PLANTING BY THE SIGNS AND BIODYNAMICS:
AGRICULTURAL TRADITIONS IN COSMOPOLITAN TIMES
Anthropology Thesis
Rachel Williamson
May 2006
…………ABSTRACT………….
The values and methods associated with traditional planting by the
signs have been undermined by conflicting cosmopolitan lifestyles, but
both traditional values and methods are finding a surprising resurgence
among members of a younger generation who practice biodynamics. This
research paper explores the life values of people who learned the
tradition of planting by the signs from their families (“keepers”) and how
they have been challenged by the growth of cosmopolitan society.
Furthermore it explores why and how people (“seekers”) would endeavor
to seek out agricultural traditions, such as Biodynamics, that they were
not raised with. Keepers and seekers reveal many basic similarities in
agricultural practices and life values, but even more significantly they
share the task of negotiating and perpetuating traditional knowledge
within an unsupportive cosmopolitan society. Fundamentally this paper
addresses how people negotiate their lives between traditional knowledge
and cosmopolitan society, and what they believe it means for the
trajectory of our society.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction………………………………………………………………………4
What is planting by the signs?………………………………………5
What is biodynamics?………………………………………………….6
Tradition in the context of change…………………………………..8
Methods……………………………………………………………………………13
Table of informants……………………………………………………..15
Structure of paper……………………………………………………………….18
Chapter 1: The Keepers: Incorporating tradition
throughout changing times……………………………………20
Tradition……………………………………………………21
Significance and negotiation of traditional
knowledge about planting by the signs……………..37
Chapter 2: Cosmopolitan factors weakening the transmission
of traditional gardening knowledge…………………………..57
Modern Values…………………………………………….58
Day Jobs……………………………………………………66
Chapter 3: Motivations to seek alternative traditions…………………..74
Environmental degradation……………………………75
Human degradation……………………………………..77
Chapter 4: The Seekers: Negotiating agricultural traditions
within cosmopolitan contexts…………………………………89
Hopeful change………………………………………… 110
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………118
Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………120
References………………………………………………………………………….121
Diagrams: zodiac man, zodiac…………………………………………………128
Table: zodiac………………………………………………………………………..129
Appendix 1: Planting By the Signs…………………………………………..130
Appendix 2: Medicinal Plants………………………………………………….134
Appendix 3: Odds and Ends…………………………………………………..136
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.………INTRODUCTION…………
Questions of tradition and societal philosophical perspectives
become essential in understanding the decline of planting by the signs
and the rise of biodynamics. Previous research has recorded the
methods and debated the validity of planting by the signs and
biodynamics (Dade 1689, Jocelyn 1970, Johnson 1974, Karask 1941,
Lewis 1994, Maynard 2004, Pyle 1993, Reilly 2004, Thun 1990, Vogt
1952, Wigginton 1922). But they have not considered larger implications
of how traditional astrological agriculture affects people’s lives and their
environment. Currently existing research addresses the differences
between planting by the signs, tradition, and biodynamics. In the body
of my paper I will be addressing the connections between these subjects.
This literature review begins with previous authors’ definitions of
planting by the signs and biodynamics. This leads to a discussion of
previous research about how traditions function throughout change.
Lastly, it addresses address how this research strengthens the existing
body of research by discussing how tradition is culturally construction
within individuals of different generations in our own society.
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What is Planting by the Signs?
Dating as far back as Samuel Strangehopes’ “Book of Knowledge”
printed in 1664, western people have recorded the practices of deciding
when to plant, harvest, fall in love, or conduct business determined by
the cycles of the astrological position of the sun and the moon, referred
to as “the signs.” James Lewis describes planting by the signs as “the
practice of choosing the time to plant and harvest crops according to the
phase and sign of the moon” (1994:8). Similar traditions can also be
found throughout the history of China, Mesopotamia, Mexico, Europe
and India (Lewis 1994, Shiva 2001:168). Many people relate the origins
of planting by the signs to the Bible passage Genesis 1:14-16, “Let there
be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night;
and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and for years,”
or Ecclesiastes 3:1-2, “To everything there is a season” (Wigginton
1922:212). The Foxfire Book by Elliot Wigginton drew people’s attention
to planting by the signs with his accounts of rural prescriptions to plant
potatoes in the waning moon or destroy your weeds when the moon is in
the fiery sign of Leo (1922). The constellation signs govern the timing of
agricultural practices in planting by the signs.
Johnson explains that, “the zodiac signs through which the moon
passes are used as a guide to planting, harvesting, breeding livestock,
butchering, and practically all other chores” (Johnson 1974:41). The
zodiac, which means, “circle of animals,” is the path the moon travels
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through the twelve constellations during each 29 ½ day cycle (Johnson
1974:41). The moon typically stays in one sign of the zodiac for two to
three days before moving on to the next zodiac sign. In contrast,
psychological astrology, such as the horoscope in the newspaper, follows
solar astrology instead of lunar, and so stays in each zodiac sign for
around a month (e.g. Virgo = August 23- September 22) (Karask
1941:30).
The lunar constellation signs are marked in the almanac or on the
planting calendar and carry characteristics such as fruitful, barren,
watery, etc, which can be correlated in timing with one’s activities to
promote the most auspicious results. Planting crops, for instance, is
best done under the sign of Cancer because it is the most fruitful sign,
whereas weeding and cultivation should be done under the barren signs
of Gemini or Leo (Pyle 1993:2-5). Planting by the signs was common
traditional wisdom for Appalachian rural people, but it becoming less
common because of conflicting modern values and day jobs, as will be
discussed in Chapter Two. Though planting by the signs is declining in
number of active practitioners, people who practice biodynamics are
adopting similar astrological gardening traditions.
What is Biodynamics?
The Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner (1860-1925) started
biodynamics as a way to address agricultural challenges such as soil
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degradation and increasing pest pressure, problems have become more
serious with the rise of modern agriculture (Storl 1979:40). Biodynamics
functions under the principle that working with celestial and earthly
rhythms through the use of minuscule “preparations” and astrological
timing will produce the best agricultural results (Storl 1979:43). For
instance, the waning moon is a good time to transplant because the
plant’s life force is drawn down into its roots during that time, whereas
harvesting of leafy matter is better done on the increase of the moon
when the plant’s energy is in its leaves (Thun 1990:16).
Unlike planting by the signs, biodynamics applies small amounts
of yarrow and nettle “preparations” to the fields to “harmonize the basic
mineral components” (Thun 1990:28). In other words, biodynamics isn’t
a simple N:P:K fertilizer equation, but a delicate act of mediating larger
forces that have their own agency.
Like planting by the signs, biodynamics is governed by the zodiac,
the belt of constellations that the moon, sun and planets cycle through
(Thun 1990:10). Universal rhythms act on the earth through the four
traditional elements of air, earth, fire, and water (Thun 1990:7).
Malidoma Some, in the vein of biodynamics, claims that the root of
physical balance lies in the spiritual realm, and so must be treated at
both the spiritual and physical level. “Visible wrongs have their roots in
the world of the spirit,” writes Some, “To deal only with their visibility is
like trimming the leaves of a weed when you mean to uproot it” (Some
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1993:24). Biodynamics, practiced for under a hundred years, draws on
both ancient traditions and a faith in individual intuition. The concept of
Bodynamics questions how tradition functions because people are
picking up ancient traditions through books and peers instead of
parents.
Tradition in the Context of Change
To understand the decline of planting by the signs and the rise of
biodynamics, it is imperative to view tradition not as a static entity but
as a cultural construction. The Latin translation of tradition is ‘to
transmit’ or ‘to give something over to another’ (Jacobs 2004:31). This
definition becomes problematic in discussions of planting by the signs
and biodynamics because it does not account for changes through time,
shifts in societal values, or adaptations of transmission. Social theorists
describe the Latin definition as natural bounded entity tradition (Handler
1984), and generally disapprove of it because it does not account for
inevitable change over time.
The theory of cultural creation tradition far surpasses the bounded
entity theory in its ability to functionally explain astrological gardening
through changing societal circumstances (Handler 1984). Viewing
tradition as a cultural construction allows authors such as Kratz and
Handler to understand tradition as an ongoing process of representing,
negotiating and affirming their cultural, family and environmental
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identity. According to Kratz’s theory of cultural creation, people plant by
the signs as a way or representing, negotiating and affirming their
cultural, familial and environmental identity. Somewhere between
bounded entity and cultural creation lies Shils’ proposition that tradition
is like an organism, always changing through interpretation and
transmission, but always staying essentially the same entity (Handler
1984). The theory of cultural creation incorporates the agent of change
into the picture, explaining why the almanac seems to be shifting away
from agriculture and towards personality astrology as the number of
people involved in agriculture declines.
Ironically, the dominant societal value in America is a commitment
to progress, which ritualizes a denial and contempt of anything that is
“old” and “backwards.” In other words, American culture ritualizes the
suppression of the past. Despite the societal denigration of tradition,
individuals who plant by the signs work to maintain their connection to
ways that have been handed down to them.
To look at astrological gardening as a microcosm of larger societal
discourses, necessitates viewing tradition as it functions on the
individual level. Appadurai locates the ultimate conceptualization of the
past in the relationship between the communal and individual
constructions of ritual tradition (1981). Appadurai’s theory creates a
space for the interaction of tradition and cosmopolitan society to take
place within each individual. People who plant by the signs are
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integrating their own sense of cultural agrarian roots with interpretations
of the dominant cosmopolitan society. This research is picking up where
Appadurai left off and exploring an actual case study of tradition as a
personal cultural construction, placed in the context of societal value
changes.
Throughout this paper I will be exploring how societal values
function at an individual level because, as Barlett says, the agrarian and
industrial worldviews are not simply held by different groups, “but in fact
these value systems often war within the same individual” (Barlett
1933:93). The traditional agricultural knowledge and industrial
cosmopolitan values that interact within the lives of farmers speak to
larger patterns within American society (Barlett 1993:97). Agricultural
traditions are not only a system of knowledge but the associated values
and lifestyles that accompany them. Gonzalez writes that Zapotec
agriculture associates itself with many things that modern agriculture
occludes (2001:4). His list includes reciprocity, food quality, and
personification of the non-human and super natural. Similarly, this
study on planting by the signs found strong connections to relationships
with the land, herbal medicine, community and religion.
Previoius authors inadequately portray traditional knowledge as
undeveloped at worst (Durkheim and Mauss) or as existing in foreign
lands (Malinowski, Conklin, Gonzalez). One flaw is to see tradition and
modernity on a scale of unilinear progress. Durkheim and Mauss are
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culturally biased in their assertion that primitive thought progresses into
modern thought (Gonzalez 2001:4). Setting up a dichotomy is only
useful if it is employed to understand the interaction and continuum
between two extreme opposites, which unilineal progression does not
allow for. Other authors take up the interaction between traditional and
cosmopolitan influences, but they do so in foreign societies, which makes
it easy to falsely imagine that it is only a foreign interaction.
Malinowski, Conklin and Gonzalez, and King have applicable
understandings of the relationship between traditional knowledge and
cosmopolitan society, but they apply them to foreign societies.
Malinowski maintains that science, religion and magic exist within all
societies, just with different functions (Gonzalez 2001:5). Gonzalez aptly
shows that though local and global knowledge are often polarized, they
are actually in constant interaction within Zapotec agricultural
knowledge. Like Gonzalez, Howard Conklin writes about the value of
traditional knowledge. Conklin, in his work in the Philippines, writes
that, “Hanunoo farming is integrated, self-contained, ritually sanctioned,
and ecologically viable” (Gonzalez 2001:12). King discusses rural
Chinese farmers’ ancient agricultural practices, which have many
similarities with contemporary American “cutting edge” organic
agricultural techniques (1911). But Malinowski, Conklin, Gonzalez and
King all discuss the function of traditional knowledge within societies
outside the United States, and so it remains easy to think that
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Americans are immune to the interaction. This is false. I hope to further
the relevance of these authors’ work by bringing home the picture of
traditional and cosmopolitan interaction within individuals in our own
society.
It is inadequate to address traditional agricultural knowledge as a
separate study from societal values or theories about tradition. The
struggle between traditional knowledge and cosmopolitan technology that
is taking place within food production has drastic environmental and
societal repercussions. The rise in large-scale industrial farms has led to
the demise of home gardens and thus the decline of people practicing
planting by the signs. One of the purposes of this research is to show
the importance of gardening as a means to maintain some connection
with the reality that people dependend on the earth. Through stories of
peoples’ experiences in leading a life cognizant of their connection to the
earth, this research shows a potential positive direction our society could
take. The biodynamics movement is one group of people that is deciding
to make a move towards a smaller-scale, more traditional, agricultural
way of life.
By studying young and old, of rural subsistence and urban middleclass backgrounds, this paper shows that the possibilities for integrating
traditional agriculture into daily life are not static, foreign, or
incommensurate with traditional American values and sensibilities. This
paper examines the negotiation of traditional knowledge throughout
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changing societal circumstances. This research reveals that the history
and reclamation of agricultural traditions belongs not only to foreign
cultures but within America as well.
This research explores four main questions. 1) How has planting
by the signs influenced people’s life values? 2) Why is traditional
planting by the signs becoming less common? 3) Why are new people
adopting agricultural traditions through biodynamics? And 4) How do
new people negotiate adopted traditions within otherwise cosmopolitan
lives? In order to answer these questions I conducted a series of
interviews with people who plant by the signs or practice biodynamics.
METHODS
Over the course of eight months I conducted seventeen semistructured, open-ended interviews to get a picture of how traditional
astrological gardening functions in peoples’ lives. Some of my contacts
come through people who have grown up in an area and know or are
related to all the “old-timers.” As with the snowball effect, informants
were my best resource to finding more informants. A set of forty-eight
questions provided prompts for me to weave through our conversations.
Shorter interviews didn’t include all forty-eight questions, but longer
interviews afforded room to touch on all my questions while still letting
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the informant guide the conversation where they felt it was most
important.
The thirteen interviews that took place in peoples’ homes allowed
me to collect field notes about their gardens. I interviewed the other four
people over the phone because they were in different states. Informants
included eight West Virginians, one Kentuckian, one Nebraskan, three
North Carolinians, and four Virginians.
I have broken the informants into two groups: the keepers and the
seekers. Keepers are those who learned planting by the signs from their
families, and their average age is seventy-five years. The keepers reflect
how people work to adapt traditional knowledge to fit within an
increasingly cosmopolitan society. Without exception the keepers were
raised in rural subsistence farming families.
Seekers are those who have sought out biodynamics or planting by
the signs from books and peers. Their average age is thirty-nine years
old. The majority of the seekers come from moderately well off, urban,
mainstream families. The seekers illustrate the constant interaction of
traditional knowledge and cosmopolitan contexts in their difficulty to fit
adapted traditions into cosmopolitan backgrounds.
The people I interviewed are listed in a table for keepers and a
table for seekers. PBTS stands for planting by the signs and B-D stands
for biodynamics. In the ‘Place’ column, (ph) denotes that the interview
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took place over the phone. All informants gave me permission to use
their real names.
Table 1: Informants: Keepers
NAME
Rosalee
Blankenship
Evelyn Lewis
Edna Christian
Virginia Tharp
Clifford and
Juanita Murphy
Lita Tunink
Mary Jane
Queen
DATE
KEEPERS
PLACE
6/24/05
Renick, WV
Interview
SUBJECT
LENGTH
1 ¾ hours
PBTS
6/27/05
6/28/05
6/29/05
11/5/05
Renick, WV
Renick, WV
Renick, WV
Union Mills, NC
4 ½ hours
1 hour
6 ½ hours
4 hours
PBTS
PBTS
PBTS
PBTS
¾ hour
4 hours
PBTS
PBTS
12/26/05 Elgin, NE (ph)
1/7/06
Cullowhee, NC
Table 2: Informants: Seekers
NAME
Jeff Eisenbeiss
and Alicia Hill
Michael Buttrill
Susana Lein
DATE
7/3/06
Bill Buxton
(about his mom)
Cindy Martin
(about her mom)
Trinlie Wood
Lenna Keefer
Andrew Faust
10/17/06
7/10/06
10/17/06
12/29/05
12/29/05
1/5/06
SEEKERS
PLACE
Renick, WV
Renick, WV
Home: Berea, KY
Interview:
Swannanoa, NC
Sugar Hollow, VA
(ph)
Sugar Hollow, VA
(ph)
Etlan, VA
Harrisonburg, VA
Renick, WV (ph)
LENGTH
6 hours
1 ½ hours
1 ½ hours
SUBJECT
PBTS
B-D
B-D
½ hour
PBTS
½ hour
PBTS
2 hours
2 ½ hours
1 ½ hours
PBTS
B-D
B-D
The interviews ranged from thirty minutes to six-and-a-half hours.
The average interview lasted a little over two-and-a-half hours. After
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most interviews I would stop along the road to write down field notes
before returning home to avoid forgetting important details. I transcribed
what I had tape-recorded of 38.5 hours of interviews. During the past
year I have also been graced with follow up visits, letters, and phone calls
with many of the people I interviewed.
Through the course of my study I read books ranging from theories
of tradition to the history of agriculture in America. Speaking with
professors and friends greatly helped me synthesize primary and
secondary information. The first step in writing this paper was to read
through all my interviews repeatedly and write down recurrent topics. As
I compiled a list of topics I noted what line and interview the themes were
found in. Next, I organized my nine pages of recurrent topics into
nesting groups of larger and larger themes. I ended up with a series of
patterns and results that were strikingly similar to what I had
deductively thought I would find. Using these nesting themes it became
relatively easy to write a fourteen-page outline of my findings including
easy references to examples in the transcriptions.
