Sister Kathy Curtis, discusses sustainability with guests Debbie, Jeff and Micah Wiles, from Cedar Creek Farm. Catherine Brock from Leslie County talks about plowing with a mule. Also, hear from CFA’s staff Maggie Smith and Sam Hamlin. Lastly, enjoy a new feature, “Meet the Farmer” featuring Grow Appalachia’s, Mark Walden.
Find other episodes and Breaking Beans stories here:
The Breaking Beans Variety Radio Show airs on 88.7 WMMT (online too!) the first Wednesday of every month at 6pm featuring stories, interviews, recipes, and news from the food and farming worlds in the Appalachian region!
Hosted by Breaking Beans Fellow Sister Kathy Curtis.
Breaking Beans: The Appalachian Food Story Project is an initiative of Community Farm Alliance to tell the story of how local food and farming in Eastern Kentucky can contribute to a bright future in the mountains. Eastern Kentucky is at the point where it can foster a food system that is equitable and accessible to all, provides fresh nutritious food, and serves as an economic generator that builds community wealth. With a rich history of food and farming, stories of how Eastern Kentucky is already growing in that direction – and the challenges along the way – are important for informing people and policy alike.
On the February Breaking Beans show, host Sister Kathy Curtis gives us a preview of the Eastern Kentucky Farmer Conference (February 23-24, 2017), featuring interviews from scheduled workshop hosts and speakers, including: farmers Maggie and Will Bowling of Old Homeplace Farm and Cathy Rehmeyer of Four Petal Farm, Grow Appalachia’s David Cooke and Mark Walden, and conference organizer Jann Knappage!
Find other episodes and Breaking Beans stories here:
The Breaking Beans Variety Radio Show airs on 88.7 WMMT (online too!) the first Wednesday of every month at 6pm featuring stories, interviews, recipes, and news from the food and farming worlds in the Appalachian region!
Hosted by Breaking Beans Fellow Sister Kathy Curtis.
Breaking Beans: The Appalachian Food Story Project is an initiative of Community Farm Alliance to tell the story of how local food and farming in Eastern Kentucky can contribute to a bright future in the mountains. Eastern Kentucky is at the point where it can foster a food system that is equitable and accessible to all, provides fresh nutritious food, and serves as an economic generator that builds community wealth. With a rich history of food and farming, stories of how Eastern Kentucky is already growing in that direction – and the challenges along the way – are important for informing people and policy alike.
Here in eastern Kentucky there have been a lot of conversations using the term “food system”. According to the folks at S.O.A.R. (Shaping Our Appalachian Region), “creating a local foods movement by connecting local producers to markets for their products both within and outside the region” is one way to meet their mission: SOAR’s mission is to expand job creation, enhance regional opportunity, innovation, and identity, improve the quality of life, and support all those working to achieve these goals in Appalachian Kentucky. I am excited that our elected officials see the value in connecting farmers and eaters.
What I have to wonder, though, is what was in place before? I decided to find out.
An aerial view of Red Bird Mission. Image courtesy of Red Bird Mission.
My first step was to contact Justin Brock, the Grow Appalachia Director at Red Bird Mission in Clay County. Since 1921, Red Bird Mission has been providing ministries in and around the isolated and rural areas of Clay and Leslie County Kentucky where chronic poverty, lack of jobs, poor housing, and rugged mountainous terrain present obstacles for residents of the area. Red Bird Mission has been addressing needs through ministry in five areas: Education, Health and Wellness, Community Outreach, Economic Opportunity, and Community Housing Improvement.
Red Bird Mission was one of the first Grow Appalachia sites and Justin has been with Red Bird since 2009 becoming the Grow Appalachia program director in 2014. His family is from Leslie County, a very rural county with a population of 11,019 as of the 2013 census.
When I explained what I was trying to find out, he said, “I know just the folks to talk to.”
I met up with Justin Thanksgiving week at the Mission. He showed me around campus a bit, explaining that at one time a large portion of the campus itself was a farm, providing all the Mission needed in the way of food. Now the campus houses the clinic, housing units for seniors, volunteers, staff, and students of the Red Bird School, so there is little land left for gardens, although Justin has found spots here and there to plant his Grow Appalachia gardens. A fairly recent addition to the campus was a shelter for their farmers’ market and a clean water distribution center.
