From The Land: Articles Compiled From The Land 1941-1954

By Nancy Pittman and Wes Jackson

Begun in 1941 as an outgrowth of Friends of the Land, the journal The Land was an attempt by editor Russell Lord to counteract -- through education, information, and inspiration -- the rampant abuse of soil, water, trees and rivers. But for all its seriousness of mission, The Land was a stimulating mix of fact and charm. It included literature, philosophy, art, and the practical observations of farmers and conservation workers, to encourage small farmers to understand and apply conservation principles to their lands.

This anthology, a fascinating mosaic, compiled from the 13 years of The Land tells in fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and philosophy the story of how we changed from a nation of small farms to the agribusiness we have today. Among the 40 authors included are conservation and literary giants such as Aldo Leopold, E. B.White, Louis Bromfield, Paul Sears, Allan Patton and Wallace Stegner.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Apr 10, 2013
• ISBN: 9781610912716

Book preview

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I

FARMING AND THE SOIL

Farming and the Soil

In 1909, the Bureau of Soils officially announced, The soil is the one indestructible, immutable asset that the nation possesses. It is the one resource that cannot be exhausted; that cannot be used up.

Twenty years later, after Hugh H. Bennett had exploded that myth permanently and scientifically, he sardonically replied, I didn’t know that so much costly misinformation could be put into a single, brief sentence.

Unfortunately, by 1941, many people again were acting as if the soil were indestructible. The horrors of the Dust Bowl years had begun to fade from national memory. A monoculture of corn, cotton, and tobacco was still the rule, especially in the South. And farmers, distracted by war pressures and economic need, were drifting back to bad farming practices. The conservation movement was effectively moribund during the 1940s.

Yet, at the same time, conservation sciences were taking giant strides forward. Scientists were discovering new techniques to measure the rate at which resources were being depleted, and in the process, discovering remedies for that depletion. Since some of these remedies had been practiced intuitively by intelligent farmers for generations, The Land set itself the hopeful task of broadcasting this information to anyone who worked on the land.

Good farming practices such as strip-cropping and field rotation were discussed in detail. Ed Faulkner’s book, Plowman’s Folly, which condemned the use of the moldboard plow, was debated hotly by the farmers themselves. During the war, The Land served as a little lighthouse of information and good cheer, beaming its light to farmers all across the country.

But after the war was over, the problems of farming took on a global dimension. America, in its new capacity as a world power, shouldered the responsibility of feeding an exploding world population. While despairing neo-Malthusians declared such a task impossible (sparking a national debate over the need for birth control), others had faith in the new chemical fertilizers. These, combined with labor-saving machinery, seemed to point the way to the future. The American farmer, no longer simply a self-sustaining citizen, became an economic tool for the production of foodstuffs. Farmers debated the benefits and drawbacks of the new agribusiness. Some even questioned whether they could afford to practice conservation at all. This unresolved question lies at the heart of our farming policy today.

EARTH IS HIS BOOK

How My Father Farms

BY JESSE STUART

MY FATHER never read anything about soil conservation in his life. He would not read. I never heard him use the word conservation. I doubt that he would know what it meant. It would be a big word for him. He calls it pertectin’ the land. And now if anyone would read to him about how to conserve the soil or protect the land, and if he should sit still long enough to listen, I know he would interrupt and say: I did that fifty years ago.

For thirty-five years, ever since I was big enough to tag at his heels, I could vouch for that. He had done everything I’ve read about soil conservation, and more.

He can’t understand why everybody hasn’t pertected the land. He wonders why more people didn’t use a little horsesense to keep all their topsoil from washing away.

He has never travelled far from these Kentucky hills, He’s been in only three states—Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky. He’s been only in the hill section of Kentucky, not even as far as the Blue Grass section. In Ohio, he went as far west as Cincinnati, but not as far north as Columbus. Cincinnati, 135 miles away, is the farthest he’s been from home. When he was young, he went east to Cabin Coal Mines in West Virginia to mine coal. And once he went as far south as Harlan County, Kentucky.

