Georgia—North Carolina line. Their home, at the head of Betty’s Creek Road, is a modest, one-story house with a covered porch across the front. They have lived in this house since it was built in 1954. At that time, the old Long family homeplace, where Billy had grown up and Annie and Billy had lived since their marriage in 1938, burned to the ground. A longtime acquaintance of the Longs, Lena Shope, told us that when the Longs’ home burned, all of the families on Betty’s Creek pitched in and rebuilt it. This was once a common tradition in many of the communities around here. Besides, Billy and Annie Long had done so much for the people of their community that it was only natural for their neighbors to return the favor.

  Billy and Annie Long are both small people physically. Billy is about five and a half feet tall and probably weighs little more than a hundred pounds. Annie is tiny and delicate. They appear to be very quiet, retiring people when one first meets them, but then the smiles come out and Billy’s blue eyes sparkle. Our interview centered primarily around Billy’s farming methods and his plowing with a horse as a principal means of cultivation. However, the conversation sometimes got off onto canning and preserving techniques, and he often turned to Annie to verify some comment he had just made. She’d just quietly agree or explain something in more detail.

  When we were there, the house was tranquil, and there were no other visitors, no grandchildren running in and out, but there were photographs and reminders of a big family, three sons and three daughters, throughout the kitchen and living room. All during the visits, there would be comments about their children, so I know they visit often and stay in close touch.

  The hillside and fields directly across the road from the house are where much of Billy’s farming life has taken place. These are the same fields that Billy’s father farmed when Billy was a young boy. The garden is now covered with old, dry cornstalks, but in early spring, Billy will plow it, preparing it for new crops. He will probably use a tractor to get the job done, but that wasn’t always the case. He once used a horse or mule and plowed for up to fourteen hours a day. On one visit to his house last spring, he gave us a demonstration of how this was done. We photographed this technique after he had trained his horse. He wryly stated that he didn’t want pictures published of him “being dragged all over the field. “

  Billy has been a farmer since he was a boy and did chores in the field for his father. When I first saw him, I couldn’t imagine this small-framed man doing such hard work for such long hours. He said it was just a way of life and necessary, and that the crops raised were not usually sold, but provided food to feed his family and livestock.

  Realizing that people in our area used to grow and preserve most of their own food from family gardens, we called on Billy to tell us his experiences in working with the land. From his recollections, gardening was once an even more backbreaking job than it is today. With country stores stocking only scant and basic supplies, gardening was certainly considered a necessity to survive. However, it did not stop with the garden. After the food was harvested, Annie had her own job of preparing it for preservation to feed their family of six children. Billy put both jobs in a nutshell for us: “A garden is about half a living.”

  —Kelli Marcus

  PLATE 159

  My daddy had four girls by his first wife. I don’t know how long it was after she died before he remarried, but he married again and had me and Edith and another sister, who died when she was young. And then my mother died when I was small, and my half sister raised us. She was the oldest girl. I think she was in her twenties, maybe thirty.

  Here lately, I’ve often thought about all she did. I didn’t think about it much then. My daddy always called me about five o’clock to get up and build a fire in the fireplace in the stove and to get my lantern and go feed the animals. As soon as I got the fire started, I’d call her. She’d get up, and when I got back, she had breakfast cooked—meat, eggs, syrup, and jelly, dried fruit, and whatever I wanted. Then she done the milking and took care of the milk and the cow. She’d come back and go about washing dishes and just everything.

  I bet there’s not three women that done the work that she done. She’d go all day long. I’d ask her that night if she was tired, and she’d say, “Nay, I ain’t tired.” Why, I knowed she was give out. She didn’t make us help her like she ought to either. She’d do it herself. We’d eat supper and go in there and sit down by the fire in the wintertime, and she’d wash the dishes. She’d never ask us to, and of course, we wasn’t going to volunteer. She made Edith help her after she got big enough to wash dishes, but after Edith left to go to school, she never asked us young’uns to do nothing. [Edith went to Mars Hill College to study to be a teacher.]