These interviews are merely glimpses into the lives of the
informants involved, but I believe they indicate larger philosophical
patterns at the individual and societal levels. Though the informants’
presentation of themselves could not possibly capture their entire
person, I believe that our conversations are capable of revealing
important themes that speak to larger truths about their lives. These
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interviews are, as Mullens says, “detailed and complex, revealing
essential values, attitudes, beliefs and personality traits” (1992:9). These
interviews reveal patterns of maintenance and reinterpretation of identity
and traditions (Mullens 1992:277). The primary purpose of this paper is
to present the thoughts of the people I interviewed.
Because many of my informants expressed the importance of
experience over reasoning, when reading through these interviews I have
sought to pay close attention not only to the explanations the orators
give, but also what experiences they have chosen to relate. For instance,
Mrs. Virginia never directly said that she highly values family, but she
spoke of her family so frequently that her values became self-evident.
The length of my paper is partially a result of my desire to give the
informants as much space to speak for themselves as possible. If I were
to only quote the informants minimally, there would be more of an
opportunity for me to bend the results into a clean argument of my own
that wouldn’t necessarily speak for them. Here I am drawing off of the
feminist methodology and polyvocality of authors such as Clifford,
Marcus, and Stacey (Emerson 1995). This technique of listening deeply
to the informants has additional importance because it is precisely the
same way that traditions are orally maintained over generations.
Throughout the paper, informants’ quotes are cited by first name only for
simplicity and ease of reading.
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Structure of Paper
The findings of this research are presented in four chapters. The
first chapter is on the keepers, those who learned planting by the signs
from their families, and how they incorporated the tradition into many
aspects of their life. The second chapter addresses how cosmopolitan
values have undermined traditional agricultural knowledge. Chapter
three explores what motivates the seekers to look for alternative
traditions to cosmopolitan society. Finally, the fourth chapter considers
how the seekers incorporate agricultural traditions into cosmopolitan
backgrounds.
The first chapter addresses how the keepers have incorporated the
tradition of planting by the signs into many aspects of their lives. It
begins with a review of the values and methods by which their families
taught them how to plant by the signs. Next I show how planting by the
signs has affected the keepers’ perceptions of the land, herbal medicine,
community, and religion. Special emphasis is put on understanding the
adaptation and negotiation of traditional views within an evolving
cosmopolitan society.
Chapter Two provides a more in depth look into which parts of
cosmopolitan society are particularly challenging the continuance of
planting by the signs as a body of tradition knowledge. The keepers and
18
the seekers reveal that modern values and day jobs are the two largest
challenges to maintaining agricultural traditions.
Chapter Three addresses what aspects of cosmopolitan society
motivate people to seek out alternative agricultural traditions.
Motivations include environmental degradation and human degradation.
Finally, Chapter Four illustrates how the seekers are incorporating
agricultural traditions into their cosmopolitan backgrounds by picking
up the practice of planting by the signs or biodynamics. The keepers
have woven their understanding of biodynamics into their perception of
the land, children, community, spirituality, the human role, and ability
to choose traditions.
All four chapters address the larger issue of how tradition
functions as a cultural construction throughout changes in society.
The conclusion includes the informants’ beliefs about the necessity
to change cosmopolitan society, the growing interest in traditional
knowledge, and how to synthesize different traditions with sensitivity and
hope.
After a page of acknowledgements, there are three Appendixes at
the end of the paper. Appendix 1 is on direct prescriptions for planting
by the signs. Appendix 2 is on herbal medicine. Appendix 3 is an
assortment of practical skills odds and ends. All three appendixes are
comprised entirely of direct quotes from the interviews.
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~~~Chapter 1~~~
The Keepers:
Incorporating Tradition Throughout Changing Times
Nothing that is can pause or stay
The moon will wax the moon will wane
The mist and cloud will turn to rain
The rain to mist and cloud again,
Tomorrow be today.
-Keramos (Johnson 1974:47)
Gardening is an act of maintaining traditional values and skills, as
Jan Mt. Pleasant an Iroquois biologist says, because “the simple act of
planting connects me to the past, roots me in the present, and commits
me to the future” (LaDuke 2005:165). Cycles are the natural laws
governing the earth, according to God’s original intention (Pyle 1933). As
John Jocelyn says “Although the physical earthly forces of nature
provide man with food for the body, his soul and spirit are maintained by
their relation to all the plurality and spirituality living in the stars”
(1970:12). Authors who write about planting by the signs discuss the
traditional conception of the interconnection of human health, success in
the garden, celestial forces, the earth, and religion (Pyle 1933, Wigginton
1922, Strangehopes 1664, Dade 1689, Jocelyn 1970, Karask 1941, Lewis
1994). Consulting the stars for guidance here on earth can be traced
back to early Mesopotamian, Meso-American, Hindu, European and
Chinese cultures (Lewis 1994:116-146), yet for some reason most
Americans now pass it off as old-wives’-tales and hippie-lure.
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The “keepers,” the older informants who were taught to plant by
the signs by a family member, are a case study of how traditional
agricultural knowledge is transmitted, negotiated and compromised
throughout changes in modern society. This chapter explores the
complexities of how the keepers have adapted to changing societal
structures and values. It addresses the cultural construction of
traditional knowledge by discussing what the keepers were taught, and
how they have utilized, maintained and adapted this knowledge through
changing times.
…………………….TRADITION…………………….
Because the keepers value tangible knowledge over intellectual
answers, hardly means that their lives are without meaning. In fact,
opposing tangible and intellectual knowledge in a binary system may be
what has gotten our society into the fix it is currently in. Contrasting the
two immediately sets up a qualification system of good and bad. In the
West, tangible knowledge such as manual labor has been given the “bad”
label as an undesirable way to spend ones life (Gonzalez 2001). Intellect,
on the other hand, has been held up as the golden trophy of
accomplishment.
When these two are pitted against each other, it becomes difficult
to see how they might coexist. More specifically, it becomes hard to see
how manual labor could hold intellectual significance. But that is
21
exactly what we must do if we intend to honestly listen to the keepers’
voices. We must allow them the right to their significance and meaning.
In this section I am using the term “traditional” fully aware of the binary
connotations that are usually attached to it. I hope to use this
terminology while breaking down the usual connotations.
We must break out of the habit of assuming that just because
something is traditional it is stagnant and not contextualized. The
reality of tradition is quite the opposite. People assume that old ways are
backwards and incorrect, but Johnson says if it’s old then it’s “been
tried, tested, and proved by many people over long periods of time”
(1974:33). Karask, too, recognizes that planting by the signs is based on
centuries of observations that have convinced people of the moon’s
effects (Karask 1941:30). These centuries of observation did not show up
accidentally or miraculously. They were gathered, guided and molded by
real people existing in real societal contexts, with their own ongoing
change and transformation.
While the act of practice is inherent to the maintenance and
transmission of tradition, the very same act of practice is the agent of
change and reinterpretation. According to Whitehouse, like a religion, for
a system of agriculture “to be alive (and not just entombed in texts), it
must be practiced. It exists in knowledge and practice. It must be
present in particular people’s experience” (Whitehouse 2004:167). In
other words, the current generations are not facing anything new as they
22
reinterpret and choose how to shape their traditions, they are simply
going through the same process that every generation has gone through.
What makes this era unique is that the rate of societal change has
greatly increased and thus the rate of diluting and discarding traditional
knowledge has increased. In their harsh judgements of the younger
generations, the keepers expressed their concerns about the rate of
societal change.
Planting by the signs was only one of many skills that the keepers
learned from their families. What follows is a compiled a list of the
keepers’ traditional skills. Mary Jane, Evelyn, and Juanita all talk about
learning fiber arts such as crocheting, quilting, knitting, and sewing from
their parents. The same women also recall learning culinary arts such
as cooking and canning from their parents. Mary Jane’s mother taught
her how to save seeds. Evelyn’s mother, Virginia, taught her how to make
soap and hominy. It is helpful to view planting by the signs in this
context: as one of many daily skills that a parent would teach their child
to help them lead a successful life in the world. Perhaps this is why the
keepers express concern over the fact that the majority of the youth
aren’t learning these traditional skills.
Tradition does not exist in a vacuum, floating around in an
idealized world. Tradition exists and transforms within a world of
complexity and change. The upcoming sections on Traditional Values
and Learning Traditions address what and how traditional knowledge
23
was passed on to the keepers. The sections on Today’s Children and
Perpetual Adaptation address how these traditions are being reconciled
and redefined in the context of a changing society.
Traditional Values
The keepers share over six hundred years of experience between
them, not to mention all the countless years of experience that their
forefathers have handed down to them. Yet the majority of contemporary
Americans dismiss planting by the signs because it doesn’t fit within the
frame of cosmopolitan rationality. What this indicates is a difference in
fundamental value judgments. The keepers who plant by the signs value
experience and faith above rationalization, while on the whole the
younger generations far prefer reasoning above experience.
This understanding of the value of experience affirms that tradition
is a continual process of accumulation and adaptation. Tradition is not
to be understood as living in the past, but as living with the past.
Similarly, a healthy parent-child relationship does not mean that the
child lives completely as the parent does, nor that the parent lives
vicariously through the child. A healthy parent-child relationship and a
healthy relationship with one’s heritage, mean living abreast with ones
roots.
This section on tradition is about having faith in experiences. Is
there any value in eighty years of experience? According to over half of
24
the keepers, experience is all the proof they need to trust that planting by
the signs works. They emphasize this fact both explicitly in statements
and implicitly through the copious number of stories they told as proof of
their practice’s validity. Not one of the keepers attempts to explain how
exactly the zodiac works, even when I ask them for explanations.
Instead, they tell me about the corn yields in a field planted at two
different times in the same day (Mary Jane Queen). Lita plants her
potatoes by the signs because her mother experimented and passed on
the results. She remembers that her mother “always made sure that she
planted them at the right time of the moon because they produce so
much better.” Lita swears by the signs in planting her potatoes and her
radishes because she’s seen such dramatic success rates when she does.
Tradition is not blind faith. Several keepers speak of doing
intentional experiments just to test that their practices are really
worthwhile. “We had peas in our garden –” Juanita recalls,
and we had a row down here and we just planted it anytime, didn’t
even look at the almanac and the sign must have been in the
blossom an everything. And we planted a row right above it when
the sign was right. And these two rows down here we didn’t even
get a peck off the whole two rows. And this one right here we
couldn’t even take care of em all there was so many. So if you
plant things in the blossom make sure it’s a flower.
[Juanita Murphy]
When I ask them what to do with disbelievers, the keepers unanimously
respond that disbelievers should do tests of their own.
25
If people only believe explanations that already fit within their
system of reasoning, then the only way to convince a disbeliever is to give
them an experience of their own. Clifford Murphy tells me,
Everything goes by the signs, if you want to pay attention to that.
But people don’t. They, it’s just like everything else, you can talk
yourself blue in the face and they still don’t, they just don’t pay no
attention to you. They don’t think it’s right. They’ll laugh at you.
[Clifford Murphy]
Mary Jane Queen’s husband didn’t believe in the signs either when
they first got married. She warned him that he was planting the potatoes
in the wrong sign and they wouldn’t get anything but tops out of it. He
went ahead and planted them anyway. But when the crop turned out
just as she predicted and “We had the prettiest vines you ever seen… but
the biggest [potato] was about like a hen egg,” Claude started paying
attention to the signs.
You gain something by learning by experience that you can’t get
any other way. Juanita Murphy claims that it’s wisdom that you
gain. And that’s what they call common sense. And you add it in
there and it works for you a lot better. Haven’t you ever had
somethin’ like that? And you’ll say, oh, I like the way I do it better
than the way they told you. That’s your wisdom or your common
sense. They used to call it common sense but I like to call it
wisdom because we all have a certain amount of that, you just
have to use it.
[Juanita Murphy]
Juanita illustrates what Gonzalez refers to as agricultural science,
based on keen observation, experimentation and problem solving to
26
figure out how things work best (2001). The value of experience finds its
roots in a respect for manual hard work.
Virginia, Edna, Rosalee and Mary Jane speak of manual hard work
and bounty as going hand in hand in their lives. We must understand,
when speaking about this, that earning what you have is more important
to these women than getting by the easy way.
Virginia was raised by a single mother since she was ten years old.
“I learned a lot from her.” Virginia says as she looks at her mother’s
picture above the door, “I learned to cut corn and shuck corn. Get out
and grub ground, cut sprouts and dig up roots… She did it all.” Even
now with over 2,880 jars of canned food in the cold cellar, Virginia is just
getting ready for a summer of canning. Half gallons, gallons, quarts and
pints – half-pints would seem ludicrous in this setting. Pickled sweet
beets, green beans, creamed corn, pickled corn, tomato juice (with and
without a long yellow hot pepper floating, suspended at the top of each
half gallon jar), strawberry jam, grape juice, grape jelly, gooseberry jam,
apple sauce, whole tomatoes, greens, sour kraut… The jars are bulging
out of every nook and cranny, lining the stairs, stacked in boxes in the
bathroom and by the door. They are glowing jars of harvest so
convincing I’d swear it was November and we were giving thanks to have
such a bounty to last us the winter.
But it’s summer, only June, and Virginia’s just gearing up for
summer canning. “What I got, I got on my own” seems to be Virginia’s
27
motto. Given her resolution to keep on canning even though she can’t
see to weed the garden anymore and despite the fact that she already has
more canned food than she could ever eat, it seems that Virginia intends
to go right on getting as long as she possibly can. That’s what I mean
when I say manual hard work is one of the keepers’ life values. All of the
seekers learned their working skills from older family members, and so
respect for elders is an important part of their traditional agricultural
knowledge.
Learned by working with family members
Is anything to be learned from thousands of years of accumulated
knowledge and experience? According to the keepers, the answer is an
unequivocal yes. And in both respect and wisdom to be learned, the
answer involves gardening.
When Mary Jane Queen was first married, they lived as they had
been raised up to live. “Oh yes, well at first we just planted you know
like our forefathers did, our dads and mothers and those people before
them, and lived off the land.” Later, she adds, “people has always
planted gardens to survive.” She references her parent’s generation
abundantly for a source of examples that have been passed on. During
her life she has paid attention to the examples her parents taught her
with, and she has tried to pass them on to her children.
28
Virginia, Rosalee, and the Murphys all refer to the “old timers”
using the almanac. Rosalee says all the “old timey people” planted by
the signs. And according to Virginia, “The old people always had an
almanac that they went by.” Clifford Murphy too claims that, “The old
people did not do nothin but go by the book.” Towards the end of our
conversation I ask Mary Jane,
“You said heritage is one of the most important things that
children should learn. What does heritage mean to you?”
Mary Jane replies directly and without hesitation “Well, that is
knowing, understanding, what life is all about. That’s our heritage.”
According to the keepers, following the ways of one’s predecessors
provides both valuable skills and meaning to a person’s life. The keepers
learned this traditional knowledge by working in the garden with older
family members.
Where and how did the keepers learn to plant by the signs? They
learned by working alongside their elder family members. Rosalee
learned it from her uncle, Edna learned it from her mother, Virginia
learned it from her parent-in-laws, Mary Jane learned from her mother,
Lita learned it from her mother, the Murphys learned it from their
parents.
According to the keepers, experience isn’t just a better reason to do
something, experience is also the best way to learn how to do something.
Scientific explanations are akin to learning from a book. One of the
29
fundamentals of a tradition is that it is passed down directly from one
generation to the next.
Mary Jane “always helped my Dad and Mother plant the garden,
and potatoes, and, well, everything they planted… Anyway, it was just a
pleasure for me to be out in the garden with Mother. And I learned all of
these things. And I learned a lot about herbs. And I learned a lot about
all of the different vegetables, all of the different crops they planted you
know – well the cane, the corn, and soybeans, and beans that you used
on the table – all these things, I learned that all when I was just a little
bitty girl.”
None of the keepers remember ever being explicitly taught how to
plant by the signs. It was just imprinted on them as part of everyday life,
handed down through the experience of working in the garden with their
parents. I ask Lita how her own mother had learned to plant by the
signs and she replies, “They just grew up with it. They all had to work
out in the garden too.” The Murphys, in another state and of another
generation, learned to plant by the signs just as Lita’s mother did, by
doing the chores that were required of them in everyday life as children.
“Most of what we learned we learned in our own homes and in our
neighborhood here,” Juanita tells me. The knowledge that they learned
locally amassed into a large collection of tangible skills. Today, the
keepers worry that these collected skills are not being passed on to the
next generations.
30
Today’s Children: Concerns about youth not learning
As much as Rosalee, Evelyn, Mary Jane, Virginia, Edna, Lita, and
the Murphys talk about previous generations, like any parents they talk
a great deal about their own children and grandchildren. Part of
tradition is caring about continuity. When the keepers express their
concerns about the way kids are being raised these days, they are
simultaneously expressing their concerns about losing the continuity of
the generations. Something is happening that they disapprove of.
“Do you see any difference in how kids are raised today?” I ask the
Murphys
“They don’t have nothin for em to do. Back then they had to work”
Clifford responds.