Despite his not being able to read, in magazines or books, he has read the surface of the earth, in every slope, hollow, creekbottom, on every piece of terrain he has walked in his day and time. He has loved the feel of the soil against his shoe-leather and of the fresh dirt in his hand. He has almost petted the earth beneath him as if it were something to be fondled and loved.

When he bought the first and only land he has ever owned, fifty acres of hill land in the head of W-Hollow, half of this small boundary was considered worthless. He bought the fifty acres for three hundred dollars. The only part of this farm that was not streaked with deep gullies was the timbered hillslopes. The slopes that had been cleared and farmed were streaked with gullies deeper than a man’s height. My friends and I used to play on this farm. We cut long poles, and our favorite sport was pole-vaulting from one side of the gully to the other with a sixteen-foot pole. This gives some idea of the ugly scars that marked the earth’s surface and gleamed yellow in the sun. Now, no one would know that the skin of this earth had ever been scarred by ugly wounds that cut down deep into the earth’s flesh. For this land grows four crops of alfalfa each season and a mowing machine rolls smoothly over it.

Even when we were cutting logs to build us a home on this farm, he saved the branches and the tops of these trees. The branches from the pine tops especially appealed to him for the kind of soil protection he planned. He laid this brush down in these scars, putting the tips uphill. When the water comes down the gully, he said, all the grass, dirt and little twigs it carries will catch in this brush. The gully will soon fill up. These were deep gullies and it took wagon loads of brush. We seldom put rocks in one of these gullies. If we did, we put them on the bottom, down deep, so they would never work to the top of the ground and be a menace to the plow or the mowing machine. And we stacked the brush high above the earth’s surface in these deep gullies. Because the weight of snow, the falling of rain, the wash of sediment weighted it until the brush was finally below the surface. Then we added more brush, finer brush, always placing the tips uphill to meet the avalanche or trickle of water.

My father always said if a cut on the surface of the earth was properly handled, it was like a cut on a man’s body, and Nature would do wonders to heal it. Nature did wonders where we piled the brush. Nature edged in with her sediment wash. Nature pushed the skin of her surface over, trying to heal the ugly scar. For a year or two or three, we plowed up to these deep gullies. We plowed all around them. The dirt went over and into the brush. Soon we hauled wagons of oak leaves from the woods and spread over the place where the brush had sunk. We pushed in more dirt from the sides, healing the great scar and then we started plowing over. We reunited the earth’s skin, leaving it without a blemish. It did not take long to do this. My father was always against building rock walls across the gulleys. He said it took too long to build the wall and Nature would not work as gently and as fast with rock walls as it would the brush and the leaves and the pine-needled branches. This was the way we handled the gullies that were from five to fifteen feet deep. The little gullies, those from six inches to five feet, were much easier to handle.

When we recleared these old slopes, land too poor to grow timber, we cut the scraggy-top pines, the black shoemakes, the saw briars and green-briars and instead of burning them we filled these gullies. The briars didn’t matter. They formed an excellent interwoven network to hold the wash and sediment anyway. And by doing this, we cleared the land and filled the gullies at the same time. We used what we had cleared from the land to fill the gullies. We pushed the dirt with mattocks and shovels until it united over the brush-briar and leaf-filled gullies. We closed the little scars on the earth’s surface before they grew to be big scars. And we did it in a hurry. We didn’t take time to build rock walls and throw rocks into these scars, thereby abusing Nature. Water would wash around rocks; it would flow between; erosion would continue. But all we put into these ditches fertilized the earth, cemented the broken skin and held it together. We crossed over the scars with a plow the first year, reuniting what had once been joined. But man’s folly had lacerated this earth’s surface. Then man had abandoned this land, as worthless, never good again for crops, to the wind, rain and freeze.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, was an old saying my father used when he and I worked on his farm together. Never did I see him one time, ever drag a plow up or down hill and leave a mark that would start a ditch. Maybe that was one of the many reasons why everybody we ever rented from, before he bought land of his own, wanted him to remain on his farm. Instead of dragging a plow with a mule or a mule team hitched to it as I’ve seen so many other one-horse farmers do in my day, my father would drive his team ahead and carry his plow. He was that careful with other people’s land, more careful, than the owners themselves, because he loved the land.

