Tag: Angie Mullins

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Don Maggard’s Garden

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Don Maggard Introduction from Community Farm Alliance on Vimeo.

by Angie Mullins

(This article was also posted in the Hazard Herald.)

Don Maggard raises a garden.

Lately, though, he realized his garden has raised him up too.

Maggard, 63, worked underground in the coal mines for 37 years. After a lifetime of hard work, his back finally gave out and he had surgery five years ago.

He hasn’t been able to work in mining ever since so he felt he had no choice but to apply for disability benefits. He was essentially forced to retire at 58 years old, something the active and motivated man would never have dreamed he’d do.

“The hardest part,” he said, “was having nothing to do.”

Boredom led to depression.

His life had lost its meaning. He had a loving family, church and good friends, but he was sad because he felt useless.

Out of long habit, he continued to get up at 4:30 every morning and then had nowhere to go.

Then, after a year or so, he decided to expand his family garden.

He joined the Grow Appalachia at Cowan Community Center organization and began to explore new options.

Now, he is a regular seller at the farmer’s market, makes a good supplemental income, and has found a new lease on life.

“I just love watching it grow. I’d do it if I didn’t make a dime,” he said.

“But I wish I could have gotten into this a long time ago and not just depended solely on mining. The way mining is, it’s so up and down.”

He found plenty of things to do to occupy his time too. He attended canning classes, and has taken field trips with the Grow Appalachia group to other farming operations where he learned about organic fertilization, pest control and different crop covers.

He earned a Micro-processing certification to enable him to sell canned goods and a certification for home-based processing for candies and breads and other such home-made products. He’s working on getting a Farm Number which makes him eligible for grants to expand his farm with better equipment.

He will sell his canned goods under the brand, “Sweet Don’s Corn”.

He sold plenty of that corn this year, 20 bushels of green beans, kale, potatoes, cabbage, onions, lettuce, 10 bushels of tomatoes, mustard greens, kushaw, beets, pumpkins, swiss chard, eggplant, spaghetti squash, cauliflower, butternut squash, basil and oregano at the Farmers Market. Really anything he took down there sold well, he said.

Now, he is working on expanding his Farmers Market offerings with about 40 fruit trees that should bear fruit in the next 2-3 years, and is interested in trying some nut trees.

That’s not all. He sells the roots and medicinal herbs he finds in the woods such as ginseng to dealers and has researched the process for making homemade hominy with his corn this year.

Even his health is better.

He walks to his garden, which is about a half mile from his house on Big Branch in Perry County, twice a day. He believes the exercise keeps him healthy and that his back pain would be much worse if he didn’t keep moving. His back hurts worse in the winter when he can’t walk or tend his garden.

He still sometimes needs help from his three grandsons, or his daughter Abigail Maggard, who is a co-manager of the Letcher County Farmers Market.

But he enjoys that part: showing the younger generations how to plant and tend and reap food from their own land with their own hands.

“They need to see what you can benefit from growing a garden,” he said.

He is the seventh of twelve kids raised in the aftermath of the Great Depression when a garden was critical to keeping a big family fed.

“If we had another depression, I don’t know what the young people would do,” he said. “They would starve to death.”

Besides the financial and health benefits, gardening and selling at the Farmers Market brought him other benefits such as friendship with the other farmers, boosting the local economy, and teaching the kids about a healthy way of life.

“They can buy straight from the garden, not straight from a can,” Maggard said. “We need to show them that.”

Perhaps most would agree, that with everything he has overcome, there is plenty that Don Maggard could teach.

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Farmer’s “Wild Hair” Pays Off

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By Angela Hatton Mullins
15596143880_8b97f1aeaa_mFor Chris Caudill, it started on a whim.

He just got the urge to expand his garden, see what he could make of it.

He grew up helping his dad in the garden and has grown a garden for his family for several years at his home in Whitco in Letcher County, but it never had occurred to him to expand or make money from it.

That all changed in 2014.

“I just got one of those big wild hairs,” he said, with his trademark super-sized grin.

In total, that wild hair led him to buy a huge tractor and plant eight acres this year, including seven acres of pumpkins alone.

Caudill set up at Whitesburg Farmers Market nearly every week this summer, selling corn, tomatoes, beans and corn.

He sold 86 dozen ears of corn, netting him about $400.00 in one day. He showed up with his side-by side ATV filled completely full of corn that day. He sold nearly all of it in the first 30 minutes.

As for his seven acres of pumpkins?

That gamble was a long shot, with even greater odds due to an unusually rainy summer. He planted about 30,000 pumpkins. The yield was only about 2,000. He experienced about a 90% loss, a potential of $34,000 if he had realized full return on his planting.

Still he made more than he spent, and 2,000 pumpkins is nothing to sneeze at for a self-professed hobby farmer. The Letcher County Cooperative Extension service alone bought 1,200 pumpkins from him in one order.

He’ll try pumpkins again next year, and now that he sees how well it sells, he will plant a lot more corn next year.