Later, Juanita brings the conversation back to her notion of
experience generating wisdom. She worries that children today aren’t
getting any experience. “And you know,” she says over across the
dinning room table to me, “children this day and time, they do a lot of
reading and this that and the other thing, but I don’t think that they get
to apply it very much.” Clifford interjects, “They’re a couch potato!” and
we’re all reduced to laugher. It may be true that current generations are
shedding traditional knowledge faster than ever before, but it would be
incorrect to assume that previous generations perfectly maintained a
static body of knowledge.
31
Perpetual Adaptation: All generations bend traditions
It isn’t just the new generations that are shunning traditions.
People have been remolding and casting off traditions for as long as there
have been traditions to remold and cast off.
Just because people practice a tradition doesn’t mean they will
blindly adopt every traditional practice they ever came across. They too
pick and chose what they find valuable enough to keep doing. Virginia
says, “I don’t go by all the signs, but I know the signs that I want to plant
in.” Rosalee tells me that she knows people who plant all of their crops
by the signs, but she is content to stick to just using the method for her
cucumbers because that’s what her uncle taught her. Interestingly, ever
since Rosalee got a bumper crop when she accidentally planted her
cucumbers when the moon was in Virgo, she’s switched over to always
planting them in Virgo ever since. Traditions are bound to evolve over
time, but so long as the fundamental framework remains the same, the
tradition stays intact.
Every generation harbors some who cast traditions aside. Edna’s
brother, Avery, lives in the next house down the road from her. For
months I passed by the trailer catching glimpses of the perpetual cluster
of people, young and old, playing horseshoes beside the road or talking
down by the tents set up along the river. One day I stop by to speak with
Avery. I have to holler my hello from the top of the steps, over the porch
and into the trailer where people are talking over blasting television
32
commercials. A child in diapers, one of Avery’s seventeen grandchildren,
teeters onto the porch to stare at me. Avery comes out finally, stands
above me on the porch and rests his bony elbows on the gate between
us. He tells me that his father, a Lewis, used to plant by the signs. But
Avery informs me defiantly that he doesn’t plant by the signs, he plants
in the ground whenever he’s ready. “We planted potatoes on a Sunday
this year,” he says with a twinkle in his eye and a little grin creeping
around his blackened teeth. “Whenever we’re ready.” Avery illustrates
the fact that tradition in itself is inherently in flux. Understanding
existing theories on tradition will help understand how every generation
negotiates their relationship between ideas about the past and realities of
the present.
Conclusion
–
“What’s past is prologue”
Shakespeare, (Thomas 2000 cover)
“I, too, face the problem of history:
what to retain, what to dump, how to hold on to what memory insists
on relinquishing, how to deal with change.”
– Salman Rushdie (Kratz 1993:30)
Though there are arguably similarities, I am drawing a distinction
between the traditional knowledge of planting by the signs and the
modern “traditions” such as consumerism and uprootedness. The
difference is a matter of localism and tangibility. Traditional knowledge,
as I define it, comes from a specific source (usually family), is useful as
33
tangible skills, and is applicable at a local context. Like Kratz, I believe
tradition to be a “negotiated and situated interaction” which emphasizes
“local understanding and individual roles” (Kratz 1993:35). Modern
“traditions,” by contrast, have no specific point source, they provide
values without tangible skills, and they pride themselves on indifference
to place. With that said, it is time to define tradition and how it
functions.
The terms “traditional” and “modern” are often portrayed as a
dichotomy. In this paper I hope to prove that the two are not mutually
exclusive, but, in fact, intimately engaged in constantly affecting each
other. Many social theorists, including Eisenstadt, Rudolph and
Rudolph, Singer, and Tipps, have already pointed out the inadequacies of
dichotomizing tradition and modernity (Handler 1984:273). Among other
problems, the dichotomy carries the unfortunate association with other
simplistic dichotomies such as “west versus rest” and “developed versus
undeveloped” (Kratz 1993:33). Still, I maintain that there are equal
dangers in simplifying things by eliminating all differentiation. Without
any differentiation it is too easy to slip into relativism where nothing
matters more than anything else. With this in mind, I have undertaken
to explore how people engage in the ongoing negotiation of tradition.
In Authentic Anxieties, Del Upton argues that tradition didn’t exist
until we had modern, which is an interesting point in linguistics, but
incapable of summarizing human experience (AlSayyad 2004:10). But
34
just because at an earlier time there was no word for tradition doesn’t
mean it didn’t exist. I never brought up the word tradition in my
interview questions, and many of my informants never used it either. Yet
tradition was clearly the topic of our conversation when we talked about
skills they learned from their parents. The term “tradition” may just be a
useful term for outside analysis of what is simply part of everyday life to
someone else. Whether or not people claim the term “tradition,” there
are some key differences between tradition and cosmopolitan values.
Tradition, unlike the contemporary cosmopolitan society, actively
connects the present to the past. I concur with Upton that tradition is a
convenient mirror for anxiety that “arises from the fear that modern life
is by its nature inauthentic – even counterfeit or spurious” (2004:10).
Dichotomizing traditionalism and modernity may be convenient to
provide the basis for a critique of modernity, but it does not fully account
for the complexities of navigating a real life between the two, as each of
us does daily. To understand tradition as a current interpretation in
interaction with modernism, we must look to the theories of tradition as
a contemporary construction.
The theory of cultural construction allows tradition to be
functional because it defines it as “less an artifactual assemblage than a
process of thought – an ongoing interpretation of the past” (Handler
1984:274). This view of tradition understands it as a “dynamic
reinterpretation of the present” (AlSayyad 2004:6). Kratz, too, is an
35
advocate of viewing tradition as a cultural creation so that we may
understand how “past becomes present in different ways as people create
multiple images of both, commenting on and framing current practices
and politics” (1993:53). Avery mocks the past, while his sister Edna tries
to incorporate it into the present. The theory of cultural construction
allows for the complexities of how the keepers have both maintained and
adapted skills and values handed down from their parents.
Now that we have established tradition as an active cultural
creation, it is time to take on the task of unraveling issues of tradition
and continuity, or what amount of change turns a tradition into
something completely different. Jack Goody wrote of a Bagre myth in
1972, “What exists, exists in change as well as in continuity”
(Whitehouse 2004:167). Only by viewing tradition in the reality of
continual change can we recognize planting by the signs as an interactive
tradition instead of an inert ideal (Kratz 1993:53). Shils gives the most
useful analogy for understanding the continuity of tradition in the face of
change when he compares tradition to an organism that grows and
changes but remains essentially the same at its core (Handler 1984:275).
The concept of tradition as a cultural creation addresses the next
section on the significance and adaptations of how planting by the signs
influences values and worldviews. This section will discuss the cultural
construction of traditional relationships with the land, herbal medicine,
36
community and religion, and how the keepers have engaged these
traditional values with a changing cosmopolitan society.
………..Significance and Negotiation of Traditional
Knowledge about Planting by the Signs………….
To illustrate how traditional agriculture has shaped many aspects
of the keepers’ lives, this section presents the keepers’ relationships to
the land, herbal medicine, community and religion. Throughout this
section it will become apparent that these values and perceptions are not
static. Indeed, they are just as mediated by changing modern society as
they are by the influences of traditional agriculture.
The Land
The most readily obvious influence of traditional agriculture that
the keepers share is an awareness of their connection to the land. In
part this deep connection comes from experiencing their direct
necessities for food and the staples of life. Having provided their own
necessities, they know that it all comes from the earth. When it came to
connections with the land, three themes became evident throughout my
interviews with the keepers. Nearly all of them highlighted their detailed
observations in their stories and explanations of how they live with the
land. Enjoyment, not mutually exclusive to necessity, came to the
forefront as one of the primary reasons why all these people garden, and
it speaks strongly to their positive relationship with the land. Several of
37
the keepers also emphasized that their physical orientation is primarily
based in the lay of the land, topography, plants, and natural indicators.
Interestingly, the keepers’ perception of land doesn’t seem to have been
nearly as influenced by cosmopolitan society as other aspects of their
lives.
Through stories, questions they asked me, and tangents, six out of
eight of the older people I interviewed revealed the importance of keen
observation in their lives. Speaking with Evelyn highlighted the
importance of observing the land. I’m sitting in a cushion-backed chair
on the front porch next to Mrs. Evelyn Lewis. She rocks slightly in the
porch swing, her silver hair playing around a gentle smile as she creates
her own breeze to fend off the heat of this late June morning. Through
plentiful examples, she conveys to me how important earnest observation
has been in her time living on this land. She says, “one thing I do know
for a fact, that if you watch even that creek out there,” she gestures
across the road to where her granddaughter is fishing crawdads and
broken fenders out of the shady creek, “the water will raise for no reason.
Say it’ll raise that much, quarter of an inch; that’s a sign of stormy
weather. And I’ve watched that.”
“Did you figure that out on your own or hear about that?” I ask.
“No, just sort of on my own. Just watching, just watching…” she
replies.
38
Mrs. Evelyn’s meticulous observations give her an understanding
of how streams and weather patterns correlate, as well as the daily
affairs of her avian neighbors. She pauses in the middle of pontificating
about cucumbers to cock her head at a faint trilling on the hillside.
“Somebody’s upsettin’ momma robin,” she shakes her head.
Two months after the fact, Mrs. Virginia clearly remembers that
the last good rain they had was on April twenty-first. Mrs. Rosalee
pauses in the middle of our conversation to point out a fawn on a far
away hillside, twice commenting on its activities. The Murphys refer
fondly to the flock of turkeys in the woods as though they were a flock of
chickens, the walkie-talkie playing in the background all the while to
keep Clifford up to date about the bear hunters on a nearby mountain.
Mrs. Mary Jane, like Mrs. Virginia, knows where her soil is rich and
where it is poor. Virginia points out the ornamental bush that the “the
blackbirds, starlings, and I believe blue jays” get into until the
gooseberries come ripe. Mary Jane talks about pollinators as though
they were children coming home with art projects for their mother.
I see bees workin’ out on the flowers; how they do that? Buzz on
little wings and get it on their legs and that’s how they carry it…
It’s just amazing though to watch something like that. Anybody
who’s never had the chance to see em do that, it’s amazing.
[Mary Jane Queen]
There are three tiers to the importance that these older people
place on these observations. The first tier is that they were attentive
enough to their surroundings that they noticed the slight fluctuations of
39
water level and bird song. The second tier is that they have deemed
these facts significant enough to commit to memory. The final tier of
establishing importance is that they have chosen to tell me these things
without my asking. Evelyn asks me if I’ve seen any cougars up on Jim’s
hill, then launches into telling me all the community sightings.
Sheila’s seen one. Neighbor saw one a few weeks ago. Tawny, long
tail. There’s a black one up in there. Mm hm. Several people have
seen it. I had a friend, lived over in the Brown’s Town area, and
she looked out her kitchen window and saw one coming over the
mountain. Yeah, they travel a lot. But there’s always been one up
here.
[Evelyn Lewis]
It is wildlife that spurs observations worth telling the neighbors
about. In three degrees – observation, recollection and retelling – the
keepers expressed the importance of observation in their lives. The
enjoyment that they get out of retelling their observations is no less than
the enjoyment the keepers get out of working in the garden.
“And so I’m gonna plant some in my corn this year,” Virginia
excitedly tells me her grand plans for Bush Half Runner Beans, like some
twenty-two year olds scheme to stay up for forty-eight hours at a rock
concert. “If God lets me live, and I don’t know what I’m facin’, I’m afraid I
have cancer of the throat… But I’m gonna plant anyhow.” The keepers
are older in their years. They have seen health problems, they have
outlived some of their children, and they have begun to watch their
bodies slow down. But gardening is one thing they have held onto. Like
40
Virginia, Rosalee has faced her fair share of health problems. After an
operation nine years ago the doctors told her she shouldn’t be working
out in the garden. But, Rosalee says, “I enjoy working in the garden.”
And so although she doesn’t hoe her potatoes anymore (weeds help keep
them moist she explains), Rosalee has still gotten out to plant an array of
pole beans, tomatoes, and cucumber hills. When I ask Lita what her
garden means to her, she says as she’s getting older she can’t work in it
too much anymore, but she likes it for “exercise and for fresh eating.
Some fresh-air, and just being out with nature. I like it.” Through lives
that have seen so much change in how people and society conduct
themselves, the garden has been a constant source of health and
continuity. The garden, like the land itself, is the primary spatial
orientation for the keepers.
We are living in a time where street names navigate people from
the doctor’s office to the grocery store, and back to an apartment. We
are also living in a time when the majority of people can’t identify more
than five trees and few people realize that their food comes from plants
and animals; the earth. This is no coincidence. It is a matter of
orientation towards the manmade world instead of the natural world.
The keepers have a different map. Here, the streets are
mountains, the avenues are streams, and every alleyway is a hollow. Tall
trees are the street signs, and plant communities are the friendly police
officers pointing the way to your desired destination.
41
Talking with some of the keepers, I am struck by the frequency
that places come into the conversation. Any mention of a person or an
event is prefaced by where it happened. And we’re not talking about
what street someone lived on, we’re talking about what mountain they
grew up on, and which stream they walked to harvest medicinal plants.
“We don’t go by exits, we go by trees.” Clifford chuckles, knowing he is
charming me. “Said, Lord, they cut that tree down, we don’t know where
we’re going!” Juanita joins in and we all laugh heartily. Albeit jokingly,
they are orienting themselves by the land, not by human constructions
and exit numbers.
Place is extremely important every time Mary Jane delivers a story.
She sets out to explain that Luther Middleton’s lady was the only woman
who could cook as well as her mother, and she winds up telling me the
origins and changes of the name of the mountain they lived on. Again
when she is telling me how she learned medicinal plants from her
mother, she leads me with names, as though I were walking with them,
up one cove and down the next. If this were my home, I would be
learning my home language.
The keepers express their connection with the land through their
observation, enjoyment and orientation. It seems almost redundant to
comment on how important the land is in their life. The truth is, the
land is equally important in everybody’s life since we all depend on it.
42
But what sets the keepers apart is their immediacy and respect for the
connection.
Mary Jane Queen ends our conversation by emphasizing the
importance of the natural world.
But I’ve always loved nature. And I love to watch the butterflies.
Cause they go in there and get that nectar and that’s what the
bees make honey out of. Anybody who loves nature will, or I do,
just love to watch em do that. I guess some people has never even
thought about a honeybee makin honey.
[Mary Jane Queen]
She has always loved nature – she grew up oriented in the land.
And she loves to watch the butterflies – being a part of the land has
brought Mary Jane enjoyment and fulfillment. Anybody who loves
nature will just love to watch them do that – the practice of observation
and the aggregation of her knowledge is important. Observation
connects her to the insects that share the land with her. “I guess some
people has never even thought about a honeybee making honey.” As
fewer and fewer people are practicing traditional gardening techniques,
fewer are inheriting a direct connection with the land. For nearly a
century authors have recorded the close relationship that farmers have
with the land.
The 1954 Old Farmer’s Almanac includes an eloquent piece on the
meaning of land to people who come from agricultural heritage.
43
We know our land for what it will grow. We know our land for the
promise of what it may grow. But we know our lands, really, for
the story of the good crops our fathers knew here.
Land is not a property passed from hand to hand. It is not
sold or bought - but truly its own. It knows no owner. It is not
supported but supports and is faithful servant and stern master.
I think of those who have worked these fields of ours – and I would
be humble – but lovely land is prouder and richer than any man
who has worked them.
These fields are life – deeper, richer, prouder than any man
who has plowed or sowed them. For men pass, but I know that
these good acres of ours – and yours tomorrow, perhaps – will
endure.
…Good land will find its good master – and tolerate no other.
…Good earth, your richness and your promise will enrich me if I be
your good servant. Serve me well in the best ways that I can use
you.
[Old Farmers Almanac 1954:29]
The author is referring to the land as strictly agricultural fields, but in
the interviews several of the informants expressed land to mean the
entirety of the mountains and rivers beyond their fields and ownership.
This passage honors the land in the language of subservience, as does
Jack Pyle when he says, “Above all, your aim should be to help maintain
the balance of nature” (Pyle 1993:47). This honor speaks to the
orientation and importance in the section the keepers’ connection with
the land.
Other authors have noted the existence of keen observation among
the keepers. “Farmers of a generation or two ago” writes Jerry Johnson,
“lived much closer to nature than we do” (1974:57). They were much
more aware of timing their crops to the growth of the trees, for instance,
planting corn when hickory buds got to be the size of a crow’s beak.
44
In their relationship with the land, the keepers show no obvious
signs of adapting to societal changes. One possible explanation is that a
connection with the land does not necessarily involve other people and
would therefore be less directly influenced by societal changes. Several
of the keepers do address the change in how younger generations relate
to the land, specifically in regards to their awareness of where their food
comes from. This will be addressed in the chapter two. The subjects
that follow – Medicine, Community, and Religion – directly involve other
people and are therefore the place to discuss how the keepers have
adapted traditional values in a changing society.
Herbal Medicine
One expression of the keepers’ connection with the land is their
traditional knowledge about herbal medicine gathered from plants in
their immediate area. “All your medicine comes from the earth,” Clifford
Murphy tells me early on in our conversation, “It’s the earth.” His wife
Juanita asks me pleasantly “you know what Lion’s Tongue is?” When we
go out in the yard later I discover that Lion’s Tongue is what my friends
call Pipsissiwa (Chimaphila umbellata).