His way was Nature’s way. And to this day I believe he did it the right way. One of the severest scoldings he ever gave me was for dragging a double shovel plow from the tobacco field down the hill. I had held to one of the handles and the plow left a little mark. He followed over the way I’d gone, took his foot and pushed back the loose dirt the plow had dug up. In a few places he picked up tiny twigs and laid them with the tips uphill and pushed dirt over them. He reunited the fresh cut across earth’s skin that water would have followed down the hill.

Another thing he did all of his life, from the time I could remember, was to follow the contour of the hill with his plow. We never farmed anything but hills in those days and many of them were very steep. These hills didn’t erode for my father. He could about judge the nature of flowing water, what it would do to the land he plowed. He didn’t let it do anything; he never gave it a chance. Even on these hill slopes were deep ravines. My father plowed up into them and straight around on the other side, making a perfect contour, never up or down. And he never had a ditch to start down his slope.

Today it is recommended by the Department of Agriculture and this information is carried to us by our County Agent, that we farm corn on our level acres and sow our hillslopes in grass and use the uplands for pasture. My father learned this long ago. Again it was a matter of ‘horsesense’ and he learned, perhaps, the hard way. On our ‘worthless’ (never worthless to us) hillside acres that wouldn’t grow timber but only shaggy brush, we cleared this land and farmed it three years straight in corn. We did this to prepare it for grass. We used fertilizer even when we planted the corn with a hand corn-planter. Dad planted the corn and I followed and dipped fertilizer from a bucket with a spoon. This was before fertilizer became popular in this section. It was before any great farm program was developed. Our first year gave us a fair yield of corn. Our second year the land was easier to plow since we’d torn out more roots and stumps, and we got a better yield of corn. Then the third year, we got about the same yield as we did the first year.

Then it occurred to my father that this land was already infertile to begin with and that he would not corn it to death. This land wasn’t hard to corn to death, for it was already about dead. So my father stopped growing corn on the hillsides altogether. We cut the brush, put it in the ditches if we had them; if we didn’t have them we burned this brush and sowed the land in grass.

We learned the stumps were better left in the ground to rot and fertilize the ground instead of farming the land and tearing out stamps with the plow, digging them up or blowing them out with dynamite. Though we had to cut the sprouts and briars with mattocks and scythes in July and August of each summer, we soon had a better pasture on the steep hills by doing this than we did by raising corn three seasons to prepare the ground for grass. We lifted the fertility of our little creek bottoms, the flats on our hill slopes and the level hilltops by using oak leaves, barnyard manure and commercial fertilizer.

My father said the roots of grass that formed a fine root carpet in the surface of the earth were the greatest protection against erosion the land could have with the one exception of timber. But we had some ditches start along the cattle and sheep paths in our pastures. And here is what we did. If the land was rough and we couldn’t mow the briars and sprouts with a mowing machine, we used mattocks and scythes. We placed this brush and briars we’d cut in the pasture along these paths. A barren scar we covered with a pitchfork of briars. If we used a mowing machine, around these slopes, we raked up the cuttings and laid them along these paths. That was a sure cure for erosion. Cattle and sheep wouldn’t walk this way again. Soon these cuttings gathered wash and sediment and the path was covered over and the land was healed.

