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

  We never did have any terraces in the field as I knowed of. My daddy never did tend that steep ground many times. He’d sow it in grass.

  Now and then we made compost. We’d build us a ten-by-twelve-foot pen or take a shed or clean out a stall in the stable. We’d take a wagon to the woods and bring in a wagonload of rich dirt and leaves and sprinkle a layer of that in our pen. We bought fertilizer—called it acid back then—in the hundred-pound bags at the store and sprinkled that over the leaves. Then we’d throw on a layer of manure and sprinkle more acid. Next time, we’d put more dirt and leaves on it and just keep building it up. We’ve had twenty-five and thirty wagonloads of compost. Then when we went to plant our corn, we’d just take us a tow sack, split it open, cut holes in it to run our arms through, and make a apron, a throw sack. That’s the way we used manure most of the time, put a handful of manure or compost to each hill of corn. We’d broadcast it over the ground by hand, because you couldn’t have even got machinery in there on them hills.

  Planting crops in the same field every year is not too hard on the ground if you keep fertilizing it. My daddy would rotate his crops. He would sow the field he had in corn this year in rye, or maybe clover, the next year, and then turn it under.

  I’ve made lots of hoes out of a saw blade. Just take an old crosscut saw that’s wore out, cut it or break it up in pieces, five to eight inches wide or whatever width you want it, and punch you some holes in it. Then just take nails or something to make brads out of, and brad that blade onto that neck that you trimmed off from a hoe that was wore out. Put three brads in the neck; I always have a brad on each side of the neck and then one down at the lower end. That makes the best hoe of any I’ve ever used. It’s a lot thinner than a regular hoe; it’s easy to sharpen, and it stays sharp. A saw blade really makes good hoes.

  When we was all growing up together, we’d always work in the field at hoeing time. We’d all get us a hoe, and sometimes we’d divide the row up: each one would take so far and just go until we met each other. We’d do what we called keeping up with the plow. When Daddy covered up corn, we’d straighten it up, chop down what weeds was there, and maybe put a little more dirt on it. My daddy said that the best time of the year was when you got your ground ready, and it was warm enough to plant.

  We raised lettuce, turnips, beets, tomatoes, onions, cabbage, and beans. We didn’t have these half-runners like we do now, just old-timey beans. We usually saved them from year to year. We let them stay on the vines until they got dry; then we’d pull them off and shell them out and bag them up and keep them for the next year. We’d always have some corn in the garden with patches of roasting ears, and we’d have a sweet potato patch somewhere.

  We always planted what we called a little clay pea with the corn. We gathered eight and ten bushels of peas at a time, after they was shelled out. And we’d always have plenty of cornfield beans. We’d hang them up and let them dry and make soup beans out of them. They call them leather britches too, you know.

  We had about an acre or two in apple orchards. Then Daddy’d have just three or four peach trees in a place here and yonder. We had a plum tree and pear trees. And we could get a lot of berries—buckberries and huckleberries. Those buckberries make the best pies of anything I’ve ever eaten.

  There wasn’t much of anyplace up here to get wheat ground, so rye and corn and a few oats were about all my daddy raised in the grain line. We’d grind the rye up and make bread out of it a lot. We used corn for feed, and to eat, to make cornbread or a big pot of hominy for the family, for roasting ears [corn on the cob], or we’d put it with beans and have pickled corn and beans. Besides that, we’d feed corn to the horses, cows, hogs, and chickens.