45
People gather it, even today we have some friends over on Bills
Creek that gather it, and they claim it’s good for Kidney problems…
And you can take just the regular Planta, you know what Planta is
don’t you? [Plantain, Plantago major] And you can crush it up and
put it on a bee sting or on a place where you have an allergic
reaction and it’ll clear it up.
[Juanita Murphy]
In return for their healing properties, the keepers treat weeds with
respect because they value their usefulness. During the course of their
lifetimes the keepers have seen the rise of modern medicine overtake
traditional herbal medicine.
The discretionary use of modern medicine shows how the keepers
have reacted to the changes in their lives. The keepers are grateful for
modern medicine in the case of emergencies, but on the whole they
distrust it. Many of the keepers have had operations, but they have
supplemented operations with herbal medicine.
Evelyn is worried about the number of her family members that
are having health problems, but she is suspicious that cosmopolitan
lifestyles are to blame and medication won’t be able to fix that. “I’m
gonna catch it from my doctor this evening because I didn’t take the
medication she gave me cause if it’s gonna kill you why not just let the
cholesterol getcha? At least it’s natural. I’m gonna prove them wrong.
Because I’m not taking it.” At the Murphys’ house, after the biscuits and
scuppernong jelly have been washed down with black coffee, Juanita
brings the conversation back to medicine. “You can take herbs for just
about everything. And you’re better off because medicines are good and
46
doctors have learned a lot of things to help people, and a lot of medicines
are just wonderful because they help a lot of people. But the thing about
it is, herbs don’t have the chemicals in them.” Evelyn and the Murphys
accept and utilize modern medicine, but they distrust the long-range
affects and prefer to keep using herbal medicine alongside.
The keepers’ use of herbal medicine has been far from a static
phenomenon. They have adapted to the development of modern
medicine with both acceptance and distrust. These same themes of
acceptance and distrust are evident in how the keepers have adapted to
changing community dynamics.
[See Appendix 2 for more information on traditional knowledge about
herbal medicine]
Community
During their lifetimes the keepers have seen neighborliness change
from relationships based on daily necessity to friendships and formalities
of people who otherwise do not depend on each other. In the past,
community values could be understood as generalized reciprocity,
wherein neighbors shared what they had because of a mutual
understanding that they depended on each other. With the shift from
subsistence agriculture to a day job economy, neighbors no longer
depend on each other the way they did when the keepers were growing
47
up. Thus, what was once generalized reciprocity has been transferred
into neighborly generosity.
The keepers’ have reacted to changing community structures with
persistence and reluctance of traditional values. Persistent adaptations
include relating to new neighbors in new ways and working to maintain
the fundamental principle of decent neighborliness. On the other hand, I
have witnessed the baffled confusion among many of the keepers who
can’t understand the indecency of careless young neighbors. The
tension of shifting community dynamics in the keepers simultaneous
generous persistence and resentment of the new neighbors’ lack of
appreciation.
Generosity is one of the most outstanding characteristics shared
among the Murphys, Mary Jane and Virginia. Clifford drove me down
the road to proudly show me the newly constructed Fire Department
building built while he’s served as chair. He’s dowsed over two hundred
wells for free, only asking that people call and tell them how many
gallons per minute they got. And even when the Murphys were living in
Winston-Salem with a half-acre garden they would “give away as much
as we kept” (Juanita). In the basement, they give me a jar of newly
canned scuppernong jelly and try to give me sweet potatoes as well.
Clifford and Juanita also provide services as consultants for planting by
the signs. “He gets a call every week nearly,” Juanita told me,
“sometimes in the summer time he gets em even more often.” Clifford
48
told me “We spent over two hundred dollars last year on almanacs and
things like that. Just to give away.” They give the almanacs to friends
and family “So they won’t bother me,” Clifford chided.
Besides the fact that all of them were willing to spend a whole
afternoon speaking with me and offering me food, the keepers’ stories
reflect that they would treat anyone this way. Once, when I called
Clifford to wish him a happy Birthday and he found out I wasn’t going
home for Thanksgiving, he invited me out to spend the weekend with
their extended family. I thanked him profusely for his kindness, but he
just responded plainly, “It’s just how we would treat anybody. We don’t
care who you are. If you don’t have a family to spend Thanksgiving with,
come on out and stay with us for a while.” The Murphys are persistent
in their generosity throughout changing community structures, but other
situations show the tensions.
In their disgruntled determination to continue being generous
despite ungrateful new neighbors, some keepers reveal the difficulty of
upholding traditional neighborly values amidst changing community
dynamics. Virginia gives away incredible amounts of food each year,
compulsively it seems, despite the discomforting ingratitude she is
sometimes met with.
Ms. Virginia remembers a woman four years ago at the post office
who, “just wanted a mess of corn so bad. Well I walked back up the road
to my gate, I said if you’ll come in and wait I’ll go get you some corn.
49
‘You bring it to me!’ [the woman said]. Well, I didn’t take it to her.” In
another account she recalls that, “I have one guy come in and pull my
onions, he calls em scallions. And I told him I’d give em a mess, but that
would be it. And these bums around here, they’re healthy and they’re a
lot younger… and too doggon lazy.” As Virginia tells me these stories she
is pressing handfuls of gooseberries into my palm, picking them by feel
because her eyes are too weak to see them anymore. The pastor’s wife
once said that Virginia is always blessed with such a good garden
because she shares. Despite her disappointments with ungrateful
neighbors, Virginia is determined to remain generous no matter how the
community changes.
The garden can be an expression of individuality both in keeper’s
self-sufficiency and in the way seekers try to resist distasteful aspects of
modern society. But strong individuality does not equate isolation.
Strong individuality makes stronger connections with the human and
non-human world. Weak individuality is a rebellious adolescent who is
afraid to deeply connect with anything for fear of losing a self he doesn’t
even know. Strong individuals arise only with the support and
connection to the larger community. Strong connections between
individuals and their communities, not surprisingly, make strong
individuals and strong communities. Some of the keepers’ strength and
resolution comes from their religious affirmations.
50
Religion
Faith extends a person’s conception of community accountability
even into the spiritual realm. In this sense, life is an expression of one’s
relationship with God. If we cannot first accept communion with our
land and community, it is doubtful that we could adequately do so at the
spiritual level that encompasses all of existence. Planting by the signs,
specifically in a religious context, is acknowledging one’s place within a
larger network of existence.
What does the soil have to do with a faith in the God above? Six of
the eight keepers have addressed the religious component of their
gardening practices. To the keepers, Christian values and beliefs are the
strongest support for their practice of planting by the signs. Evelyn
explains, “The sun gave the heat, the moon had the phases that had
control over the waters and stuff, and how it does control I have no idea.
Only God knows that.” Several times during our interview she stresses
that she doesn’t want a logical explanation for why planting by the signs
works, because to her it’s more about living in harmony with God’s
intentions and trusting in His wisdom.
Faith is the expression of a lively connection to the divine. Evelyn
tells me
You have a season of growth, spiritual growth, and then you have
a dry season. And then you have a cold season where you feel
nothing…If you don’t have those seasons where you’re
unproductive or you’re down and out and you’re always in a
51
productive time – it’s just like hurt. If you never know hurt, you
never enjoy joy.
[Evelyn Lewis]
The seasons, Evelyn explains, depend entirely on how much faith
you have in God to guide your life. Mary Jane, Evelyn, Rosalee and the
Murphys all put their faith in the Bible for guidance and to affirm their
astrological gardening practices. Clifford says that he’s a good dowser
because he has faith, and other people could do it just as well if they had
faith. “I tell em, I say you got to have faith, you gotta believe” (Clifford).
Clifford’s reference to contemporary people needing to find faith to be
successful hints at the tension between religious gardening and largescale industrial farms that grow the majority of America’s food today.
If we are to understand that respect for the spiritual realm is an
important component of growing one’s nourishment, what then are we to
make of industrially grown food? Mary Jane says that God is just as
active in the industrial farms of unbelievers as he is in her own home
garden.
Because if we do our part, just till the ground, plant the seed, the
Good Lord does His part. He makes it rain, lets the sun shine, and
all these things that it has to have to grow in the dirt and make
food. So He takes it up. … But, as long as they plant and do their
part, then the Good Lord He sends the rain on the just and on the
unjust.
[Mary Jane Queen]
Mary Jane has chosen to interpret religious agricultural matters
with the same lens she has always used. According to the keepers, there
52
are no exceptions to the rule; we are all connected to God, no matter
what. The only difference is if we chose to deny it or to honor that
connection by working with it. Previous authors have revealed that
tradition and religion share many similarities in the discussion of
individual agency.
In its discussion of agency, religious studies literature reveals
many of the core tensions in validating traditional practices throughout
changing times. The subject of free will lies at the crux of the tension
between planting by the signs and Christianity, and it challenges the
notions of agency in people’s reaction to change. On the one hand, the
keepers insist that the Bible is the basis of all their practice. On the
other hand, some Christians condemn astrology as heretical.
As with most contentious topics, people have used the Bible to
both support and condemn planting by the signs. The New English Bible
states in Leviticus 19:26 “You shall not practice divination or
soothsaying,” but Genesis 1:14 encourages “God created lights in the
heavens, and He made them for signs and for seasons (Lewis 1994:8485). Astrology, historically honored in Christian and Western traditions,
was renounced in the 20th century because fundamentalists didn’t want
to be associated with the New Age metaphysical movement that had
newly adopted astrology (Lewis 1994:132). This brings up an interesting
question of whether or not seekers who are advocating astrological
53
gardening are simultaneously separating it form its very important
religious support.
The problem is a question of free will versus determinism (Lewis
1994:131). Anthony Stone though he condemns astrology in India,
acknowledges that astrology isn’t determinism but recognition of natural
patterns that humans can choose to work with (1974:83,44). There are
parallels between the free-will/determinism debate and the debates
about tradition as a static entity or evolving interpretation. Determinism,
like static entity tradition, is too inflexible of a concept to actually
function in the real world of change. Reverend Geo A. Leakin wrote in
1868 that man “does not stop the waves, he transfers his own position”
(1868:66). Thus free will, like cultural construction of tradition, is
compatible with the reality of continual change. This concludes the
section on examples of the keepers’ traditional values and adaptation.
Conclusion of Chapter One
The keepers’ relationships with land, health, community, and
religion are not indications of a Jungian universal consciousness, but,
rather, a local direct experience of the interdependence and connection
we share as living beings. These connections involve complications and
contradictions that the keepers have had to make amends with through
changing times. In some ways the keepers have dealt with societal
changes by holding onto their connection to the land or herbal medicine.
54
But in other ways they have adapted to changes by modifying their
practices, as in the case of modern medicine and disgruntled community
generosity.
Sharon Kaufman describes the process of adaptation as a person
selecting “events from his or her past to structure and restructure his or
her identity. Thus, themes continue to evolve from and give form to
personal experience – making identity a cumulative process” (Mullens
1992:277). Mullens points out the importance of recognizing how
societal changes are incorporated and interpreted within every
individual. Identity, Mullens will have us understand, is not static,
though a core identity is maintained. Life changes and shapes us just as
it does traditions, but “reinterpretation takes place as part of the process
of the continuity of identity” (Mullens 1992:277). Since adaptation is the
way to view tradition and identity as they move through change, it is the
only reasonable to question how tradition functions in astrological
gardening.
If lives of traditional gardening are interwoven with notions of land,
herbal medicine, community and religion, then it only stands to reason
that change within one aspect will affect change in the others. The
science of old agriculture that the keepers grew up with was, as Storl
said, “not yet divorced from religion, psychology or everyday life; rather,
it was part of a holistic way of being. Their agriculture was a sacred way
of life… not just a business to be carried on” (Storl 1979:23). This
55
chapter has endeavored to show the importance of the land, herbal
medicine, community and religion in the keepers’ lives, and how the
keepers have adapted them over time to fit within changing societal
norms.
The next chapter addresses some of the keepers’ and seekers’
observations and reactions to societal changes. To answer why fewer
people are planting by the signs, the keepers and the seekers established
that cosmopolitan society poses two main challenges to traditional
agricultural communities: modern values, and day jobs.
56
~~~Chapter 2~~~
Cosmopolitan Factors Weakening the Transmission of
Traditional Gardening Knowledge
Certainly I have learned a lot from this project, but the thing that
stands out most to me is the amount of change that can happen during a
person’s lifetime. Though Americans could not imagine living without it,
the cosmopolitan lifestyle is a very recent development in our civilization.
It would be erroneous to claim that everything was static until a hundred
years ago and then suddenly everything changed. Societies and
individuals have always changed and adapted. But the rate of societal
and ecological change has sped up immensely during the keepers’
lifetimes. Given the increased rate of change, it is all the more vital to
evaluate the causes and effects of change and to investigate potentially
valuable alternative systems of traditional knowledge.
Ironically, the immensity of these changes is the very thing that
deludes us into thinking that modern society is the way it has always
been. Andrew expresses his feelings on the matter in an almost
confessional tone. “There’s so much stimulus and so much information
that we’re constantly being bombarded with,” he says of the recent
developments of western civilization, “that it feels like a great deal of time
must have gone by.” This section seeks to reveal some of the patterns of
change observed by both keepers and seekers, so that we can better
understand why some young people are reacting by seeking out
57
alternatives. According to the seekers and keepers, Modern values and
Day jobs are the two biggest cosmopolitan challenges to traditional
astrological agriculture.
Modern Values
A societal change in values is evident even within the almanac.
The almanac, as a commodity more than as a tool, is designed to suit the
interests of a changing mainstream buying force. The mainstream is no
longer comprised of farmers, but retail service sector workers. It should
come as no surprise then that the almanacs are becoming increasingly
geared away from agricultural knowledge and towards personality
astrology.
Evelyn is the first one to point out the change in the almanac.
It doesn’t talk so much about planting anymore as it talks about
relationships between people, and the type of people. Like, you
know, Aries people are planners and doers and things like that.
And it doesn’t talk that much about your planting things, only the
dry and barren, masculine or earthy moist… Could be what
people’s wanting… there’s not that many gardeners around… you
know, people don’t raise gardens like they used to…
[Evelyn Lewis]
Evelyn says simply, “There’s a lot of people interested in their
horoscopes more than planting.” The change in the almanac’s focus is
one indicator of societal changes in values.
No one would claim to be working against the traditional values of
faith, manual hard work, and a respect for elders. Nevertheless, our
58
everyday lives foster modern values that weaken those traditional values.
The conflict between traditional and modern values is not simply a fight
between two groups of people or two different time periods. It is a
struggle that happens within every individual, each of us, every day of
our lives. No modern mother could deny that there’s a struggle between
a successful job and a healthy family. It would be blind to deny that
such a struggle exists.
What are these modern values that are subverting the traditional
ones? Everyone could come up with a list of one’s own, both positive and
negative. Two modern values stand out in my interviews with both
keepers and seekers. These are changes in society noted by people from
both rural agricultural and urban cosmopolitan backgrounds. I believe
that these two modern values speak to a larger truth about how
changing societal values degrade traditional knowledge systems and
practice. The two modern values are convenience and entertainment.
The keepers and seekers talk about modern convenience in technology
and in laziness, which pervades even the way people garden.
I am holding my hands up to the electric heater that stands
between Mary Jane and me. Somehow I am comforted by the fact that a
chimney stands behind it, even if it is bricked off. The chimney beguiles
me into thinking that it is one step closer to a wood stove.
“This is a nice little heater,” I remark to Mary Jane.
“Well thank you.” She replies politely, then her voice changes.
59
It may get so high I can’t afford it... Henry said, ‘Mother.’ – I’d get
splinters in my fingers you know putting wood in the stove. Or
maybe touch the heater and burn my fingers. So he said, ‘you
need you a stove that you don’t have to do that.’ So we bought
that, and... I don’t burn my fingers but I’m maybe burned with the
price. Oh well.
[Mary Jane Queen]
The stove is only one of many modern conveniences that Mary
Jane seems to appreciate for comfort while simultaneously resenting the
connotations and prices. A good deal of the resentment comes from the
knowledge that with every new thing, one or two older things are rejected
to make room. The resentment of modern technology is, then, more of a
reluctance to let go of older technologies. Mary Jane says tillers are
“better machinery” than horses, because “they don’t have to have a horse
and they don’t have to feed the horse,” but then qualifies her statement
with, “Of course, you’ve got to buy gas for the tiller. That’s the difference.
Oh well.” In another sense, she resents modern technologies because
they mean depending on someone else to fuel them.
Convenience isn’t entirely bad. Mary Jane recognizes that “people
have learned and made a lot of work a lot easier than it was back when I
grew up.” She appreciates the convenience but dislikes the
consequences. Besides, Mary Jane misses the wood stove and she
misses the horses. Above all, more modern technology equates less time
spent outside. Even among gardeners, technological convenience means
less time spent in the garden.
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Perhaps out of a lack of necessity or perhaps out of a lack of care,
even if people have gardens, they aren’t paying nearly as much attention
to them as people used to. Of the seekers and keepers I interviewed who
partially rely on their gardens for food, many of them talk scornfully of
hobby gardeners who pay minimal attention to their garden. “People now
a days just plants whenever they gets ready,” says Rosalee, “A lot of em
wants to put the black plastic down before they’ll plant anything. They
don’t want to have to hoe. Well when I first saw that I said, Well, that’s a
lazy job.” According to Jeff and Alicia, most modern people expect their
gardens to do well on their own and if they don’t they’re not too worried
by it.