We had two places on my father’s fifty acre farm that gave us trouble. One was a steep bluff, not far from the house, that was cleared and farmed. In the first place, this land should have never been cleared. But my father learned this after it was too late. This bluff started slipping off down into the valley in big slides. Again we hauled brush and laid it down in the valley to catch the slides. Then my father did something else. He suggested that we set this slope back in trees. It was a difficult type of erosion, the kind that he thought only the roots of trees would cure. And this would have to be done quickly by trees that had good roots and grew quickly. He decided on the yellow locust sprouts to set on this bluff. Because this tree grew all over the farm we could find small sprouts to dig and reset. He chose this tree because it had ‘roots like iron ropes,’ grew rapidly, and made good fence posts when it grew up. He chose it too because the grass would grow under its shade. These locusts stopped the slides on this steep slope. The scars were soon healed and the land reset itself in grass.

The other problem we had was where a stream sank in our pasture field and left a deep hole. Here is what we did about it. For sometime we used this hole for a trash dump. We hauled the old tin cans, trash, cornstalks and whatnots and dumped into this hole. But we couldn’t fill it up with all of this flimsy material. Then we hauled wagonloads of rocks. They sank down, too. Again my father hauled brush and put into this hole to form some sort of bottom. Then he went about the farm and gathered all the old roots of barbed-wire that we had taken down and rolled up. He hauled these bales of worthless rusty wire, for he was always afraid to leave them about on account of the cattle, mules or horses which might get tangled up in them. These he put on top of the brush, and this held the wash that poured into it. The place healed over and grass covered the spot. No one, except us who remember, because we worked there, would know where it is today. My father worked carefully with Nature and she healed her own wounds. Not a scar was left on his eroded fifty acres seven years after he bought the farm.

To this day, although he is seventy, he practices his prevention of erosion. He uses a sled to haul tobacco, hay, fodder down a hill slope. He will not use a wagon because the wagon wheels cut deep and help to start ditches. Sled runners slide over the dirt and hardly leave a trace. He will not drag logs straight down a hill unless the ground is frozen. Old log-roads are another good way to start erosion. And if Nature with a bountiful rain, a freeze or a thaw, breaks the skin anywhere, he immediately does something about it before it gets a headstart. This is why he has had no erosion on his farm. He did not learn the second-hand way through words on a printed page, but he read the language that Nature scrawled upon her rugged terrain, and he understands that language better than any man I have ever known.

1953

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HONEY HOLLOW

BY P. ALSTON WARING

HONEY HOLLOW is a little watershed of the Delaware Valley. I farm one of its six adjacent farms.

We are only six men and we farm only about 900 acres all told, a very small effort to be sure. But I think we have discovered something as we have worked, which may be of general interest, and it is about this that I want to write to you rather than to relate how much run-off we have checked by our strip cropping or terraces or whether we have increased yield per acre by our changed methods. Quite frankly we don’t know the answers to these things as yet. But we do know that by getting together, the six of us, and by thinking of our problem on a watershed basis we have made a real beginning on a conservation job which may in the long run bear some real results.

When we first saw the map of our watershed, which the Soil Conservation Service helped prepare, I think most of us were struck by the boundary line which cut off our farms from the surrounding countryside. It was a boundary line which we had never seen on any map of our township because, of course, it never had been drawn before. It was not just the boundary of two or more or even six of our farms. Here was a new area as far as our thinking about it was concerned, the area created by our stream. All the land within that boundary sloped into Honey Hollow Creek, and all of us who lived within it had something in common. Up to now our farms had been just six separate parcels of land. Now they were of a piece, belonging together. Here was a new thought, and it took a map to drive it home.

Naturally six men, accustomed to farming their own fields, did not suddenly jump into cooperative methods because of a map. But we did see that there was a relationship between our fields, created by the stream, and we began to see that this relationship meant that we ought to do certain things according to a plan, at least as far as erosion control work was concerned.