Sister Kathy (left) talks with Catherine (right)
After touring the campus (and giving our first
stop some time to get ready for visitors) Justin led me to the women’s dorm for the Mission School where his 84-year old memaw, Catherine Brock, is currently residing. Catherine, like most youngsters of her era, got an early start at working in the garden, but it wasn’t until her daddy died when she was nine that the responsibility really set in.
She had three brothers and four sisters. When the two older brothers left home when she was a teenager, she took on their responsibilities too. Her daily chores were building the fire in the cook stove, sometimes cooking the breakfast, milking the cow, and then going to plow. The family had a big field of corn “laid up the hill” and a large vegetable garden and plowing using a mule was Catherine’s job.
“It was ‘bout the only way we had anything to eat,” she said. “I remember one time Mommy got 200 baby chicks and we would eat them as they grew up, three, four, five at a time. There were quite a few of us. We always had chickens. Well I guess I cleaned my last chicken just last year,” she told me with a smile.
I asked her what “laid up the hill” meant. Most of eastern Kentucky is Appalachian mountain country with lots of steep hills and very little flat land, so gardens and corn fields were put on the side of the hill: laid up the hill. I told her I couldn’t imagine planting a small garden on our hillside much less plowing a cornfield and she pointed out there weren’t a lot of other options. She plowed the hill as a child of thirteen and continued while raising her own children.
“I tried to plow a little every year we had a mule just to do it. I could plow about as good as any man,” she said with a grin.
When she married and had her own family of five children, she continued being the person responsible for growing their food. Her husband D.M. started working in Pike County and only came home once every two weeks so Catherine took care of the cows, hogs, and chickens as well as the gardens and corn field. The Brock’s had a big garden “under the hill” (on the hill below the house) where they grew everything they needed.
Red Bird residents and other Eastern Kentucky farmers work the steep hills and narrow bottoms like the one pictured here – buildings are built into the hill, like this barn
The house was built on the side of the hill so they had a cellar where they stored potatoes and such.
“One time we laid up forty bushels of potatoes. He built a box and put them in it. And some were just scattered on the floor. Those were the ones we ate first,” Catherine shared.
They had cows, hogs, and chickens too.
“One time we had this cow and she got loose and went out about two miles and had her calf. Well me and my eldest, he wasn’t too old yet, well I went around there and got that calf on my shoulders and brought it back home. There was no one else to help me,” she said matter-of-factly.
The whole family was involved in gathering food not only at home but in the hills.
“I’d send them kids up into the hills to pick berries, blackberries were my favorite. There was also some apple and pear trees over the hill and I’d give the kids some coffee sacks and they would load them up.” I asked if she ever gathered poke and she told me all the different ways it could be used, her daughter and grandson chiming in too. Apparently the Brock family knows poke.
After her children were grown, Catherine went to work at the Beechfork Elementary School as a cook and was there for twenty-one and a half years. Catherine said, “I still see some of those kids when I go to town and they say, ‘There’s my cook that raised me’.”
“I’ve had a good life,” she said. “I had a good husband. He worked. He was a good fellow all his life. And I’m enjoying myself now sleeping in and visiting with the girls here,” she told me as we were leaving, “And I have time now. I’m learning how to play the guitar.”
On our way to our second interview, Justin told me more about plowing with a mule, “They are pretty smart animals. You do you first row and get to the end of it and make the sound your mule knows means stop and turn around and then the mule just kinda looks at the furrow you just put in out of the corner of his eye and just goes along sweet as can be.”
One thing you need to understand with this whole plowing with a mule thing is the topography of most of eastern Kentucky does not lend itself to large machinery like a tractor very well – especially when the garden site had a forty-five degree slant to it. But a mule can walk on that angle, so it becomes a real lifesaver to the family depending on their garden for a year’s worth of food. I got a good look at that landscape as we headed to our next interview: Justin’s wife’s 84 year old grandmother, Faye Bowling.
Faye’s house is surrounded by vegetable plots, flowers, fruit trees and a small greenhouse full of blueberry bushes. We found her at the kitchen sink cleaning mustard greens and getting them ready to put up.
“I cook mine some before I put them up,” Faye told me, “So you don’t have to cook them much when you want to eat them.” Her life has been one of making food for her family and she has figured out how to not waste time in doing it.
I asked what her earliest memory of working in the garden was.
“When I was big enough to pull weeds,” she replied, “Maybe four or five. We children weeded the onions, lettuce, and mustard. Fed the chickens. Got the stove wood. Everybody worked. You had to be a worker to live back in them days.”