Jeff and Alicia, a younger couple just up the road from Rosalee,
frequently berate people who take the miracle-grow approach to
gardening. Jeff and Alicia have chosen to undertake an older method of
gardening. Five times during the interview Jeff comments that, “really I’d
say ninety percent of the gardens around here are… It’s all till it, throw
down some miracle grow, hit it with round up – And you have a garden.”
We all laugh. Disapproving of modern convenience, even when it shows
up in gardening, is another indication of how the keepers and seekers
resist losing traditional values. Just as they resist the modern crutch of
convenience, keepers and seekers also assert traditional values by
disapproving of modern entertainment.
61
Who hasn’t heard an older person say that kids weren’t so spoiled
back when they were growing up? Entertainment is the second major
modern value that informants speak of begrudgingly. Like my
conversation with Virginia, nearly a quarter of my interview with Mary
Jane Queen consists of her worrying about the way kids are being raised
on entertainment, without adequate parenting. “Anymore, all children
does this day and time is come in from school, get em a lot of junk –
[pause] food, and fall in front of the TV and stay there until it’ll be time to
go to bed. They never try to learn to make nothin.” Mary Jane rolls her
eyes and sighs heavily. But older people are not the only ones to resist
the obsession with entertainment.
A younger voice, Lenna Keefer, worries that entertainment is
degrading people of all ages. According to her, the culture of material
entertainment bankrupts not only childhood, but adulthood too. Lenna
says that since people got caught up in “the materialistic rat race,” they
haven’t had any time to enjoy sunsets together. Lenna remembers how
her friend
Steven Peter says that all these nick-knacks are just us trying to
fill in parts of our soul. But if we would just realize that we are
already completely integral and not let any of the little tears end up
in there… Instead of having to get a physical material object that
you can hold and possess and then have to dust and pack and
shove around.
[Lenna Keefer]
62
Seeking a traditional lifestyle is not merely a matter of providing
one’s own needs, it also means getting rid of all the things that are
bogging life down.
Lenna leans towards me, her round face overcome by two intense
shining eyes. In a hushed voice she trails off, “Because you, you
definitely understand that all of this is illusion… And we just keep piling
it up, piling it up. And all that’s really there is your element of your everpresent soul. That’s all that you really, really have.” Her voice betrays
sadness and disapproval at the distractions of modern values.
Whatever these new values bring in the way of comfort, they have
also brought disapproval from the people who practice biodynamics and
planting by the signs. Even within the church, which is supposed to be
the bastion of traditional values, Virginia complains that, “There’s too
much worldly stuff in the churches anymore. I could stay home and live
better at home than I could go to church and see all this stuff that ain’t
s’posed to be there.” And that pretty well says it for many people,
whether they go to church or not. If they disapprove of the modern
values that are being practiced in the mainstream world, they tend to
seclude themselves in their safe little home haven. This can mean
spending more time at home, or even limiting interaction with neighbors
they disagree with. From “The Secret Garden” to the walled in garden in
“Repunzel,” there is plentiful imagery of the garden as a place to seek
refuge and isolation from an outside world that is incommensurate with
63
one’s life values (Burnett 1987, Zelinsky 1997). Other authors refer to
this change in societal values as the rise of consumerism.
As the informants indicated, American priorities have drifted away
from wholesome sustenance towards convenience and entertainment.
Most Americans these days will complain that they can’t afford organic or
local food because it costs too much, but the reality is that people have
other priorities for where they’d rather spend their money. In 1950,
Americans spent 21 cents out of every dollar on food. In the year 2000,
Americans had chiseled it down to 11 cents per dollar, 40% of which was
spent in restaurants (Hart 2003:257). Compare this with the fact that
people in Western Europe spend 30-45% of spendable wages on food,
55% in Russia, and nearly 100% in parts of Asia and Latin America
where over ninety percent of people work with the soil (Higbee 1963:18).
Where, then, are Americans spending their money? Conveniences
and entertainment have apparently taken priority over the health of our
land, our children and our own bodies.
A shift in values is central both when a culture transitions into
industrial society and an individual moves from the farm to the city.
Edward Higbee notes that the technological agricultural revolution “has
affected people more than it has affected the land,” with the changing
role of human labor in agriculture (1963:44). Gregory Bateson asserts
that the Industrial Revolution led to the assumptions that it’s humans
against the environment, it’s the individual that matters, and that
64
humans can and should have unilateral control over the environment
(1972:492).
The individualism that Bateson writes about stems from the
enlightenment period when scientific rationality led to “increasing
materialism and a dimming of the spiritual vision and soulful experience
of the world that once was a part of man’s heritage” (Storl 1979:31).
Rational systems can spawn irrational consequences that are detrimental
to both people and the environment (Ritzer 1999:20). American society,
in its conviction that control and rationality are the best tools, neglects to
see the environmentally and socially devastating results of our
supposedly superior modern trajectory.
Farmers who switch to outside steady-pay jobs are reenacting
enlightenment philosophy when they change from agrarian values of
“success” (independent livelihood, spiritual connection with nature, and
property ownership) to a “consumer ethic” status based on materialist
accumulation (Barlett 1933:78-89). In their simultaneous incorporation
and resentment of changing societal values, the keepers and seekers are
affirming and redefining their own values. A person’s means of making a
living is the largest indicator of restraints on how they will negotiate their
lives between tradition and modernity. Acquiring day jobs is the primary
limiting factor for maintaining gardening traditions.
65
Day Jobs
Day jobs have changed home gardening in two ways. First, the
children of farmers have moved to the city to seek jobs, so they are
breaking the line of farm inheritance. Second, people who have day jobs
rarely have the time to keep serious gardens.
In order for local traditional knowledge to stay in tact, people have
to stay local, which is becoming increasingly rare. “Well, see, my mother
and father and his mother and father are gone now,” Juanita Murphy
tells me, ‘But yeah, everybody in this area believed in the signs an
ever’thing and that was just a part of the – it was passed on from one to
the next, from one family to the next.”
“How about people now?” I ask, “The kids of those folks – do many
of them plant by the signs?”
“Most kids now do not farm.” Clifford Murphy responds
emphatically. “They have moved to town. And they might have a
patio tomater, sittin on the back porch or somethin like that. But
naw, they ain’t nobody does any farming anymore.”
The Murphys drive me up the road to visit the house Clifford was
born in. While we walk up the long sloping rocks by the river, Clifford
looks into one of the wide pools of water and tells me about when all of
his parents’ generation lived on the farms along the river. He says all the
local kids went to the city to do “public works”, and then sold the farms
to the developers. “Don’t know where the food’ll come from,” he says,
66
shaking his head. “At my age, I shouldn’t be concerned for the future,
but I am. What’s comin in the future? There’ll be no land” (Clifford
Murphy).
Clifford went to the city, too. He and Juanita spent their working
years in Winston-Salem where Clifford was employed at Duke Power
Company. But even during that time Juanita recalls that, “he always
liked stirring in the dirt. Even at Duke it’d settle his nerves to get on the
tractor. He’d get home and be out on the tractor until past dark.” And
when Clifford retired at fifty-five, they came back home to start farming
again. Clifford and Juanita are an exception in this regard. They went
to the city but they kept farming despite the day job. For most people,
whether or not they move from rural to urban, acquiring a regular day
job means the end of serious gardening.
Rosalee says it, Evelyn says it, Jeff and Alicia say it, Lita says it,
and Mary Jane says it. They all agree with the Murphys – the younger
generations are hardly gardening because they all have day jobs.
According to Lita since women were the ones who did most of the
gardening in Nebraska, the decrease in gardens mostly has to do with
the fact that women are working day jobs now. Evelyn says that her own
daughter works at the unemployment office, “so by the time she gets
home and gets things ready and supper over… she’s just too worn out to
do a garden.” Day jobs require too much energy for most people to be
able to come home and work in the garden.
67
Even Jeff and Alicia, who talk so much about the tragedy of farm
kids leaving the farm to find jobs in the city, are finding it difficult to
handle both a garden and a day job. Alicia tells me, “We lived a lot off of
what we could do when we first moved up here. And then things
changed.” For the past six years they’ve been spending most of their
time running an independent appraisal business. During that time
they’ve also delivered two daughters. So, “This is the first year we’ve had
a pretty decent garden,” Alicia concedes. They are surprised to find that
the girls, though they take up a lot of time, are actually quite helpful in
the garden. Besides day jobs taxing people of energy, the shear fortyhour time commitment of a day job keeps people from gardening.
Time limits how much one can carefully schedule around planting
by the signs. I heard this from the seekers, Michael, Susana, Jeff and
Alicia. Fairly early in our conversation, Michael gives me a pseudoconfession.
In the garden there are constraints dealing with the weather and
dealing with my time and dealing with the plants that are growing
and their own time scale. So all those are the factors that mitigate
what my ability to use the signs for. And frankly, I kind of gave up
this year.
[Michael Buttrill]
Michael can articulate the reasoning behind planting by the signs
far more thoroughly than any of the keepers I spoke with, but when it
comes to managing the complexities of his life, Michael chose to give up
planting by the signs this year.
68
For Susana, timing things to be ready for market takes precedence
over the planting calendar. Jeff seems to partially envy that “Old timers
had more free time to plant by the signs.” Even Virginia, without a job or
children to raise anymore, complains that she doesn't have enough time
to work in the garden. Summertime brings an onslaught of visitors
(which, I admit uncomfortably, includes me) all of whom keep her from
her garden work. The overwhelming feeling of not having enough time
has led some people to believe that time is actually speeding up.
Two of the women I interviewed are adamant that time itself has
sped up. Evelyn alludes to a Paul Harvey show when she tells me
You know how things seem so fast, life seems so fast – and even
back here it’s faster than it used to be – he said he firmly believed
that the earth had speeded up on its axis… And I guess that
stands to reason. It just seems like you just get up one day and go
to bed and the next day and the next thing you know it’s Monday
again.
[Evelyn Lewis]
Lenna, from a completely different background in a different
state, tells me “There’s only forty seconds in a minute now… And that’s
what’s causing you to look at your clock and say, ‘Gosh, I’m losing time.’
You know, it seems like time is going by faster. Well it is.” Both women
believe that time must have sped up because there is no logical
explanation for how fast our lives are going by. And that’s just it. There
is no logical reason for how fast time seems to be going by, because the
pace of cosmopolitan life is, itself, completely irrational.
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The stereotype that the past was simple and plain is erroneous,
because of the staggering amount of knowledge and skills required to live
self-sufficiently. But the current state of society is unique in its
complexity of demands for peoples’ time and energy. In each of these
cases the keepers and seekers are expressing the difficulties of
maintaining a traditional garden within the constraints of the modern
society’s high time and energy demands. They are not alone in noticing
these new demands and challenges. Throughout the keepers’ lifetime,
authors have written about the societal changes in values and economy.
Conclusion of Chapter Two
The phenomenon of children moving from the farm to the city is a
microcosm of the process of industrialization and modernization. The
farm to city exodus is not, by any means, a one-generation upheaval.
The exodus has been happening for roughly the last two hundred years
since the industrial revolution. Since only 1950, the percentage of rural
people working on farms has dropped from 40% to under 10% (Whitener
2005:32-35). Even in 1901 the Old Farmers Almanac encouraged
parents to let their child plant strawberries to “get him interested in the
work, and he will not be as likely to leave the farm and go to the city,
thinking to find a more congenial occupation” (1901:21). In 1952, The
Old Farmers Almanac critiques those who were abandoning agricultural
land in a time of increasing population, saying,
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…since our generations prefer to shrink to the town and seek
elbow to elbow sidewalk living and their precious three freedoms of
radio, television, and hot dog stands. As the ages see it, it is well
for the land that the four corners return to wilderness. What is
lost is the heritage of character, of courage and hardiness, that
belonged especially to those who loved the soil and made it their
own.
[Thomas 1952:13]
The tension of maintaining traditions within the cosmopolitan
context is microcosmically reflected in everyday conflicts and
prioritization, particularly among people trying to find enough time to
provide their own food. Jack Pyle recognizes the difficulties of time
restraints when he says that it’s best to get the most fruitful sign, “but
we live in the real world. Gardening has to be fitted in as best you can.
So, let us look to the realities” (1993:23). Winona LaDuke writes that the
greatest threat to the Anishinaabeg harvest of wild rice is not pollution or
agribusiness, but the wage economy itself (2005:169). Besides
urbanization and time limitations, undermining traditions happens at
the most fundamental level of personal values.
The value conflicts so present in these interviews have been going
on for a long time, evidenced by the fact that Barlett wrote about them in
1933 in her book American Dreams, Rural Realities: Family Farms in
Crisis. According to Barlett, when farmers switch to outside wage labor
they adopt the consumer ethics of higher expectations, identity as a
consumer, individualism, and materialistic accumulation (Barlett
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1933:78). The individual autonomy so valued by industrial society is
incommensurate with “the farm’s need for multigenerational cooperation
and planning” (Barlett 1933:87). The age-old saying that “You can make
a living in farming, but you can’t make any money” reveals that people
now value money above quality of livelihood (Barlett 1933:85). These
value conflicts occur not only within rural America, but are pushed
abroad through the process of agricultural industrialization known as
modernization.
Modern agriculture’s hostility toward rural subsistence agriculture
is most evident in foreign business policies that reached their height
during the Green Revolution (Shiva 2000:25). Stevens and Fisk express
the 1970s strategies to transform third world countries’ subsistence
farms into large-scale industrial farms. The whole premise of the Green
Revolution in the 70’s was that small farmers needed to be saved from
their “technical and economic equilibrium” so they could be more
productive on a large-scale farm to accommodate for a growing
population (Stevens 1977:5). Equilibrium is a problem to Stevens
because it interferes with free-market capitalist notions of infinite
growth. According to Fisk, the main strategies for converting subsistence
farming are to get rid of the commons and introduce wage labor (Fisk
1978:11-13).
What Stevens and Fisk describe as a problem of development is
actually a conflict in values. In Nigeria, Uzo Igbozurike criticizes that
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“modernization” of developing countries’ agriculture merely means
implementing American, British, Russian or French methods that are not
appropriate to other local geographies (1977:7). Sevens, Fisk and
Igbozurike reveal that modernization’s domination of traditional
agricultural methods occurs throughout the world, both formally and
informally, and is fundamentally based on value differences.
Authors are not the only ones to notice the way cosmopolitan
culture compromises traditional agricultural practices. The seekers I
interviewed have been motivated to find alternatives because they too
find problems with the cosmopolitan trajectory. The seekers’ two main
motivations to look for alternative agricultural lifestyles are 1) distress
regarding environmental degradation and 2) concern about human
degradation.
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~~~Chapter 3~~~
Motivations to Seek Alternative Traditions
Everyone is affected by societal changes in their own individual
ways, and everyone reacts in their own way. Malidoma Patrice Some
speaks from a Dagara perspective about how stressful it must be for
people living in an industrial society. Malidoma Some says,
Those serving the culture don’t have the option to slow down and
address the issue of what to do with their own needs, or how to get
in touch with their own unexpressed powers. For they are too
caught up in the speed and motion that is required by the Machine
to feed its overt power. But some ultimately become so distraught
that they figure out a way to take care of themselves rather than to
take care of something that can never be satisfied.
[Some 1993:45]
Everybody embraces and resists cosmopolitan culture in his or her
own unique way. The seekers are doing just what Some says. They are
trying to figure out a way to take care of themselves rather then
attempting to satisfy societal norms. But it isn’t a matter of abandoning
cosmopolitan society and stepping in to a traditional world of bygone
days. One cannot simply adopt traditions and live as though they were
raised with them. The seekers daily navigate between traditional and
cosmopolitan lifestyles as they continue to interact with the multiplicities
of contemporary demands.
This section draws primarily from the interviews I conducted with
the seekers – those who during the course of their adulthood adopted the
74
practices of planting by the signs or bio-dynamics. These people come
primarily from moderately well off, urban, mainstream families.
Two motivations came up in the interviews as the primary reasons
why the seekers have adopted the agricultural practices of planting by
the signs and bio-dynamics. One motivation is a concern about
environmental degradation at both the local and global scale. The other
motivation is a concern about the degradation of human life. Not
surprisingly, several of the seekers considered the two concerns to be
symptoms of the same societal problems.
Environmental Degradation
All seven of the seekers point to their concern for the environment
as a motivating factor for their gardening practices. Most people, says
Andrew, “miss that the earth is something sacred, and that it’s being
destroyed.” Trinlie, Jeff and Alicia, who have adopted planting by the
signs, express their environmental concern at the local level of wanting
their land to be healthy. Lenna, Susana, Michael, and Andrew, who have
adopted biodynamics, are more concerned about the environment at the
socio-political level. This is not to say that these two groups are
mutually exclusive. Certainly Michael cares not only about state of
society but also about the soil in his garden. Nevertheless, those who
sought out biodynamics more frequently bring up global warming and
massive deforestation, whereas seekers practicing planting by the signs
75
more frequently talk about insect populations in their garden or the
logging on the backside of their mountain (Trinlie, Jeff and Alicia).
[The seekers’ relationships with the land will be further discussed in
the section titled The Land in the chapter on Seeking Traditions]
Not surprisingly, some of the seekers spoke of the connection
between human health and environmental health. Andrew Faust says
that the degradation of the environment has lowered the quality of life for
humans with the growing scarcity of clean water and clean air. And it
should come as no surprise that unhealthy food is creating unhealthy
people (Andrew). “People are not in direct relationship with what they
receive sustenance from,” Andrew says, so they end up “abstracting and
disconnecting their relationships.” He points out that the mainstream
cultural myth that humans are incapable of living in balance with the
earth is a blatant indication of how out of balance we are. Andrew says
his garden is his personal opportunity to create health inside and outside
of his body.