If you should come to visit us some day and walk up to the crest of the hill on my neighbor’s farm you could look out over a hill-side and valley where most of the fields follow the contour of the land in alternating strips of fall and spring crops. There are two sets of terraces on our watershed, also, and we are developing some sod-ways which cut across boundary lines. We have only been at this about a season and a half, but already the plans on our maps are getting established on the land and more conviction as to their rightness in our minds. Perhaps it will take three good years or even more before we get completely shifted over to this newer way of doing things, and then maybe we’ll go on adjusting our rotations to different factors as we learn them. The thought, I believe, which we are gradually getting is that we are not just trying to hold moisture or even soil in order to get better yields. We are doing this, but we are also slowly building a permanent agriculture on our farms, an agriculture which, as far as the land is concerned, will be secure for us and for our children.

When some soil auger tests were made on our watershed we were right deeply impressed by the speed with which soil can move away and be lost and what this might mean for our security and the security of whoever might farm this land after us. We knew that this countryside had been farmed since it was opened up to agriculture in the early eighteenth century, and because farming generally in this part of our state has always been considered of high grade we suspected that little erosion had taken place during the years. We are dairymen and poultrymen and general farmers, and we rotate crops and return manure and grow grass and do most of the things considered good farming practice. But our watershed test showed that more than half of our acreage had already suffered from 25 to 75 percent top soil loss. And when we looked it up we discovered that this corresponded with the figures for the whole state of Pennsylvania where around half of the rural land has from 25 to 75 percent loss of top soil. This was startling indeed, and I think the knowledge has spurred us on to more effort.

Of course, we had our worries about whether conservation methods, no matter how important or how effective, weren’t just too disruptive of our old and well established ways of doing things. And we didn’t want to get into anything which was going to cost a lot or into a method of farming our fields where our machinery would not work. We wondered about plowing and harvesting on the contour, we dreaded point rows in corn, we were told that our farms would get cut up into a lot of little patches, and that there were left small corners hard to get at which resulted in land lost to productive crops.

We went into soil conservation with a good deal of questioning and some reservations, but as time has gone by we have learned that the change was not so disruptive as we had feared and that it is not more costly to farm on the contour than on square fields or that we can’t use our same machinery. Perhaps if I tell you the story of my neighbor, Charlie, and his potato field, you will get some idea of the conviction we are getting that we are on the right track.

Last fall we were husking corn in adjoining fields and stopped to talk about this conservation we were beginning to practice. I asked him how he was liking it.

After a bit Charlie stopped husking and dumped a basket of corn in the wagon. I like it, he said, and sounded more positive than I had expected. I think it’s real good.

Ordinarily this is about all Charlie would have said, but somehow he seemed full of his subject. While we husked together he went on. You know that sloping field behind the house where I planted the potatoes this year? Well, I planted it on the contour, and I wasn’t sure at all whether it was going to do any good or not. Along in June a gullywasher hit us, the only soaking rain we had all summer. I reckon you remember it?

I remembered it all right. It was one of those rains you don’t easily forget, drenching, with wind behind it.

Well, said Charlie, in the middle of that rain I had to see what was going on, I just had to. So I ran out of the house to look at my potatoes, and all those curved furrows between the spuds were standing in water, and the water was clear! After a while the rain stopped, but the water kept standing in those furrows until it soaked in the ground. If you’d have walked out in that field as I did you’d have seen that there wasn’t a wash in it, and not a plant covered.

I’m just as sure as anything, Charlie added as I was leaving, that that rain and those curved furrows made my potato crop. We didn’t get any more good rains that summer and I figure there wouldn’t have been a crop if the water had not been caught and held where it was.

Shortly after I heard that another one of our neighbors who does not live in our watershed had told Charlie that he couldn’t afford to do conservation work because you wasted too much land in corners. Charlie’s answer was: I’d rather waste a few square feet of land not planted and make a good harvest than the other way around. Looking at Charlie’s potatoes roll out this fall I should say there is no answer to that argument.

The men here in Honey Hollow are beginning to get a new idea about their farming. It seems to me they are beginning to develop a permanent agriculture. We might have a long way to go to really do all the things which would make our farming so sound and good and durable that our families could go on living here successfully and happily for many years to come. We might have much to do, but we know it now. We have the idea, and we are working on it.