Faye (left) and Sister Kathy (right)
Talking about workers reminded Catherine of her mother: “One day a feller with a flat bed truck pulled up to the house and asked my momma if she wanted to go to Baltimore, Maryland to work building ships for the war. Well, she went to the woman next door and asked her if she would watch me and Ruth, my little sister. Told her she’d send twenty dollars a month. And then she just jumped on the truck and was gone for twenty months. I had two cows to milk, had to haul a water bucket of bean and one of potatoes for supper and then went back to school. Got there in time for geography and history. Had plenty of homework too.”
When she married her husband Dill, they lived surrounded by his family who all farmed although only one uncle grew food to sell that she knew of.
“He used to grow corn then fall beans to sell to the commissary over in Lynch [a coal town in nearby Harlan County]. He used a sled to haul it out,” Faye remembered. It turns out roads in those days were not really reliable for trucks and cars.
“That’s the middle branch (of the Kentucky River) out there and the old road used to cross the river twenty-seven times between here and Hyden (the county seat). And there were no bridges,” she explained. “The big bottoms were for growing food and nobody wanted to give them up for a road.”
In fact it wasn’t until the 40’s that the WPA finally started working on the road.
Faye remembers, “Used to be in the winter that you would hitch up your horse and wagon to go to Hyden and there would be a place about halfway where there were two big ledges where people built fires and spent the night before going on to Hyden.”
I asked how far away Hyden was: “About twelve miles.”
Faye, like Catherine, spoke of “new ground” and how hard it was putting in a new field because you couldn’t use a mule to plow due to the stumps still being in the ground.
Faye described, “You had to dig the corn in. With them trees down, the ground would be full of old leaves and all so you would just plant your corn right in the leaves.” I wished right then I could see a picture of those corn “fields”.
Faye and Dill raised three kids and “about any kind of vegetable and some corn but no stock.” They opened a general store and ran it for about twelve years.
“We had any kind of food, fertilize, hardware, shoes, clothing, everything but gas. We ran the store for about twelve years then I sold it to a lawyer, then he moved on and sold it to my sons,” Faye explained. Her sons still own the store.
Red Bird residents and other Eastern Kentucky farmers work the steep hills and narrow bottoms like the one pictured here
While talking about the store, Faye mentioned they sold seeds, so we started talking about “old time-y” seeds, like mustard and corn seed and tomatoes. She said they always saved their seed mostly because you can’t get those varieties anymore. Like corn. Apparently sweet corn, or what us non-farmers call “corn-on-the-cob,” is a relatively new invention. Everybody planted corn, just regular corn. It was how you cooked it that made the difference.
“You take the top off so you can scrape it all out. Then you take your big cast iron skillet and brown some bacon in it. Then put water in it and the corn and keep stirring it so it doesn’t burn. Then you put a heaping tablespoon of sugar and crumble some bacon meat and stir it all up. Best corn you ever ate.” Faye was laughing as she told me how some friends of hers had made it and it was so good, “they foundered in it!”
Another old time-y food I learned about is apples. Faye’s favorite was a hulling apple called Black Ben Davis because when was fully ripe in the fall its skin was almost black and the flesh snowy white. She said folks would can apple slices to fry for breakfast and use the hulls to make jelly. She would save the hulls and skins for a cold, snowy day and make apple butter.
Faye and I talked more about tater onions, the best corn for hominy, and how moon flower vines and an empty hornet nest on the front porch keeps it cool and bug free all summer. But too soon we had to leave to visit the last relatives on our journey, Farmer and Roberta Brock.
At sixty-seven and sixty-five, respectively, Farmer and Roberta were the youngest people I interviewed for this story. They live on property Farmer has been on since he was seven years old and first met when Farmer’s father married Roberta’s sister. They have been married themselves for fifty years. Farmer worked on strip mines and Roberta worked the garden, cooked, did the wash – “What a wife was supposed to do. When he comes home, have supper cooked,” Roberta remarked. She says she learned everything she knows about cooking from Farmers’ mother.
“She had twelve children to feed so she knew how to cook,” Roberta told me. “And Farmer’s daddy taught me how to work in the garden. We used a horse and plow. We didn’t have a tiller back then so we just hoed it. I like the old timey-y ways like heating with wood and coal and canning. I always canned. It tastes so much better.”
She shared, “We always raised hog meat too. In the wintertime you would dry it out, cure it out. You’d put it in the smoke house and salt it down for about two weeks. You have to turn it over to make sure it was OK then we would hang it up.”