Where Andrew points to the connection of earth and human in
physical health, Lenna Keefer recognizes the connection of human and
earth in spiritual health. Lenna was waiting in the driveway when I
pulled up to her house. She greeted me with a warm smile, and then
launched immediately into showing me around her garden beds sneaking
their way across her lawn from the edge of the woods. Within minutes
she is telling me about the Indian method known as Angi Hotra of
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burning ghee, dung and rice in a copper bowl as “a way to purify the
earth and our spirituality.” The seekers’ first motivation to find different
agricultural traditions is the recognition of the interrelation between the
health of humans and the earth, at both the physical and spiritual level.
But like many environmentalist movements, though they recognize the
interrelation of humans and earth, the keepers spent a lot more time
talking about the human costs of environmental destruction.
Human Degradation
The seekers, both bio-dynamic and planting by the signs, speak
freely of their disillusionment with how cosmopolitan American society
has degraded humanity. They are not content to live the mainstream life
disconnected from the earth. They believe there is value in the heritage
that mainstream culture is throwing away. These seekers have found
the garden to be the space to individually begin solving these societal
problems. Cosmopolitan society, according to the seekers, is degrading
human life with 1) disconnection from sources of sustenance, 2)
weakening communities, and 3) the loss of inherited knowledge.
Like the keepers, the seekers worry that people are becoming
disconnected from their source of sustenance. Alicia, who often speaks
of how dependent the old-timers were on the land, says that, “There
aren’t that many people that live off the land anymore, that have to
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depend on their food from the garden. Ninety percent of gardens aren’t
what they used to be.” Jeff expresses his concern that “Nobody pays
attention anymore- just throw the seeds in and drench it in miracle grow
and let ‘er rip.” Just up the road from Jeff and Alicia, Andrew has a
similar concern that people aren’t even in contact with what sustains
them anymore. Cosmopolitan society is disconnected from tangible
reality because people don’t even know their necessities (Andrew).
The interviews with seekers express that a disconnection from the
earth is a fundamental assault on humanity itself. To live without
context, believing that humans are independent of the earth is akin to a
disastrous marriage wherein there is no recognized affinity, only an
exchange of services and resources.
Whatever the details of the change in modern values, the prevailing
theme is a growing distance between people and their daily necessities.
Nearly all of my informants, both young and old, commented on the
dwindling numbers of people who are growing their own food. Even
Susana, who is only forty-four, has seen the change happen within her
own lifetime. There is defiance if not sorrow in her voice as she says,
“Well there’s a lot less gardening even in Iowa where I grew up. When I
was small, everybody had a garden. And that’s a huge thing, because
that makes connections, and even people who have a few plants it makes
a big difference” (Susana Lein). It is striking how even while lamenting
the loss in connections she is simultaneously opening an optimistic door
78
for the future. It only takes a few plants to get some sense of connection
back.
When I ask Andrew what values he wants to pass on to future
generations, all four of his answers pertain to a healthy connection with
the earth. First, he wishes to pass on a sense of the sacred complexity of
life on earth, and second, a responsibility to protect that complexity.
Third, he wishes that future generations would be skeptical of a society
that is harming the environment. And fourth, he wants to pass on the
ability to tell the difference between what commercials tell us we need to
buy and our real needs; clean water, food with vitality, a safe home, and
a loving and supportive community. Both keepers and seekers are
motivated to strengthen gardening as a way to strengthen communities
that are falling apart.
As we drive along the river, Clifford waives his hand at the brushcovered fields and newly built houses, “I had ancestors on all this
property back here,” he says. Now all the family farms have been sold to
developers and are built up in retirement lots and vacation homes. Mary
Jane remembers that when she was growing up people “would always go
and spend a day with a neighbor, grandmaw and grandpaw, aunts and
uncles. But they’d always take the two smallest children and they would
spend the day. …They don’t do that now. That’s a thing of the past.”
Anytime someone got sick or had a baby, the neighbors would take
turns spending a few days with them until they got better (Mary Jane
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Queen). “They used to help one another when I was growing up,” Mary
Jane says, “but they don’t do that anymore.” Content gardeners,
according to Mary Jane, make good neighbors.
Neighbors used to share seeds and swap plants, Mary Jane tells
me, “But they don’t do that anymore. They’re not neighbors to each
other anymore. That’s the only way I can tell it to you. They just don’t
do like they used to.” When I ask her why people don’t visit each other
anymore, she replies, “Well, the most of em is workin on the jobs. And
they think they’ve got to be there. So that just completely cut it all out.”
Virginia shares a similar frustration about her new neighbors, a young
couple that work at Walmart and haven’t integrated into the community.
“She buys phone cards for friends, you know, that’s moved away, and
that ain’t right. They should take care of the community the way I look at
it.” Her voice becomes suddenly insistent, “I’m here. I could go for days
and they’d never see me. If I’m not at church they don’t call or anything”
(Virginia Tharp). For a woman who exhibits so much generosity, it’s
unfathomable and infuriating that the able-bodied younger generations
aren’t doing their part to take care of the community. Many of the issues
around weakening communities involve new neighbors, which are
becoming more common than old neighbors as people move around the
country following jobs.
Of gentrification, the increase in wealthy people moving into an
area, Trinlie relates the story of her seventeen-year-old son who is
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looking to buy land around their home in Etlan, Virginia. The chance
that he’ll be able to afford any land is slim because the land prices have
grown exponentially since it became a popular place for city-folks to
build second or third homes. Gentrification is nothing new to Virginia
residents and I too lament that I will potentially never be able to afford to
live in my own homeland. The cosmopolitan value of rootless living is
weakening communities. Trinlie recounts,
It used to be that everybody had a pretty good piece of land, and
Johnny’s gonna build a house on that part of it and the daughter’s
gonna be over on this side, and it just kept going. And then eventually
the parents would die off and one of the kids would live in their house.
And over generations they would sustain some community. That’s not
the way it is oftentimes around here anymore.
[Trinlie Wood]
Living without being rooted in a place is the current fashionable
model, but Trinlie wonders about the health of individuals in such a
society.
People have different feelings about roots and connections. And
there are a lot of people whose life goal seems to be to get as far
away as possible from where they grew up. But that seems sad.
What’s going on there? What’s going to happen to their kids, and
their kids?
[Trinlie Wood]
The individual freedom of living without being rooted to a place has its
liberties, but it comes at the cost of losing the maintenance of traditional
knowledge and belonging.
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Susana feels very lucky to have grown up in Iowa during a time
when everybody had a garden because she recognizes how rare that
upbringing is becoming. Despite biodynamics and permaculture, she
has sorrow in her voice as she tells me that there’s
…much more local sustaining knowledge that has been lost.
There’s a lot less gardening. And the ones who are, [are] learning
often from scratch because of a philosophical change in their life
and it’s not a traditional, passed on. Like, we have maybe two
percent of our population is farmers now. So there’s not many
people there to pass on the knowledge of growing food. And so a
lot of it becomes book knowledge… We have to find another way to
pass it on. Because knowledge is best passed on by doing”
[Susana Lein]
Jeff and Alicia tell me frequently that the younger generations simply
aren’t interested in learning what the old-timers knew. Perhaps this is
why Jeff and Alicia felt so comfortable moving into the holler and asking
to be taught.
Few articulate it as clearly as Andrew does, but many of the
seekers express that they are similarly inspired to cultivate new
agricultural practices to help create a more hopeful future. When I ask
Andrew how long he’s been interested in agriculture, he responds that he
first started thinking about agriculture when he realized that since
agriculture is the underpinnings of our civilization, to change our
civilization’s “unhealthy track” we must first reassess our agricultural
systems. Andrew sees that agriculture, like all progressive movements,
is “trying to solve an ongoing work of being alive and being human on the
earth.” Somehow, seeking out these agricultural practices has given
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these seekers some of the physical and temporal context they felt was
lacking in their mainstream lives.
Conclusion of Chapter Three
Many authors site that the integrity of human life is intimately bound
to our relationship with our environment, suggesting that we seek
traditions that more readily respect this connection in our means of
obtaining our necessities. Industrial agriculture, suburbia, and social
distress are major indications that cosmopolitan society is failing at
maintaining environmental and societal health.
Since agriculture is the most intimate of environment/human
relationships, certainly with the largest consequences (Igbozurike
1977:16), it is logical that in assessing the environmental crisis we
should start with taking an honest look at our changing agricultural
practices. Agriculturalists, though present only in the last one percent of
the two million years humans have lived on earth, have dramatically
changed, and even endangered, the earth and our existence upon it
(Solbrig 1994:225). Amplifying agriculture’s effects on our environment
even farther, the small-scale family farm is being run out of the picture
by large scale industrial agriculture characterized by specialization and
consolidation (Higbee 1963:4,43).
Seekers and keepers are not mistaken in noticing the trends away
from homegrown food towards mass produced food. In 1860, 65% of
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people in America lived on farms. By 1980, only 5% of people were living
on farms (Higbee 1963:9). In 1949 most farms were nearly self-sufficient
and sold only a little on the side. By 1997, most farms had become
highly specialized and earned an average of $102,970 (Hart 2003:2). By
1963, the top 3% of farms produced more than the bottom 78% (Higbee
1963:3). Now, writes Hart, “Farmers and their wives stand in
supermarket checkout lines just like the rest of us” (Hart 2003:3).
Industrial agriculture, one symptom of cosmopolitan resource
utilization, has had devastating affects on the environment.
“Monoculture” writes Igbozurike, “is inimical to the natural order,
deleterious to ecospheric safety and lethal to man’s long-term interests”
(1977:38). In other words, monoculture is dangerous to both humans
and the environment (Igbozurike 1977:13). Yet monoculture is being
pushed on third world countries as the most “advanced” and “educated
agricultural method according to first world nations. While monoculture
may produce more yields in the short-term, it does so at the cost of
ecology and nutrition (Igbozurike 1977:65). “Until we develop a true
sense of the unity of nature we are destined to fail to respond effectively
to the possibly mortal perturbations which we have inflicted on her”
writes Igbozurike (1977:65,7). The seekers have found that traditional
agricultural practices are more capable of recognizing the unity of
nature, and thus more capable of addressing environmental destruction.
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Since agriculture is the most basic interaction between humans
and the environment, the seekers are finding traditions that they believe
will better address the environmental-human relationship. But they
aren’t the only ones to desire a revitalization of their relationship with the
land. Throughout mainstream society the desire to reconnect with rural
roots reveals itself in the ironic display of suburbia.
Suburbia is a failed attempt at reconciling the modern lifestyle to
man’s innate desire to be close to nature. Some small part of people still
clings to the American ideal of a farm in the country, and it is ironic at
best that their very same insatiable desire is literally consuming and
destroying farm land (Higbee 1963:85). Higbee writes, “It may wound the
jobholder’s pride to know he will always be just another hired man, but
he recovers some dignity through owning a house and lot in suburbia”
(1963:85). Suburbanization is an attempt to regain the contact with
nature that urbanization severed, but it does so with the added element
of attempting to unilaterally dominate the environment (Flora 2001:5).
Hart forfeits that “technology has trashed the Jeffersonian ideal of the
small family farm, whether we like it or not” (Hart 2003:229). Higbee
also recognizes the weakening of our Jeffersonian ideals suggests that we
need to either redefine American values or redefine the family farm in
order to keep our professed ideals commensurate with reality (1963:85).
The human price of cosmopolitan culture has been as steep as the
environmental price. The majority of agricultural industrialization has
85
happened without our society being fully aware of what transitions are
taking place, perhaps because “it is hard for the nation to face up to the
fact that throughout the economy it is more profitable to employ capital
than to employ people” (Higbee 1963:4). Not only has industrial
agriculture drastically changed the way most citizens work and eat; it
has significantly contributed to the loss of agricultural heritage used and
maintained by citizens.
Even Hart, who believes industrial agriculture is inevitable, still
laments with surprising fervor that, “Large organizations have trapped
us in a dehumanized world. They have deprived us of our individual
identity and reduced us to mere strings of numbers” (Hart 2003:231).
Distrust of the growing corporatism within food production is “a reaction
against the impersonal, cold blooded, cut throat, competitive corporate
culture” (Hart 2003:232). Engaging in cosmopolitan society comes with
physical and psychological costs for individuals.
The decline of traditional agricultural livelihoods is leading to
emotional distress in American society. Wendell Berry believes that our
social problems are due to alienation for the land and from our
Jeffersonian agrarian roots. Drifting youth, urban violence and the
severe number of people on anti-depressants are blatant cries for help to
find meaning in American lives (Storl 1979:386). “What we’ve done to
chickens we’ve done to ourselves,” writes Mosley. “Factory-farm
chickens are cooped up in boxes, their only functions to consume and
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produce – who would ask them if they’re happy? Who would believe
them if they answered that they were?” (Mosley 1996:180). Like many of
the seekers, Mosley asserts that,
The further people move away from dirt and physical work, the less
they are aware of their dependence on nature. Insulated from the
earth by plate glass and concrete, the highly paid occupants of
luxury apartments make decisions that devastate the globe, in
return for short-term profits.
[Mosley 1996:181]
Meals, one of humanity’s most basic culturally shared celebrations of
connection with the earth, are now an ordeal that people strive to get
through as quickly as possible in cosmopolitan society (Ritzer 1999:28).
In response to both environmental and human degradation, the seekers
have turned to traditional agricultural systems to find solutions.
Like many of the seekers, Storl believes that societal values have a
profound impact on environmental and human health. “Where unbridled
greed, unconcern and decadence characterize a society,” writes Storl,
“there one will surely find ecological catastrophe, pollution, endangered
wildlife, agricultural crisis, and people alienated from the land” (Storl
1979:401). The seekers, in varying degrees and methods, are attempting
to adopt “traditional” lifestyles that will restore human and
environmental health.
Ultimately, writes Winona LaDuke, “the recovery of the people is
tied to the recovery of food, since food itself is medicine: not only for the
body, but for the soul, for the spiritual connection to history, ancestors,
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and the land” (LaDuke 2005:210). This chapter has addressed why
people seek out astrological gardening traditions. The next chapter will
address how seekers incorporate agricultural traditions into
cosmopolitan backgrounds.
The next chapter explores the ways that the seekers are attempting
to construct lives that incorporate adopted traditions. The interaction of
adopted traditions and a cosmopolitan background affects the seekers’
perceptions of the land, children, traditional values, spirituality, and the
proper human role. The garden, in chapter four, is the stage for seeking
solutions to the cosmopolitan problems of environmental and human
degradation. In other words, the garden becomes the site of resistance
and critique of a society that the seekers view as damaging.
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~~~Chapter 4~~~
The Seekers:
Negotiating Agricultural Traditions within
Cosmopolitan Contexts
..Michael, Jeff and Alicia, Susana, Trinlie, Lenna, Andrew..
“For the Earth once more begets what it’s begotten from of old.”
-Goethe (Mann 1986:24)
Anyone who has built a house will tell you that it is best to use
tools that other people have proven work well. If you go about inventing
all your own tools, believing you are most ingenious person there ever
was, then you will probably die a frustrated woman with a heap of
strange tools and no house. The principle remains the same for
constructing a life. To construct a strong and functional life, it is only
logical to look to those who have come before us to get the right tools,
instead of assuming that we have a superior ingenuity to invent all of our
own tools.
The seekers are the informants who have sought to learn
astrological gardening from a source other than their family. In their
own way the seekers have been looking for old tools to construct more
traditional lives with. The bio-dynamic seekers, (Michael, Susana, Lenna
and Andrew), tend to take their inspirations from the ancient history of
foreign cultures. The planting by the signs seekers, (Trinlie, Jeff and
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Alicia), are drawing off of local history, despite the fact that it isn’t their
own heritage.
But a carpenter also knows not to replicate an old house and
include all the cracked floor joists and broken beams, and there is no
sense in poking holes in your roof just so it looks old. The seekers have
not blindly adopted older ways of life. They are actively making their own
adjustments to traditions. They are negotiating their own lives between
looking to the old, surveying the present, and shaping the future.
They are not alone in this process of negotiating past, present and
future. All people engage in some similar process. But what makes the
seekers unique is that they are engaging in this process somewhat
consciously, and that they are respecting and embracing more of the
past than average cosmopolitan people. This paper explores how the
seekers are developing life values that are similar to the keepers even
though they come from completely different backgrounds and
generations. Naturally, the seekers are not completely abandoning
cosmopolitan routines to fully return to bygone days. It isn’t that simple.
They blend tradition and cosmopolitan backgrounds to varying degrees.
The following sections consider the aspirations and compromises the
seekers have made in “reclaiming” traditions. Traditions of astrological
gardening provide the framework for adopting traditional values when it
comes to the land, children, values, heritage, connection to the larger,
and the human role on earth.
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The Land
If the tension between cosmopolitan reality and traditional ideals
exists anywhere, it is most visible in the seekers’ relationship with the
land. The seeker’s relationship with the land manifests in both their
language of anthropomorphism, and their desire for the earth’s health for
its own sake.