1941

M’MAHON’S GARDENER’S CALENDAR

BY FLORENCE HORN RETZER

ON MY bedside table stands an old, rare volume which, a century ago, was the standard, authentic, widely popular handbook for gardeners. It is called The American Gardener’s Calendar, by Bernard M’Mahon, and it first appeared in 1806. A hundred years ago, long before one could get market vegetables all year round, or could own a home freezer, M’Mahon wanted to show Americans how they could have fresh asparagus, strawberries, pineapple and salad greens winter and summer.

The great horticulturalist of our century, Liberty Hyde Bailey, calls M’Mahon’s Calendar the first great American horticultural work and adds that for fifty years it remained the best American work on gardening. As for me, I find the book a bit too muscular for protracted bedtime reading. It is something I like to dip into, a few pages at a time, now and then. A century ago Americans did not, of course, take their gardening instructions while lying on their spine and the Calendar is therefore a sturdy book for rugged men.

Before M’Mahon Americans had to depend for their gardening information on English books which, for climatic reasons were quite unreliable. Many of these British works were patterned on John Evelyn’s Kalendarium Hortense (1664) and M’Mahon uses that same practical form—twelve chapters outlining the work to be done, the plans to be made during each month in the year. M’Mahon’s work, a solid, encyclopedic guidebook, ran to eleven editions for the excellent reason that it served a real need in the new Republic—giving copious, practical information adapted to our climate.

Bernard M’Mahon was only about thirty years of age when he wrote the Calendar and had been in the new world only ten years. He was born in Ireland around 1775, although the exact date is not established. He emigrated to the United States in 1796 and within four years had established himself in a seed business in Philadelphia. Before long he made himself well known not only in the United States but in Europe where he had a considerable list of customers eager to try new things from America.

Liberty Hyde Bailey tells us that Thomas Jefferson was a good friend of M’Mahon and spent considerable time in the shop with botanists and scientists of the period. Indeed it is believed that many of the plans for the Lewis and Clark Expedition were worked out by Jefferson and his cronies, right there in M’Mahon’s shop, among the onion sets and seed potatoes. And it is certain that the plants and seeds brought back from the Expedition were turned over to M’Mahon and Landreth (a seed house still in existence) for general distribution and development.

M’Mahon died in 1816, having made a remarkable place for himself in the new country, during the short period of twenty years in which he lived here. His book continued to sell widely and to serve as an authority until well into the late 1850’s.

I find myself as much interested in M’Mahon himself as in his gardening advice. It astonishes me that a man living in this new limitless country, only just being explored, should have seen fit to write, in 1806, this exhortation to plant trees:

Live hedges are already become objects of importance particularly in those parts of the Union in which timber has got scarcer and must inevitably become more so in very rapid progression. Therefore the sooner the citizens turn their attention to the cultivation and planting of them the greater portion of their benefits will they themselves enjoy and the sooner will they lay the foundations of a rich inheritance for their children, and of an ornamental and useful establishment for their country. The plea is still being made 144 years later, and my good Wisconsin neighbors still ignore it.

M‘Mahon, from Ireland, knew what an impoverished land was and realized that however vast and rich his new country was it, too, could conceivably be one day bled of its wealth. His earnest concern for the earth is evident in many passages on the proper dunging of the garden. Like many an immigrant to the new Republic, he took his citizenship very seriously and very proudly. He dedicates his book to his fellow citizens whom he describes as an intelligent, happy and independent people, possessed so universally of landed property, unoppressed by taxation or tithes, and blessed with consequent comfort and effluence. The Calendar is an enthusiastic missionary work to contribute my mite to the welfare of my fellow citizens and to the general improvement of the country. Nowhere is there a hint that M’Mahon is in the seed business. He gives explicit directions on how to grow our own seed, winnow it and store it for use in the following spring. This restraint from plugging his own wares seems unbelievably pure-minded today when no opportunity for pushing sales is ever neglected. But M’Mahon is sternly and solely writing for the purpose of making better gardeners—for the sake of the readers and the nation. Implied and often stated in the month to month instructions is the principle that we must have prolific orchards and kitchen gardens and beautiful pleasure grounds," and hedges of trees as a moral, patriotic duty. An old-fashioned notion it is, and very good, too.