  Back in my daddy’s lifetime, about all we used for hay was fodder. We’d cut the tops off of the corn, shuck them, and tie them up. We’d strip the fodder off of the stalk as far down as it was green—plumb down to the ground nearly—and tie it in little “hands” and hang it on the stalk. When it was cured out, we’d take about four of those hands—all the blades you could hold in your hands at one time made up one hand—tie them together, and make what we called the bundle. Then we went to stack it. According to how big a stack we was stacking, we’d put maybe seventy-five or one hundred bundles to a stack. We always put the tops down first. We’d stand up about forty or fifty around the bottom of the bed, just stand them on their ends with the tops sticking up. Then we’d start right up the pole. Somebody would get up on the pole, and we’d lay a bundle down and step up on it. Then somebody’d start throwing it to you, and you’d just go round and round that pole, laying it on it. We’d start the fodder down pretty close to the lower edge of the tops, but we’d keep pulling it in and tapering off pretty sharp as we got up the pole. Always heard talk about things “tapered like a fodder stack”—well, that’s the way we’d do it. Then we’d take two or three bundles, tie them together by the loose end, and make a big bundle out of it. We’d slip that right down over the stack pole, and we called that the cap bundle. That’s what we put over it to keep it dry and it would shed water. That’s about all we used for hay and roughage.

  My half sister would get the inside of the corn shuck and wrap it around the spindle on a spinning wheel, and then she’d weave her off a little thread and wrap it around the corn shuck ’til she got it tied. Then she’d tie the next piece onto that, and she’d just spin it and roll it up on that corn shuck. When she got her spool of thread as big as she wanted it, she’d just slip it off the spindle. That’s what she called a spool.

  Back when I was a kid, we’d pick up enough chestnuts in the fall of the year to buy our shoes. You could always sell those chestnuts.

  We had plenty of rhubarb, and we always kept peppermint or catnip in the garden. It would come up every year; you didn’t have to plant it. We’d gather it, put it up ’til it’d get dry, and use it all winter to make tea. We’d get out on the branch banks around and gather horsesnips and other herbs. Very little we wasted.

  Well, we raised about everything except salt, soda, coffee, a little kerosene oil, and some sugar. We used syrup more for sweetening than we do now. Daddy always raised a big cane patch. We’d fix the ground, put fertilizer and stable manure in it and work it about three or four times, plant it in hills, and keep the weeds out of it. When the cane got ripe, we’d strip the fodder off of it, cut the heads off, and cut it down. We’d pile it up in the patch and then haul it to the syrup mill, where we’d grind it, boil it, and make syrup. Everybody in the settlement, even as far down as Dillard, would bring cane for Daddy to grind. He’d make it on the halves with them. He’d get part of the syrup as payment for making it.

  So we had plenty of syrup, milk and butter, meat and bread. Some people say, “I can remember we like to have starved to death.” But I’m telling you the truth, as far as eating goes, we never knew there was a Depression. Back then people didn’t depend on money to buy nothing. They made what they needed!

  Mostly I think we’ve come a long way since the 1920s and 1930s. In some ways, the living has improved a lot from what it was back then. And in a way, I don’t know but what people could get along just as well back then as they do now. Of course, they didn’t have all the utilities and conveniences they have today. We used a spring box to keep our milk and butter in. We didn’t know what a refrigerator or a freezer was, and we kept our meat in a smokehouse. But people’s not as close as they used to be. Back when I was growing up, if your cow was dry you still got milk. If your neighbor had milk, you had milk. We’d divide the milk as long as we had it and lived close enough together. Of course, people are still neighborly. You take the people up here on Betty’s Creek. They always come to the rescue if you need help. But I’ll sure say this is unusually good up here. I don’t know whether it’s as good everywhere else.

  LILLIE NIX

  “We made do when we didn’t have, just the same as when we had.”

  My grandmother Lillie Nix is one of the most loved people in my l
ife. She married Earnest Nix in October 1923, and they had four children, one son and three daughters. Earnest died in November 1934 from complications of sugar diabetes. In 1936 Lillie married his brother George Nix, my grandfather, and they had two sons and two daughters.

  My grandmother worked in the fields, as well as raising her children and coping with housekeeping without the modern conveniences of washing machines, dishwashers, and vacuum cleaners. My grandfather George worked in the asbestos mines early in their marriage and later on started farming in Scaly, North Carolina, where they still live.

  I interviewed Grandmother one afternoon back before she and Granddad left for their winter stay in Demorest. For several years, I had wanted her to tell me about her early life, her childhood. Some of the things she told me were things I had heard her talk about before. Others were new to me. She told me about some old people she had visited when she was a child, and she related it in such clear detail, I could almost envision the place.