For the second time during our interview, Lenna stretches her
arms high above her head, imitating how the earth must breath in after a
long day. It strikes me that this overt symbolism is a little like a
children’s book, made to illustrate only the most basic of points for a
complete novice. We, in the progressive movement, use the term Mother
Nature much as we would refer to a politician or an ancient Greek God
with a mysterious personality that we can’t quite call our own. Jeff and
Alicia do the arms-raising maneuver as well. Only, they are
impersonating how the moon regulates water energies in the archetypal
plant. In this kindergarten play, Lenna is the earth, Alicia is the moon,
and Jeff is the archetypal plant. I have brought this upon myself by
posing as a novice.
But the fault isn’t entirely mine, and I’m not mocking Lenna, nor
Jeff and Alicia. In our attempts to relearn how to respect the non-human
world, we have started out in the only place we know how: by
anthropomorphizing the rest of the world, casting human personalities
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for great and small, earth and plant. Perhaps we will have to be content
with kindergarten plays while we strive to love the earth for its own sake.
Besides their anthropomorphism, the seekers also express a
genuine desire for the land to flourish for its own sake. Trinlie begins to
say ‘my garden’ but cuts herself short. “Well, my – not my – I feel like
the plants come on and they do what they’re intended to do much better
when I plant by the signs rather than when I just do it because I happen
to have a day off.” Trinlie wants the plants to thrive for their own sake.
“I love it. I want my garden to thrive and be inviting every bug in the
community to come over and go ‘Wow. Get a load of this garden. Yeah
we’re gonna set up shop here.’ I love being in that space. So of course I
want it to do the best it can do.” Similarly, Andrew and Lenna’s genuine
concern for the soil’s health speaks to a stewardship that will last well
beyond any futile utilitarian notions they might have for their lifetime. In
reorienting their lives, these seekers have come to reorient their
definitions of the purpose of the land and, at least in part, regard the
land to be valuable for its own sake.
Whether they express it in anthropomorphism or genuine care, the
seekers illustrate a level of attentiveness to the earth that is, in itself,
contrary to cosmopolitan values. My conversation with Trinlie begins
and ends with expressions of her love for the Piedmont. She tells me
that when she returned home from El Paso midwifery school she could
relax and say, “Ok. I know where I am now. It feels right again.” Before
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I even begin to ask her questions she eagerly tells me what the garden
means to her. “There is nowhere on earth that I’m as at peace as in the
garden,” she confides, as she gazes out the window at the winter garden.
Adams’s definition of belonging seems appropriate to Trinlie’s
sentiments. Belonging, says Adams, means “possessing and being
possessed by the environment” (Blandy 1993:27). In the reciprocal
relationship between person and place, the health of one reflects the
health of the other. Steiner, the founder of bio-dynamics, firmly believes
that “what one does to nature – to soil – one does essentially to other
people and to oneself. An unhealthy agriculture and an unhealthy social
and spiritual life have common roots” (Storl 1979:34). These literary
ideals, however, have a harder time being actualized within the
constraints of modern society, and so often turn out as
anthropomorphism. The seekers, who were not taught agricultural
traditions as children, express the importance of raising children with
traditional agricultural values and knowledge.
Children
Can a child be a child without growing up with the natural world?
Can they grow into an adult? The seekers believe that children must
grow up with the natural world. But sometimes it is difficult to make it
happen within cosmopolitan surroundings.
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Lenna’s relationship with the land divas began when, as a seven
year old, she began getting psychic messages on how to grow a garden.
“I would tell my mom, ‘Mom, I am going outside and I’m getting all sorts
of messages. Where to plant a how to put in a garden. Can I have a
garden?’ And she was like ‘Yeah yeah yeah. Don’t tell your Dad. Yeah
you can have a garden.’ ”
When she heard of Biodynamics later in her life, it fell in line with
what she had been doing ever since she was a child. But today’s
children, despite their intrinsic affinity with the natural world are being
stripped of their empathies at a young age. The fifth graders in Lenna’s
after school program all tell her, “We don’t believe in Santa. We don’t
believe in fairies. We don’t believe nature has a soul. We don’t believe
any of this…our moms and dads tell us that that’s not so. It’s just not
so” (Lenna Keefer). Lenna’s story is unique among my informants in the
assertion of psychic signals, but it demonstrates the natural inclination
of children to pay attention to their surroundings is being dampened.
Mary Jane says that if parents have to work day jobs, they ought
to work in the garden when they come home so that their children will
have the chance to learn something other than television programming.
“Let em help in the garden, and teach that child what they should know
about gardening… That’s the reason why a lot of children don’t call em
by Daddy and Mommy – because they don’t know em!” Most children
don’t actually know what their parents do during the day because they
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never see their parents work. Mary Jane’s idea is that if parents would
garden with their kids, they would be passing on valuable information
while showing their children an honest picture of who they are.
Jeff and Alicia are doing just that this year. “And the girls think
it’s cool… to go down and pick squash we’re gonna eat or go get the corn
or tomatoes,” Alicia says.
This is the first year that they have. And they really did help.
They were really into planting the seeds and getting dirt into the
flats. And, actually Mable, that was one of her projects was I
would give her the seed packets and she was writing the labels for
me from the seed packets.
[Alicia Hill]
Michael, too, wishes to pass on his “love of farming, and
manifesting earth energy to help transform the earth” to his three-yearold daughter, Luna. Trinlie hasn’t directly talked with her children about
the almanac, but they help her in the garden just the same. Her own
father was an avid “soil conservationist. You didn’t hear him saying
dirt… He was just always wandering around outside, poking around.
And I love to do that. So the kids can’t help but be influenced to some
extent” (Trinlie). Trinlie is confident that the values she got from her
father will naturally rub off on her own children.
Jeff, Alicia, Michael and Trinlie all want to pass on their love for
gardening, but none of them intend to push planting by the signs on
their children. They’ll make them aware of it, then let them chose
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whether or not they want to carry it on. It is clear that on the micro level
none of them are overtly trying to revitalize traditional knowledge as
something that gets passed down through the family. But all of them
believe it will be physically and mentally good for their children to grow
up with gardens. Barlett encourages that including kids in farm work is
the “first step in teaching a non-industrial orientation to life and work”
(1933:88). Barlett, like the seekers, hopes that introducing children to
holistic lifestyles will be the most effective remedy for the dominant
societal values of industrial cosmopolitanism. In place of cosmopolitan
values discussed in chapter two, the seekers hope to revitalize the more
traditional value of community– although here, yet again, their pursuit of
ideals is jumbled with their cosmopolitan contexts.
Community
Gardening strengthens community. Seekers and keepers
emphasize this heavily. While the keepers lament the loss of community
with the loss of gardening, the seekers are looking to revitalize
communities by revitalizing gardening. Susana speaks of the Amish
garden work parties they do in Kentucky to strengthen the gardening
community. Trinlie fondly talks about giving away produce to her
neighbors, a celebratory practice that her children get very excited about.
It only makes sense that focussing on getting one’s physical sustenance
locally would improve local community sustenance as well.
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Trinlie, Jeff and Alicia, the seekers who practice planting by the
signs, are very involved in their local communities. Each one is vocally
troubled about how gentrification is damaging their communities. Trinlie
says,
The land has become much more expensive. Local people can’t
afford it. So the people who can afford it are people who don’t
really come here to live. They buy places and put a lot of money
into them so they can have a place in the country. And we don’t
get to know them. They aren’t part of the community. The land
isn’t farmed…We see it more and more happening. And that’s
disturbing.
[Trinlie Wood]
As she gets closer to retirement, Trinlie is thinking more about escaping
her deteriorating community and moving somewhere more rural.
The bio-dynamic practitioners speak to the same ideal that farming
strengthens communities, but they are having a harder time making it
happen locally. Lenna personifies the tension between the ideal of
community and the reality of being isolated by one’s practices, a tension
that ran through many of my interviews with biodynamic seekers. “We’re
supposed to be functioning more like a community,” Lenna told me. And
yet she describes herself in a cave of understanding, getting messages
she’s not supposed to “go out and be out of the cave of understanding
and telling everybody all this stuff. We’d rather have you just safe”
(Lenna). She constantly talks about hiding from the mainstream family
neighborhood that she has married into. “I’ll also do prayer probably
tonight, because I have to be secret here because I’m in this huge
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redneck neighborhood…Which is just your basic, nice, country,
unjudgmental, shop-at-Wal-Mart family. …And they pretty much think
that I have lost it.” Though she values the idea of community, Lenna has
to retreat from her neighbors and extended family in order to practice
biodynamics.
Andrew, too, speaks freely about the value of community, but after
five years “we’ve connected up with immediate neighbors and then a few
other people who are definitely like-minded.” It is ironic that when I
asked Michael and Andrew if they knew anybody else in the
neighborhood that planted by the signs, both of them replied that they
were the only two. They are unaware of at least a dozen neighbors that
have been planting by the signs their entire lives. This is in contrast to
the fact that in less than a month I was able to contact over a dozen of
Michael and Andrew’s neighbors who plant by the signs. The two are
also both completely unaware that only a few generations ago everybody
in the immediate mountains used to plant by the signs.
Trinlie says gardens are “the center of the community.” People will
stop along the road to visit with her as she works in the garden “The
women pitch in” she says with a big laugh, “and the men talk.” Yet,
knowingly or inadvertently, the biodynamic practitioners have isolated
themselves with the very practices that they hope will strengthen
communities.
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Concepts of community contain the fundamental paradox of
idealism. Biodynamic practitioners can speak eloquently about the value
of holistic community, but their own lives reflect isolation from their
immediate neighbors. Lenna, Michael and Andrew are each engaged in a
larger network of likeminded people that transcends state borders, but
their local community network is weak at best. The idealist attachment
to a village community connected to the land, writes author Tom Hayden,
…remains with us even in the modern age of megacities, since it
has been the context in which we have evolved for thousands of
years. It partly is a nostalgic attachment, for we cannot return to a
world we have obliterated. But it is not so much a reactionary or
obsolete attachment as a longing. The decentralized village-based
tradition is not only an important resource to salvage from our
history, but also a crucial alternative to the relentless and
unsustainable growth of the centralized megacity.
[Hayden 1996:195-196]
Ironically, this concept of imperialist nostalgia, or “mourning for what
one has destroyed,” is the same motivation for the very gentrification that
is driving people like Trinlie away from their homes (Mitchell 2004:65).
The biodynamic seeker’s intense longing for the ideal community
hinders them from being able to connect with their present neighbors.
The seekers’ idealism is essentially isolating them from the keepers they
could be learning from. Spirituality is one possible way to feel connected
to a greater network of people regardless of how strong the local
community is.
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Spirituality
Claiming a connection with spiritual unity is one way of
transcending the reality that one may have less than ideal community
ties. What the keepers call a relationship with God, the seekers refer to
not only as God, but also as creator or celestial forces.
Lenna speaks plentifully of the Christ-light that humans are meant
to embody. Biodynamic spirituality, though it frequently draws off of
Christianity, is looser than planting by the signs Bible-based religion. In
biodynamics there is ample room for people to individually interpret and
define their spirituality. “Nature is really just God trying to speak to us,”
Lenna explains, “or Creator, however you want to think about it.”
Andrew’s interest in biodynamics stems from a metaphysical belief in the
spiritual correlations between plants and the cosmos. Like the keepers,
seekers express spirituality as an integral part of their agricultural
beliefs, no matter who or what they address in their prayers.
The basic principle is that faith needs necessity. Faith does not
proffer as a hobby or a merit badge. It must come from true longing and
subsequent rejoicing. There is no replacement for interdependence in
keeping one cognizant and mindful of their self and surroundings. Of
the importance of agriculture in community and spirituality, Malidoma
Some writes, “In a way, subsistence work links humans together while
ritual links humans to the gods or God” (1993:24). Despite their
shortcomings, biodynamic practitioners are searching for both the
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community and the spirituality that Some speaks of, and they are finding
it through a collection of subsistence and ritual practices loosely defined
as tradition. The notion of faith in agricultural practice is counter to
modern industrial agriculture sentiments.
The experience of this world, writes Howard Hanger,
…offers the distinct possibility that these other worlds are actually
within and around us already. And everything is part of it. It just
might be that we’re each and all part of a grand and goofy myth…
a myth which is always and forever pointing our time-locked, goose
stepping minds to the always and forever. To the infinite. To the
fullness of life. To the divine.
[Hanger 2005]
The seekers find their most direct experience of the world while working
in the garden, and thus their spirituality is intimately connected to their
time spent there. Yet in the explanation of universal interconnection,
biodynamic authors appear to be caught in indecision as to whether they
should call it spiritual, scientific, or both.
Perhaps in an attempt to reconcile with cosmopolitan ideals,
biodynamics is ensnared in a debate over whether earthly
interconnection is scientific, spiritual, or both. Maria Thun writes, “All
the life patterns of the kingdom of nature, in the world of plants, animals
and human beings, are woven into cosmic rhythms” (Thun 1990:6).
Unlike those who plant by the signs, Thun maintains that bio-dynamics
views planetary rhythms as scientific, not theological or psychiatric
(1990:6). Yet still later in her book she quotes Johannes Kepler saying
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“A certain image of the zodiac and of the whole firmament has been
stamped by God into the soul of the earth” (Thun 1990:9-10). Thun’s
inability to make up her mind if she is scientific or spiritual indicates
that perhaps she is trying to convince a wide range of people by
employing both persuasions.
The tension between scientific reasoning and spiritual guidance
runs heavily through the heart of biodynamics, both in literature and in
conversations with practitioners. On the one hand, they seem to want to
move down a more spiritual path. But though they are purposefully
trying to transform mainstream western culture, they simultaneously
long to be accepted by mainstream scientific reasoning (Thun 1990:20).
Within this larger picture of spiritual interconnection, the seekers are
creating an idea of the proper role for humans.
Human Role
The seekers are searching for their place. They are looking for
their place within the interconnected universe, upon the land, with their
children, in their desire for community, and in their spiritual endeavors.
They are looking for the proper role of humans on this earth.
Instead of controlling the environment, their goal is to be mediators
of larger life forces. When I asked Lenna about the humans’ role on
earth, she responded immediately and emphatically, “We are the
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archetypal wands of Christ-light, perfect, golden energy, mediating
between heaven and earth. And God, Creator, Truth wants us to claim
who we really are so that we can become golden wands.” Her voice
lowers to a hush, “That’s what we are.” Lenna is the most extreme of the
bio-dynamic informants, but the other biodynamic seekers also express
that humans were made to be mediators of larger forces, especially in
their garden.
Perhaps because humans have caused so much damage to the
earth, every one of the bio-dynamic seekers brings up the human need to
heal the earth. Lenna and Andrew both say that they are living on their
pieces of land to protect and strengthen them. Susana remarks that the
prairie where she grew up used to have three feet of topsoil. Now there’s
only “six inches in the best places,” but even no-till isn’t going to save us
if they keep using all these chemical herbicides. One of the chief callings
for humans today, say the seekers, is to restore the health of the earth.
In line with the seekers’ aspiration to help heal the earth, Maria
Thun offers that bio-dynamics endeavors to “go towards sustaining the
life of the earth, by enlarging the concept of “environment” to include the
whole cosmos” (1990:3). Szanto dichotomizes science and astrology
when he says that, “The scientist asks: ‘What is the nature of the world
out there?’ And ‘How can I use it?’ The astrologer asks: ‘How am I a part
of the world?’ and ‘What is my role in the world?’” (Szanto 1985:17). In
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the interviews with seekers, Szanto’s two questions are as intertwined as
science and spirituality.
To some biodynamic authors, the human role is greatly inflated.
Storl claims that the 5th natural element on earth is the quinta essentia,
or the human consciousness (1979:54). Like Lenna, Storl defines
human’s role on earth as master of the elements and microcosmic Christ
(1979:54). Humanity’s quest, claims Szanto, is to reunite heaven and
earth (1985:13). It is interesting to note the anthropocentrism present in
assuming that humans comprise one of the five major elements of the
earth. Like the section on anthropomorphism of the land, it is again
readily evident that biodynamics is a hybrid of traditional spirituality and
cosmopolitan anthropocentrism. The seekers further display their
cosmopolitan influences in the ways that they are adopting astrological
gardening traditions.
Choosing Traditions
The seekers reveal two aspects of choosing traditions. The first is a
fascination with synthesizing “traditional knowledge” in a pick-andchoose fashion. The second is in finding their inspirations in distant
lands and ancient history.
The seekers are choosers. They chose which traditions they want
to take up, what influences they want to take on, and what direction they
want to go with their lives. Susana picked up astrology in Guatemala,
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then again in Kentucky. Somehow all of these different influences fit
within permaculture and biodynamics. “It’s traditional knowledge,”
Susana remarks, “which often permaculture builds on. I’ve learned a lot
from traditional knowledge in Latin America.” European agricultural
traditions, which Susana says are even more inappropriate here than in
Europe, have replaced much of the traditional knowledge in North
America. “There’s a lot of traditional knowledge that’s just lost up here.
Whereas it’s very living still in Guatemala for example” (Susana). Her
next comment makes me chuckle as I read back through my
transcriptions: “And so to find it here is like a research project.” The
seekers seem to have on cultural blinders to the agricultural traditions
that exist within the United States.
Many of the seekers have looked into deep history or foreign
cultures to find their inspirations. Jeff, Alicia, Michael, Andrew, Lenna
and Susana all talk about ancient civilizations such as the Aztecs who
guided their lives astrologically. “Planting by the signs,” says Michael, “is
a method that began thousands of years ago. And here it is. I’m having
to decide, do I do this or not.” It is important to understand that when
Michael says planting by the signs he is referring to the Maya and the
Druids, not his immediate neighbors that learned the practice from their
parents. In fact, he is completely unaware of the local astrological
gardening tradition.