Some of M’Mahon’s plans for a pleasure ground are quite elaborate, if not gruesome—with their gazebos, ha-has, shell work and grottoes. Simpler advice, like the following, is more to our taste: Here I cannot avoid remarking that many flower gardens are almost destitute of bloom during a great part of the season, which could easily be avoided and a blaze of flowers kept up from March to November by introducing from our woods and fields the beautiful ornaments with which nature has so profusely decorated them. Is it because they are indigenous that we should reject them? Ought we not cultivate and improve them? M’Mahon would be happy to know that the seed houses of the United States have done just that. The list of worthy, but neglected, wild flowers that M’Mahon cites includes Asters, Morning Glory, Bergamot, Phlox, Coreopsis, Violas, Rudbeckia, and Gayfeather. Today seedsmen offer these, improved and now thoroughly respected, in their annual catalogues.

M’Mahon’s monthly entries on the Kitchen Garden interest me most of all. He knew nothing about vitamins but took a strong stand on the value of vegetables in the diet. It is allowed that health depends on the use of a proper quantity of wholesome vegetables. He went far beyond the farmers I knew in my childhood in Connecticut who considered potatoes and a few root vegetables the only important ones; all others were excessive furbishing to a meal. M’Mahon insisted on a very wide variety in the garden, and persistently advocated small sallading (spelled thus), which he defined as lettuce, cresses, radishes, mustard and rape. These we must have all year round, planted under glass when we cannot seed them in open ground. Herbs have a conspicuous place in the book, both for flavoring and medicinal purposes. Rhubarb is as important for its dried roots (a purge) as for its thick stems.

Nasturtium is recommended for the kitchen garden, as well for the beauty of its large and numerous orange colored flowers as their excellence in salads and their use in garnishing dishes. I am sure that he would be shocked to know that the present day seedsmen have bred out the pungent smell and taste of the nasturtium flowers, and substitute a banal sweetness. I once tried eating the flowers (pungent ones, naturally) but found it difficult; I had a stubborn inhibition about biting into so delicate a flower. The stems, however, chopped up fine in a potato salad are excellent. M’Mahon goes on to recommend the green berries or seeds which make one of the nicest pickles that can possibly be conceived.

To Indian corn, M’Mahon is rather chilly, as if to say, if you must have the stuff, here is how and when to plant it. Since he condemns no vegetable, his few bleak instructions on corn seem to be as close to outright disapproval as he will permit himself. Apparently he was still too much of a European to appreciate corn-on-the-cob. He recommends tomatoes, not then in general cultivation, because they impart an agreeable and acid flavor to soups and sauces.

Okra is an admirable ingredient for soups but to M’Mahon it had a more important use: The ripe seeds, if burned and ground like coffee can scarcely be distinguished therefrom. Some say it is much superior to foreign coffee, particularly since it does not affect the nervous system like the former. On salsify we are told: some have carried their fondness for it so far as to call it a vegetable oyster. I detect here a scepticism in which I heartily concur. However, I am baffled by the following oyster-comparison: Eggplant . . . when sliced and nicely fried approaches, both in taste and flavor, nearer to that of a very nice fried oyster than perhaps any other plant."

Because of M’Mahon’s enthusiastic recommendation of it, I have a passionate wish to grow something called Sea Kale. It is delicate eating. . . . As an esculent vegetable it is found to be very wholesome and most people who have tried it prefer it to asparagus to which it is related in point of flavor. A most excellent vegetable, highly deserving of cultivation, says M’Mahon.