“Everybody loves corn,” he said, adding that he eats corn raw, straight from the cob. “Everything in the garden is edible raw. When you eat it raw, you can taste the natural sugars and the starches. When you cook it, you lose all the flavor.”

Caudill loves to encourage people around him to try raw vegetables and to try farming.
“I just like doing it. And I wanted to make it easier on myself so I bought the tractor and that made it much easier to grow more.”

He bought that new tractor with all the attachments for about $20,000.00 and, so far, has made all the payments solely from his garden earnings. He even has the payments paid up until March, when the next growing season will have begun. He used the tractor to make a little money too by tilling and plowing and clearing land for other people.

Farming has always been just a hobby for Caudill, who works as Director of the City of Whitesburg, Water and Sewer Department.caudill

He’d like to see more hobby farmers bring their extra produce down to the Farmers Market. Although he sees most people just grow enough for their families, “everyone has extra of something,” he says.

It turned into fun and socializing for Caudill too. He and the other vendors he met at the market bought from each other and bartered with each other for produce, trading blackberries and blueberries for squash and greens or honey.

He said he mostly saw acceptance from his community and support for what he was doing this summer. However, he has heard people express reluctance to visit the market because they see the market as full of “treehuggers”.

“That’s not true,” Caudill said. “I’m not. I sell down there and I’m having a good time. There are people down there that want to help the community and we, the community as a whole, can grow from that.”

He is already planning for next year as he looks out over his empty fields with a gleam in his eye. He is working on setting up some low tunnels and considering applying for a grant for some high tunnels to extend his growing season. He is also applying for a farm number.

It’s hard to predict what kind of “wild hair” might strike Caudill next year as he plans his garden.

“My neighbors already think I’m crazy,“ he said, laughing. “This doesn’t surprise them.”

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From Digging Coal to Digging Potatoes: One Miner Tries his Hand at Farming

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by Angie Mullins

Shane Lucas has found what he loves to do. Now he hopes to make a living at it.

When he was laidshanelucasWP off from the coal mine after 17 years and had to take a lower-paying highway construction job, he turned to farming his 29-acre piece of land to supplement his income.

Lucas, 40, who lives in the Cowan area of Letcher County, was recently called back to work at a coal mine in Harlan County, though he hadn’t started yet as of late October. While he is glad for the money and knows he can’t turn it down, he knows it’s not what he wants to do.

 

“If I could do anything in the world, this is what I’d be doing,” he said, gesturing toward his garden on a brilliant late fall afternoon.

He is proud that he was able to supplement his income this year through his farming. He says he made over $580 one particular Saturday morning at the Whitesburg Farmers’ Market. He sold approximately 1,600 pounds of tomatoes this season. If not for a blight, it would have been at least 4,500 pounds, he believes. He sold potatoes, onions, greens, kale, cabbage, corn and beans too.

When asked what the other miners did to make ends meet after the massive layoffs that rocked the Eastern Kentucky coalfields in 2013 and 2014, Lucas replied, “They left.”

Unwilling to join the outmigration that took so many of his co-workers hundreds of miles away to find work, Lucas dug in his heels and kept planting crops.

“It’s a lot harder work than running a piece of equipment on a mine,” he said. “But I love it.”

He was disappointed, though, that he rarely saw coal miners at the Farmers Market buying the healthy food and supporting the local farmers.

“It bothered me,” he said. “They think we’re ‘tree huggers’.”

He even dressed in his mining uniform when he rode through the Mountain Heritage Festival Parade in Whitesburg on a parade float with Grow Appalachia and Farmers Market volunteers. He says he did this to show miners and farmers they “don’t have to be against each other.”

For now, Lucas knows that he must accept the call to go back to the mines to support his wife and extended family that live with him on Lucas Farm, as his new sign calls his home.

However, he says he will miss spending so much time in his garden. Perhaps this is because more than just economic stress pushed him to expand his small garden from a hobby into a business.

He was taught to raise a garden by his dad, Richard Lucas, who died in January, 2014.  Since his dad died, he has put in many more hours than ever before in the garden.

“He’s out here with me,” Lucas said.  He even bought back his dad’s first tractor, a grey 1948 Ford, from a neighbor who had bought it from Lucas’s dad years ago. He found the right parts and has it running again, working the land his dad once helped him farm.

Lucas has a five-year plan to try to make a living farming. He has a small produce stand nearshanelucasWP2 his house that he wants to expand. He has considered getting his micro-processing license and Certified Market license to expand his offerings. He’s installed an efficient drip irrigation and fertilization system. He even plans to try growing 2,000 plugs of Shitake mushrooms next spring.

He has expanded his growing season by using a high tunnel type of greenhouse he built with help from a grant he was awarded through the Natural Resources Conservation Service. There are still rows upon rows of tomatoes in the high tunnel not yet ripe in late October. Lucas expects to keep growing through December and he is working on a contract to supply vegetables such as broccoli to the local school system.

“I’ll just keep trying, “ he said.