  The house where I’ve always lived is very close to my grandparents’ home, though not next door as city houses are because we live on a large farm. My parents operate the farm now, but it still belongs to my grandparents. They now spend their winters in Demorest, near one of my aunts, and their house in Scaly stands empty through the cold weather. I miss their not being there as I come home from school. When spring comes, they’ll be back and the yard will bloom with dahlias that Grandmother has planted over the years. She’ll plant a vegetable garden as she does every year, and their place will come to life once more.

  —Pam Nix

  I was raised in Northeast Georgia, just a little ways from the North Carolina line, on a farm, pioneer style. There was a big family of us, eight children. We all had to work, and we worked hard. Our father taught us to work with our hands. That taught me when I grew up how to make a living with my own hands.

  PLATE 161 Lillie Nix (center foreground) and her family

  We raised all of our food we ate. We raised our own meat, our own vegetables, and everything that we needed. We had cows. Nearly every family in that community had a cow. My father also raised hogs. It was open range where we lived. That meant there wasn’t any fence law. You had to fence your crops in to protect them from the animals. Our farm animals roamed at large, wherever they wanted to go. They roamed loose in the woods. My father had lots and lots of hogs in the woods, and come fall of the year, those hogs would get fat off of the mast that fell from the trees.

  In spring of the year, about March, the men of the community would go out and burn the woods. It didn’t kill the timber because the sap wasn’t up, but it caused the grass to come up tender, and the cattle would feed on that.

  My father had two good hog dogs. One big bulldog was the catch dog, and a big cur dog was the bay dog. The bay dog was the one that would run and stop the hog. The hog would wheel around and face the dog, and the dog would bark with a vicious bark ’til my father would get there with the catch dog. He would tell that bulldog to catch. The bulldog would catch that big hog by the ear and lay close by the hog’s side, holding it there until my father could cut its throat and let it bleed to death.

  We also had sheep. In the spring of the year, we would gather up those sheep and bring them in, and put them in the stables and shear them. We had a table, and we would tie the sheep’s feet together and lay him up there. We’d shear one side and then flop him over and shear the other side.

  My grandmother lived with us. My grandfather was dead. She and my mother would wash that wool nice and white with homemade soap. They’d dry that wool on a scaffold and sack it up. In fall of the year, my mother would spin that wool into thread on her spinning wheel. Mother and Grandmother knitted all the socks and stockings that the family needed. Sometimes Mother would spin thread and send it over to a neighbor and have the neighbor to weave some cloth. Mama had a sewing machine, and she would sew shirts for my daddy. We had some cotton clothes that we used for Sunday, and we had gingham dresses too.

  We planted big crops. We planted lots of cornfield beans with our corn. They would grow to the tops of the corn. We would pick those beans and bring them up on the front porch and ask our neighbors in to a bean stringing. They would come over and help us string those beans out. Mama and Grandmother would lay those beans out on scaffolds to dry and then put them in white sacks to have to eat in the winter.

  My mother didn’t can too much. She dried most of her vegetables. For our kraut, we had a sixty-gallon barrel up in the little springhouse. We would chop that full of cabbage and make a barrel of kraut. Then Mama would put up a sixty-gallon barrel of pickled beans.

  We had lots of apple trees. There was old fields around where we lived. My daddy would take the wagon and us kids, and we would go to those fields. He would climb up in the trees and shake the apples off. Us kids would pick ’em up, put them in the wagon, and we’d bring them in. Mama and Grandmother would cut those apples, put them on scaffolds, and dry them in the fall of the year. They dried most of them with the peeling on them. Therefore, we got more vitamins from what we ate by having the peeling on them.