This warm praise of Sea Kale drove me to my modern vegetable gardening books to see if anyone today had even a footnote for Sea Kale. It turns out that the modern experts praise it almost as highly as M’Mahon did, and deplore the fact that it is hard to find anyone who has seed for sale. I have become curious about the neglect of Sea Kale in spite of recommendations by the writers of two centuries. I want to know if there is a seedsman anywhere in this broad land who has a package of seed for sale. If there exists a vegetable like asparagus, but better in flavor, I must have it.

I have merely hinted at all that is contained in M’Mahon’s Calendar because I am one-sided in my gardening enthusiasm. The briefest and most accurate summary of the book can be given merely by setting down its full title which is not less than the following: The American Gardener’s Calendar, adapted to the Climate and Seasons of the United States; containing a complete account of all the work necessary to be done in the Kitchen-Garden, Fruit-Garden, Orchard, Vineyard, Nursery, Pleasure-Ground, Flower Garden, Green-House, Hot-House and Forcing-Frames, for every month in the year with ample practical directions for performing the same, also, general as well as minute Instructions for laying out or erecting each and every of the above departments according to modern taste and the most approved plans; the Ornamental Planting of Pleasure-Grounds in the ancient and modern style; the cultivation of Thorn Quicks and other plants suitable for Live Hedges, with the best methods of making them etc. to which are annexed catalogues of Kitchen-Garden Plants and Herbs; Aromatic Pot and Sweet Herbs; Medicinal Plants; and the most important Grasses etc. used in rural economy with the soil best adapted to their cultivation; together with a copious index to the body of the work. This long winded title is no idle Irish brag. Within the covers of this 613-page volume it’s all there.

[Mrs. Retzer, formerly of the staff of Fortune, is the author of Orphans of the Pacific. She now lives with her husband on a 90-acre farm in Waukesha, Wisconsin.]

1950

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SUBJECTS OF THE KING

BY NANCY NISBET

COTTON still has a stranglehold on the deep South. There can be no question about it. Corn, grain, vegetables, livestock, a southern farm worker will watch after all of these, but only with half a heart and directed by a wiser master. He will find some excuse to keep from planting corn field beans between the corn rows.

Cotton is in these workers’ bones. They finger the round, grey seeds lovingly as they pour them into the planters. They chop out the grass to allow the new sprung plants to grow. Happily, they thin out the extra plants, and dirt back the others, dragging the soft earth around the small plants to hold the moisture close. They have learned to poison reluctantly, and follow the long rows listlessly dabbing arsenic and molasses with the aid of an old cloth on the end of a stick. It goes against their superstition to pick up fallen squares and burn them. They believe the Lord sent the weevils and to destroy them is to tempt the devil. Laud Jesus! they moan as the smoke rises from the mounds of burning squares.

The glory time is the picking time. The cotton is weighed there in the fields at sunset, lifted from the ground in cotton sheets tied at the four corners and bulging with fleecy whiteness.

All the negroes are standing to see the trucks come home from the gin ladened with bales of cotton. They caress the fat bales with loving brown hands.

Leben bales off dee new groun’piece. Dat aint bad!

Settling time when the books are balanced and the crisp green bills are counted into eager hands is a good time, too.

Now, us ken buy us a kyar!

Cotton, you see, is ready cash in a big lump sum, something to work a year for, dreaming out the days with thoughts of what can be done at paying time.

My father likes to tell a story that explains to perplexed city folks how cotton is reverenced. Lee has been overseer on the Old Place since before the turn of the century. He has seen four-cent cotton, fields ravished by the boll weevil, hunger walking about on the depleted land, yet he showed where his heart lay when they took the tractor over the creek one day to plow out some new ground.

The tractor goes fast on its rubber tires, and the driver was tearing around the edge of Lee’s biggest cotton patch. He was following as best he could a narrow strip between the cotton and a few vegetable patches. It was a place that Lee had designated as the road. Suddenly Lee gave a frightened shout.

Laud Jesus! Stop dat thing!

The driver came to a halt. Lee ran up to him breathless.

Laud God-a-mighty, he said, Keep off dat cotton. Pull roun’ hear ober dese vegebles!

1941