When I was a boy my folks always raised a big garden. Back then my dad plowed with a mule and we planted in long rows. We grew field corn and cowpeas, bush beans and okra, tomatoes and potatoes. We also grew squash, peppers, cucumbers, lima beans and onions.
My dad used the mule to plow other people's gardens for them and sometimes I would ride the mule as we walked over to a neighbor's garden spot. We lived in what later became known as the "old house" that we rented from a great aunt who lived out in west Texas. We had running water in the kitchen sink and an outdoor toilet.
My folks were traditional gardeners in the sense that they plowed with a plow, or tilled with a tiller, used commercial fertilizer and dusted their garden with poison to kill the bugs. I don't think they had much of a concept of building up the soil, but they did value topsoil from the woods. Sometimes we would load a bunch of buckets and go to the woods just to get a load of topsoil for Momma's flower bed or for a few plants in the garden.
Our garden was too big to think of gathering enough topsoil to cover the entire area. So we would add a little around a few choice plants, but it was used especially for the flower bed.
One of our favorite places to get topsoil was from behind my grandmother's house. The woods there were thick and so was the topsoil.
My maternal grandmother, Nonnie Mashaw (we called her Mamaw), lived in a little house about a mile from where we lived. She was a widow with one daughter (Caroline) still living at home. My mother's brother Billy had drowned when he was 26 years old, leaving a widow with two young children. His widow, my aunt Frenchie, built a small house next door to my grandmother. This was in 1959 when I was 5 years old.
A few years later my aunt Frenchie remarried. Her husband had his own house, so we bought that little house and moved next door to my grandmother. Now we had indoor plumbing and an attic fan. And we owned a little land of our own. I felt wealthy; I was 9 years old.
The first order of business for my dad was to clear the woods in back of the new house. We spent long summer days burning and digging stumps. I have five brothers, so it wasn't like there was a shortage of labor around our house. I can remember the excitement my folks had looking forward to gardening in all that rich topsoil. And it was nice -- for a year or two. After that, most of the topsoil washed away because there was no effective erosion control in place. Don't get me wrong -- we were still able to raise great gardens over the years, but it was mainly because of triple-8 fertilizer. What had once been an area with several inches of the richest, blackest topsoil quickly became just another sandy garden spot.
Every spring we ran the tiller, planted the seeds with a little commercial fertilizer mixed in to help things grow and watered as needed. We hoed, raked and hilled up the corn and potatoes; we sprayed the bugs, and every year we had a great garden.
I don't think my folks gave much thought to the process of erosion or that all the topsoil had washed away. Maybe they thought the plants had used it up by growing in it. I don't know. At the time, I wasn't aware of all this. It was only after learning about making compost and using mulch and other, more holistic gardening practices that I began to look back at how my folks gardened with anything like a questioning attitude.
My folks were considered, and I think considered themselves, to be expert gardeners. I do know they worked hard at it and expected their offspring to do so as well. With eight children to feed, a large garden was more of a necessity than anything else.
Just as an aside, we always had a couple of long rows of okra which in Louisiana is called "okrie." I loved to go out and cut the okra, take it in and cut it up. Since okra can be rather itchy, no one minded my working with it. My mother would roll it in corn meal and deep fry it in Mrs. Tucker's lard. I loved fried okra, fresh corn casserole and hot corn bread right out of the oven! I still do for that matter, but we left the Mrs. Tucker's lard back in Louisiana.
When I was in my early twenties, I came across a copy of The Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening by Rodale Press. This was my first exposure to the concept of organic gardening. I have to say I don't think it made a lot of sense to me at first, but one thing that stood out in my mind was the concept of adding organic matter to amend the soil. According to the experts at Rodale, compost was the best form of organic matter to be found. Armed with this new knowledge, I began to make compost for my garden. This was in the mid-to-late '70s.
In the early '80s, I was living with my wife and children in Lake Providence, La., not far from the Mississippi River. The soil there is a fine silt clay from centuries of the great river flooding its banks. When this soil is wet, it is as slick as wet ice; and when it is dry, it breaks up into what the locals call, "buckshot," which looks like little pebbles. The grains of this soil are so tiny it feels really slick between your fingers and probably wouldn't taste gritty even in your mouth. Because of the tightness of the soil, it's kind of difficult to garden in it even though it is very rich. By adding compost I was able to loosen the soil and raise some truly amazing gardens in the years before we moved to Arkansas. In June of 1985, my family and I made our move to Gentry. I had never seen so many rocks in all my life. Here was a new challenge for the backyard farmer. Happy gardening!
Sam Byrnes is a Gentry area resident who has been gardening from his youth. He may be contacted by email at [email protected]. Opinions expressed are those of the author.
Editorial on 06/10/2015