  The store was five miles from our home. We didn’t need to go to the store much. We had all we needed at home. It just had little items that was necessary for the pioneer people back then. They would keep horseshoe nañs and things like that. And they would keep a little coffee, but they didn’t keep ground coffee like we have today. It was in the grain, and it was green. You had to bring that coffee home, put it in an iron skillet, and put it on the stove to parch; or you could parch it before the open fireplace in a Dutch oven. You could put a few coals under the Dutch oven, heat the coffee slowly, and keep stirring it ’til you toasted it a dark brown. Then we poured it up in a can so it wouldn’t lose its flavor. We had a little coffee mill fastened to the side of the wall, and we would pour our coffee beans in that little coffee mill, put a cup under the little spout, and it had a little crank to it. We would grind enough to make a pot a coffee. You could smell that coffee all over the house. We only used coffee in the morning.

  Sometimes we would run out of kerosene, so our mother would send us kids up on the hillside with a tow bag. We would fill that tow bag full of rich pine knots and bring them to the house. She would throw them, one or two at a time, in the fireplace, and it would light up the whole room where we sat. She has knit socks many hours by that crackling pine knot fire. We made do when we didn’t have, just the same as when we had.

  To make lye soap, we needed ashes and lard. The longer you burn ashes in your fireplace, the stronger the lye you get from them. When the ashes get cool, you take them out and put them in your ash hopper. In the bottom of the ash hopper, you put something like straw to make a filter for the lye to come through, so the ashes won’t go through with it. You put a vessel under that little spout that’s under the ash hopper, and you pour water on the ashes a little at a time and very slowly until the ashes get wet enough for the lye to start being leached out and dripping through. You then keep pouring a little water along until the ashes have been thoroughly saturated. You put your lye water in a black iron pot and put grease in there in order to make the soap. It won’t make without some kind of grease—old butter, tallow, fat from hogs that you kill, or anything that’s grease.

  It might take a day or two to make a big pot of soap. You boil it until it’s as thick as you want it. It never did get plumb hard, that kind of soap, but it would be like a thick liquid soap. We’d usually pour it up in some kind of a container, usually a trough that had been hewed out, because that soap was strong. It would eat through most metals! It was stored in old jars or a wood trough. That’s what people washed their clothes with.

  They would take a bucket of that soap and go down to the spring or to a branch to wash their clothes. There wasn’t any washboards back in that day, like people used on up later. People had what they called a bat-ding block. The menfolks would saw off a great huge block of wood about waist-high for the battling block. And they’d make a bi
g paddle with a handle to it for a battling stick. The women would soak those garments good, take them out of the water, soap them and put them on that block, take that paddle, and just paddle them. Knock every bit of the dirt loose in them and put them into the washtub. If they wasn’t cleaned up by then, they would soap them again and onto the block and battle them again. That’s the way they cleaned their clothes.

  Our house was a two-story home. It had some bedrooms upstairs and two bedrooms at the back of our living room. The kitchen and dining room were together in an L-shape that run off the back of the house. We had two fireplaces in that house. We had one in the living room, and the other one in the kitchen, and my mother did a lot of her cooking in the fireplace. She would bake bread in the Dutch oven. We cooked lots of bread before the open fireplace. She would cook pots of meat and those dried applies or dried pumpkin, and keep a pot of something cooking nearly every day for us from the open fireplace.

  My daddy had about thirty stands of bees. Whenever he would rob those bees, we would have so much honey that we wouldn’t have vessels to put it in. I remember one time that my mother had to use her big black washpot to help hold honey. And we always had a barrel of syrup too. Back then people didn’t eat white sugar like they do today. We didn’t use much sugar, because we didn’t need it. We had plenty of syrup and plenty of honey for sweetening.

  For our brooms, we would go out to an old field and cut broom straw. Each one of us would cut big bundles of it. We’d take a string with us and a short knife and cut the straw off at the ground. We’d get all that we could carry. We’d bring it to the house and put it in the dry to make brooms that winter. To make a broom, we’d take as much straw as we could grasp in one hand, wrap a cord around that bundle, and fasten it to where it wouldn’t come undone. Using the ax, we’d cut the end of the broom to make it square. That’s the kind of brooms we had, and the longer we used them, the better it was. I was half grown before I saw a store-bought broom!