Justin told me that Farmer and Roberta were a part of Red Bird Mission’s Grow Appalachia program and that Farmer was an expert tater grower.
Red Bird residents and other Eastern Kentucky farmers work the steep hills and narrow bottoms like the one pictured here
When asked his favorite variety he responded, “Kennebec, I grow them and they keep good over the winter.” He also likes the little red Pontiac for spring new potatoes but doesn’t care much for the golden ones. I asked him what he did for the pesky Colorado potato beetle and he said that he uses the spinosad spray he gets from Justin but he pointed out that when he was a kid they didn’t have those beetles and as far as he was concerned they “could send them back to Colorado.”
I asked Roberta to tell me more about the canning she loves and was surprised to learn she has only recently started using a pressure canner and she isn’t all that comfortable with it.
She told me, “Farmer’s momma taught me how to can. You take a number three washtub and take clothes and line it. Then you get your filled jars ready and put in with the clothes and stuff paper between them. Then you put clothes and something on it to keep ‘em so they don’t float. Then build you a fire, don’t fix a real big fire. I cook ‘em about four hours. I’ve done that for years.”
When I asked her why she didn’t like a pressure canner, Farmer said, “She’s a little scared of them.” Ends up that she was canning one day with a pressure canner and she heard a funny noise and the top blew off. The good news was she was using it outside so it didn’t make a big mess in the house.
“Never could get that gasket back on,” she told me. “Extension gave me a new one, though, so it works now.”
Before we left, Roberta showed us her pantry: shelves filled with home-canned vegetables. Roberta proudly gave me a quart of her sauerkraut and her recipe on how she makes it. She and Farmer walked us to the van and invited me back anytime. This, I thought to myself, is mountain hospitality.
Roberta’s canned goods
Driving back home I thought about the people who had invited me into their homes and talked about their lives, sharing themselves as well as the bounty of their gardens. I recognized in these “old-timers” what people across Appalachia are doing today in developing local food systems. They are using the skills and values of the past and doing the hard work of growing not only food, but communities.
Before I left Catherine’s house at the beginning of the day I had asked her if she thought today’s generation could do the work she did to feed her family.
“No,” she said with a smile, “They don’t have to.” Faye had reminded me that they took care of the land so the land could take care of them. Farmer keeps his grandboy from Louisville every summer because his daughter wants her children to know how to grow a garden and he has the wisdom that was passed down to him.
Before it was called a “local food system,” there were people who grew food so they could eat. I wonder if it might be wise to invite them to the conversations about local foods? Or better yet, sit around a fire with them and share a meal and some stories.
Breaking Beans: Appalachian Food Story Project is an initiative of Community Farm Alliance to tell the story of how local food and farming in Eastern Kentucky can contribute to a bright future in the mountains. Read the stories at cfaky.org/blog
(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.
CFA member Dorothy Feltner moved to Lotts Creek, Kentucky in 2014, located on the borders of Knott and Perry counties. After completing college, Dorothy moved from Michigan to Kentucky as an AmeriCorps VISTA with the Appalachian Coal Country Team. Serving as the Community Development Coordinator for Lotts Creek Community School, Dorothy runs the Grow Appalachia program for Knott and Perry Counties, providing resources and education for at-home gardeners and community gardens in the surrounding communities.
Dorothy has a big dream for her Grow Appalachia program: to create a sustainable
Learning Garden to provide hands-on training in growing methods, like season-extension,
for-market gardening, organic techniques, and soil conservation.
“Lotts Creek Learning Garden will be an important tool for engaging the community and
a resource for the Grow Appalachia program at Lotts Creek Community School… [it] will be a vessel to share knowledge among the community through hands on learning and leading by example. The learning garden should be a source of inspiration and a place for experimentation. A lot of the sustainable practices, like no-till farming, may sound a bit crazy, but seeing it in action is much more concrete,” she said.
Now working on her Masters in Sustainable Management, Dorothy hopes to turn the
Lotts Creek Learning Garden into a social enterprise with triple-bottom line principles,
operating as a micro-farm business and teaching center for the region.
“From my experience, everyday people have more strength, knowledge, and ability than they give themselves credit for. I’d love to see the Lotts Creek Learning Garden and the Grow Appalachia Program be a catalyst for community resiliency.”
airs on 88.7 WMMT (online too!) the first Wednesday of every month at 6pm featuring stories, interviews, recipes, and news from the food and farming worlds in the Appalachian region!