  She’d can apples and dry fruit. Daddy always kept plenty of racks made up out of little old thin boards. He’d make them about three or four foot square and put her some poles outside for those to set on. Some of them were bigger than a table. She had different sizes. She’d peel her fruit, slice it pretty thin, and take it out there and spread it out all over those racks. She’d just cover them up with her apples and lay them out there in the sun ’til they’d dry and shrivel up. She would transfer them off of one and onto another, and when she got some empty, she just peeled her some more apples and put them on there. Most of the time, if it didn’t look too rainy, she’d just cover them up at night. The racks was fixed so you could just set them on top of each other without hurting the apples. She had six, eight, or ten at a time, and after you got them stacked up so high, you just cover up the top one. That was it. If it rained then, it wouldn’t hurt none of them.

  My half sister was the main one who took care of the garden too, and the rest of us worked in the field most of the time. Of course, we helped. That’s the way it was done back then. Men would help in the garden if they was needed, and if the men needed the women in the field, they’d go help in the field.

  When we wanted to clear up a field, we’d cut the trees off, burn the brush, snake the logs off or burn them, or whatever we wanted. We couldn’t plow it much the first time, so we’d take a plow and just kind of scratch it up. Then we’d lay it off the best we could, and lots of times we just planted us a bean patch. We didn’t use fertilizer and didn’t have to spray then. We just grew them. Usually, we’d get out in kind of a hollow where your soil is pretty rich to do things like that.

  I think one reason there’s so many insects today is people quit burning the woods. You know, they used to burn the woods up ’bout every year. Certain times of the year you could burn it, and if you burned it right, there wasn’t enough stuff in there to kill the timber much. We didn’t have any problems out of ants, and we didn’t used to know what a beetle was. We had little old flea bugs and things to get on the sweet potatoes and Irish potatoes. The children would clean ashes out of the fireplace every few days, and we’d just broadcast them on the tater ground, and them flea bugs would leave. We didn’t have no more trouble out of them. We had a lot of cutworms. They’d get on our tobacco and cabbage and cut them down, but we never did spray for them back then. We’d just go through and hunt for them and kill them when we would find them. We didn’t have too much trouble with the birds, and we never did bother them. I imagine they ate a lot of the insects. We would put out a scarecrow for rabbits and groundhogs, and my daddy used to trap a right smart for muskrats. We had more trouble with muskrats than anything about cutting the corn down. They’d set in on a field, and they would just clean it up for an acre or more.

  Anyway, after we got the field broke up pretty good, we’d usually sow it in grass and make a pasture out of it. If there was rocks, we just hauled them off, but we never did get all of them big rocks in some pastures. We’d just keep piling them up. I know one field over there that my daddy pretty well cleaned up before I came along. It seemed like every t
ime we plowed it, the plow would just gather that many more rocks. We kept on ’til we got most of them off. And there’s one four-or five-acre piece up there that had a lot of stumps in it, and we’d generally just plow around them until they began to rot. Then when they got loose enough, we’d run a plow over them, or take horses, and just pull them out and snake them out of the field.

  PLATE 160 “When we were breaking up the new ground, we never did use but one horse, so we just used a single-foot plow.”—Billy Long

  We didn’t have a ‘dozer or nothing like that. We had a bottomland plow, and we’d use two horses to pull it. And we had what I call a hillside plow. That’s the one you can just flip over and plow backwards and forward in the furrow. With a bottomland plow, you go around just one way where it’s level. We’d take so much of the field and cut it up into what we called lands. When we were breaking up the new ground, we never did use but one horse, so we just used a single-foot plow. You couldn’t use a turn plow for new ground ’cause it was too heavy to lift around. If we got a big rock or stump that left a hole, we’d fill it back up with dirt. Then maybe we’d run the harrows over it and smooth it up.

  After we plowed in the spring, we’d always take a drag harrow and run over a field and smooth it up. Then we’d take the disc harrow and disc it, and cut it good, and take the drag harrow and drag it again. Then we’d lay it off and plant it. When the corn began to come up, we were about ready to go to work on it with a cultivator. We had three different cultivators: a five-foot, a four-foot, and a double-foot. We’d use that double-foot in the new ground and the four-or five-foot in our land that was already broke up good.