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People want to belong to something. But the modern individualism
within Americans makes people rebel against feeling constrained by any
tradition. Three times during our conversation Susana refers to how
frustrated she gets with following bio-dynamics like it was a religion.
One possible explanation is that the seekers have commodified foreign
instead of local traditions because they will not be held accountable for
modifying and reinterpreting distant traditions. Nobody is watching
them if they manipulate foreign traditions to fit within cosmopolitan
lives.
Which brings up the question, how much can traditions be
commodified and adopted? Can they be chosen by just anyone? Do
traditions have to be transmitted through family or can they be obtained
through literature?
Is the act of adopting traditions rejuvenating them or destroying
them? Here we must make the distinction between authenticity and
information. Globalization has made available tradition as a commodity
to be acquired, combined, and consumed (Lu 2004:23). Tradition as a
process of passing on information is rejuvenated then, but “what is dying
is tradition revered as authenticity,” and tied to particular places (Lu
2004:23). The seekers are wrapped up in globalization sensibilities as
they commodify tradition for pure information, without place-based
authenticity.
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Even proponents of globalization agree that it disturbs the
connection between identity and place (Mitchell 2004:54-59). Spurious
tradition is the term for knowledge that gets put into museums or
traditions that get tried on like party costumes. Though Handler
disagrees with the demarcation of spurious tradition, he quote Shils in
saying that if it’s discussed how to present a tradition, it’s fictitious and
it’s a danger to “actually existing syncretic traditions” says Shils (Handler
1984:281). Bioregionalism suggests expanding one’s sense of self in
order to care for the environment (Dryzek 1998). Globalization, though
expanding the boarders of commerce, is shrinking one’s true sense of self
by removing loyalty to place. The irony is that biodynamics practitioners
say they are striving to become more place-based, but they are doing so
by drawing on traditions from all around the world.
Within cosmopolitan society, and biodynamics too, “traditions do
not disappear but they lose their moorings in the shared locales of
everyday life,” writes J.B. Thompson (Jacobs 2004:32). If this is true
then it becomes all the more important to address questions of how to
begin transforming a society without any directly transmitted traditions
to work with. We must ask what we make of people with no lineage or
place to tie them to traditions that they are, nonetheless, incorporating
into the “shared locales of everyday life” (Jacobs 2004:32)? Can nothing
be rejuvenated, only trivialized? And where does that leave us, a
tradition-less generation of children who have been taught nothing about
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how to provide for ourselves in a way that is kind to the earth? Are we
bound to be solely consumers? We have not been handed the tools to
live well upon the earth, but that does not excuse us from seeking the
tools we need to create our own body of earth wisdom, borrowing
conscientiously and wisely from other traditions. That is the very task
we have been given as a uniquely tool-less generation at a crucial
crossroads in the history of the earth.
Here we must question the ownership of agency. “Modernity,”
writes Jane Jacobs, “delivers us away from this embedded mode of
dwelling, and injects us into a more disembedded and rationalized, and
individuated being in the world” (2004:30). Modernity, it is to be
understood, removes the agency from placed information and gives it into
the hands of any individual to mold as they will. Biodynamic
practitioners are taking this individual agency very sincerely, perhaps at
a cost to the integrity of the place-based information they are consuming.
In an interesting twist of the ‘modern/traditional’ relationship,
Ananya Roy argues in ‘Nostalgias of the Modern’ that the very appraisal
of tradition comes from modern consumerism’s valuation system
(2004:63). Globalization, says Duanfang Lu, has rendered the borders
between tradition and modernity “vague, porous and subject to crossings
from both sides” (2004:213). “Olde” font and “quaint” content in the Old
Farmer’s Almanac point to an interesting play on the modern
commodification of traditional knowledge. In 1954 the author of the
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Almanac is adamant in expressing his disdain for astrology as a weak
superstition, but the 2000 publication of the almanac has more
information about planting by the signs than in the any of the previous
years since 1901. While this might superficially seem to indicate a rise
in planting by the signs, it more likely indicates the commodification of
what otherwise was a tradition. The same “old fashioned” font now
signals that the almanac is a novelty available for purchase by curious
people who maybe thirst for some traditional beliefs in their life.
Regardless of whether traditions are place-based or commodified,
some authors suggest that people pick traditions up with the same basic
intentions. Jane Jacobs and Carolyn Long, while acknowledging the
ironies of commodified tradition still recognize that the intentions are the
same as with “authentic” tradition. Jane Jacobs writes,
What come to be assembled from such globalized shopping spaces,
are innovative, thoroughly mediated, utterly commodified, and
usually unauthorized, versions of indigenous living. It is, of
course, very easy to be cynical about such New Age activities, but,
in their own globalized way, they are attempts to dwell
meaningfully in the world by assembling an infrastructure of
tradition derived from anywhere, anytime, any place
[Jacobs 2004:35]
Similar trends in the commodification of traditions can be mapped
in the growing market of manufactured spiritual products since the
1920s (Long 2001:99). Just as people are learning less from parents and
more from books, there has been a decrease in the role of spiritual
advisors and root-workers and an increase in self-prescriptions gleaned
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from books (Long 2001:126). Despite the change from handmade to
manufactured, Long concludes that the intentions have the same
intentions in using traditional remedies (2001:109). The important part
to note is that biodynamic seekers, regardless of the fact that they are
looking to foreign sources for traditions, are fundamentally motivated by
a desire to “dwell meaningfully in the world” (Jacobs 2004:35). The
desire to find a meaningful and positive way to live in the world is driving
an increase in the number of people seeking to modify cosmopolitan
society with traditional gardening practices. The next section is on how
the keepers and seekers understand the why and how cosmopolitan
society needs to change.
Hopeful Change
The past, present and future exist in contention within every
person. Nobody can conjure up any idea of the past without having it be
affected by the present. We must understand the past and present in
relationship with each other. People who seek a way of life unlike the
present societal model have no choice but to begin by adapting the
contemporary model in small ways, modifying it with traditional practices
as they see fit. Keepers living in a world that is drastically different from
the one they grew up in similarly adapt traditional ways to fit within the
cosmopolitan context. This section addresses how seekers and keepers
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talk about the necessity to change cosmopolitan society, the growing
interest in traditional knowledge, and how to synthesize different
traditions with sensitivity and hope.
Both keepers and seekers are adamant that cosmopolitan society
needs to change. Despite having somewhat isolated themselves with
more self-sufficiency, both keepers and seekers remain very aware and
concerned about the state of the world. “The world is in a pretty bad
mess right now,” Evelyn declares. With questionable remorse, Lita
figures “It’ll be that there won’t be any gardens in, oh, I’d say, ten or
twenty years. It’ll all be boughten at the store. Cause it’s coming to that
already.” The keepers have not watched the demise of traditional
agriculture with indifference.
Mary Jane worries that planting by the signs may be getting lost
because “if nobody learns it it’ll be, well it almost is now, a thing of the
past.” I ask her how future generations will garden and she exclaims,
“Oh Lord! If time lasts ten years from now I’d be amazed that a young
generation would be worse than what it is today.” Mary Jane is bothered
by the fact that everybody’s food is being shipped into the stores on
trucks from thousands of miles away.
Well if it was to come a time that they couldn’t make it either, here
wouldn’t be nothing left on the store shelves. I don’t know what
people would do. The younger generation I mean. I’ve thought
about em and I have mentioned it to lots of people. If…they
wouldn’t know how to plant a garden.
[Mary Jane Queen]
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Mary Jane blames it on the parents for not listening to their
children and teaching them what they need to know. “Hah!” Mary Jane
lurches forward in her seat, “Everything is entirely different from what it
used to be.” She settles back, and in a quieter voice says, “I guess you
just adjust to the new things and forget about the old.” But it isn’t just a
matter of older people submitting to a tragic future. The seekers, too,
understand the costs of the current societal trajectory.
Andrew tells me that pollution and industry will “continue to
increase. There will be more disease. Die off will occur,” he laughs
apologetically for bringing up such an uncomfortable subject.
I just think that’s part of the inevitability of the existing way of
providing ourselves with what we need. The rate of contamination
far outweighs what the production capacity is. But trying to figure
out ways to produce more of what we need is really an imperative.
It’s not something that we can afford to continue to overlook.
[Andrew Faust]
Lenna, too, remains confident that “mainstream society needs to
break down. And I think that it’s going to have to break down through
chaos. And unfortunately through destruction. And then it will spin
around to the good side.” For some time people have been writing about
the same bleak trajectory of cosmopolitan society that the keepers and
seekers see.
With the depletion of readily available fossil fuels and cheap
energy, our country is confronted with two diverging paths. Down one
path lies strongly centralized control of large-scale agriculture requiring
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massive nuclear power inputs (Storl 1979:380). Solbrig writes with a
tone of submissive dejection that future farming will be more technical,
with fewer people living in the country and higher input of fertilizers and
biocides, and “plants will be radically altered until none but the
scientists will know the connection between them and their wild
ancestors” (Solbrig 1994:252). Down the other path lies the small-scale
agriculture that Thomas Jefferson advocated for the sake of human
dignity at the inception of our country (Storl 1979:380-384). In deciding
what sort of future we want, we must begin with the relationships. “Ecotheorists ask that we think about our relationships to the non-human
world in a way that encourages interdependence, claiming that nothing
less than this will sustain diversity of life on Earth” (Blandy 1993:25).
The simple act of speaking about the past brings recognition of change,
division, and debate about social actions because it dispels the myth of
the eternal present (Appadurai 1981:218). Agricultural traditions,
though ridden with the complexities of intellectual ownership, are one
opportunity to begin questioning and restructuring the present and
future.
Michael remains optimistic that society, particularly in agriculture,
is changing in “many different directions.” It is true that industrial
agriculture is growing, but Michael says it is simultaneously causing
grassroots people to become “even more focused on the green way.”
Andrew, like myself, is “not a big fan of doomsday incentives. Most of
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why I do what I do… is because the quality of life is more enjoyable and
enriching… When we’re eating things like the honey from our own bees,
we’re like, you know, this is something you can’t buy.” The primary
motivation for adopting traditions is not fear but the understanding that
there is a better way to live. Both keepers and seekers notice a growing
interest in traditional practices, and therein a hope for cultivating a more
optimistic future.
Many of the seekers are optimistic about their ability to combine
different methods and traditions. Susana and Andrew both classify
themselves as experimenting with a combination of permaculture, biodynamics, and organic agriculture. More than anybody, the seekers use
their right to filter which practices they like and which ones they don’t.
Jeff, for instance, twice voluntarily criticized biodynamics. For Jeff and
Alicia, local, hands-on planting by the signs resonates better than
biodynamics.
When I asked Michael if he thought planting by the signs ought to
be preserved, he responded, “I think it should be furthered. I think that
different ideas are coming together as totally syncretic groupings of
biodynamics and permaculture and French intensive gardening and
whatever. Whatever to manifest the most, the highest energy.” Andrew
believes it a good thing that we need to continually evolve and find better
ways to procure our basic necessities “I mean, it would be a bleak day
when humanity got to the point where we were done with anything.”
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Choosing and synthesizing old traditions and new methods is the key to
the seekers’ ingenuity. In a mix of approval and disapproval, the seekers
reveal some of the complexities about new people adopting traditions
they weren’t raised with.
Despite the growth of cosmopolitan society, half of the keepers
remark that there seems to be a growing interest in traditional skills.
Rosalee says, not with a little disdain in her voice, that the hippies who
come around,
most of the time they’re from Philadelphia, round up in there. And
they come in here. Well, I know one feller, he always come down
here wantin to know when to do this and that…Some of them act
like they don’t know how to do nothin – about cuttin wood, nothin.
They’re always hooked up to money.
[Rosalee Blankenship]
The Murphys and Mary Jane, unlike Rosalee, condone people
readopting traditions. Clifford notices that the people born during the
Korean War are retiring in the country and “they wanna have a little
garden. You know, kind of a traditional thing” (386-387). Juanita sees
handmade children’s clothes “kind of come back now. Things kind of
revolutionize or something. They come rollin back around. So it’s good.”
Mary Jane says “it seems that now more people are getting interested in
gardening, digging herbs, doctoring with herbs.” She has noticed a
reemerging interest in herbal medicine from the number of doctor’s
pamphlets she gets in the mail (Mary Jane). Author Deborah McGregor
115
unpacks some of the issues around adopting traditions that may lead to
the disapproval of people like Rosalee.
There are problematic issues around the area of adopting
traditions that have not been handed down to a person lineally, but this
calls for discretion and sensitivity, not abandoning the use of traditional
knowledge. Deborah McGregor speaks of the risk that one might go out
and harvest traditions with a colonial mentality, as though it were a
commodity to be bought and taken home. McGregor aptly notes that the
phenomenon of modern people desiring traditional knowledge says less
about traditions and more about the “modern” people who desire
something “indigenous” because they are afraid of their own trajectory
(McGregor 2004:5). Indigenous Knowledge, writes Deborah McGregor,
is the expression of the vibrant relationships between people, their
ecosystems, and other living beings and spirits that share their
lands… All aspects of knowledge are interrelated and cannot be
separated from the traditional territories of the people concerned…
[McGregor 2004:3]
Nevertheless, McGregor recognizes that traditional worldviews are
just as relevant and crucial to modern society (2004:3), so while being
sensitive to the current holders of traditional knowledge, seekers must
also work to construct their own traditions.
The strength of biodynamics, according to Storl, is that it uses
modern intellect to speak about pre-enlightenment sciences so that
116
cosmopolitan society can understand it (Storl 1979:41-77, Szanto
1985:14). Not only will it be more easily understood in modern terms,
but Storl insinuates that we can make improvements by combining
modern science and traditional spirituality (Storl 1979:32). Biodynamics
is not merely a collection of survivals and superstitions, but a
metalanguage of detailed observations, says Storl (1979:12). The
resurgence of genuine traditions holds the possibility for alternative
philosophies and thus alternative futures (Lu 2004:211). In “The
Latency of Tradition,” Duanfang Lu submits that tradition and
modernism both share the “now”, and have “the same responsibilities for
making lived ground and shaping the future” (2004:21). The seekers are,
in different degrees and capacities, carrying on the work of shaping the
future by blending traditions within a cosmopolitan context.
According to the seekers and an array of authors, agriculture is a
promising means of societal change. “Growing food is not just a matter
of biology, or even economics, but of the interrelationships among people,
the use of their time, energy and resources. It is a social concern,” writes
Storl (1979:378). Growing food, especially in a period of American
history when few people are engaged in agriculture, is inherently a social
and environmental action.
The very fact that astrological gardening practices seem foreign
and irrational steadily undermines the over-rational cosmopolitan society
they are opposed to. “Ritual is not compatible with the rapid rhythm
117
that industrialism has injected into life,” writes Malidoma Some, and
thus readopting holistic ritual into everyday life is inherently and antimechanistic statement (1993:19). Reclaiming agricultural traditions
links the past, present and future while restoring the spirituality of food
and strengthening the community and self (LaDuke 2005:191). LaDuke
advocates that what we have to do with traditional knowledge is “bring it
back full circle so it lives in ourselves, our communities, our nations, and
our children. Hopefully we will not have to rely on books, databases, and
lectures to tell us who we are” (McGregor 2004:9). LaDuke’s words are a
call to take our studies of the world past analytical observations and
place them firmly into heart and hand.
Thesis Conclusion
This research is a glimpse into the significance and complexities of
how agricultural traditions interact with cosmopolitan society. Exploring
how “tradition” and “modernity” interact within individual lives will
ultimately do more to break down false dichotomous connotations than
avoiding the subject out of a vein attempt to be politically correct. If
people are truly seeking to learn more traditional ways of life in order to
cultivate place-based communities, then the real learning needs to be
done with elder neighbors, not globally distributed literature. Traditions,
like the garden, cannot be maintained by leafing through books. The
conversation about how to maintain gardening traditions must begin
118
with keepers and seekers weeding alongside each other in the same pea
patch. Traditional gardening needs sunburns, dirty knees, and soil on
the hands.
119
..………AGKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………
My sincerest thanks goes to all the people who welcomed me into
their homes to tell me about their gardens. I am grateful to Siti
Kusujiarti for guiding me through this year-long research process, to
John Baumann for engaging in conversation about seeking traditions,
and to Ben Fienberg and Sandra Hayslette for their excellent constructive
feedback. I’m thankful to David Moore for his abiding friendship, advice,
and guiding hand on my shoulder – I don’t know what I’m going to do
without it. Most of all, I am grateful to my dear ones and the gardens for
keeping me grounded.
120
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Appendix One
Planting By the Signs
Waxing moon = ruling up = coming up = new of the moon = light of the
moon = 1st and 2nd Quarter
Waning moon = ruling down = coming down = dark of the moon = 3rd and
4th Quarter
PLANTING
“When you plant your cucumbers when the sign’s in the heart, they’ll
bloom theirselves to death. They’ll bloom, but no cucumbers. So he [her
uncle] always told us that the best time to plant em was in the legs or the
arms.” (Rosalee)
“When the moon’s changing you want to avoid those days” [avoid
planting on days when the moon changes from waxing to waning or vice
versa] (Evelyn Lewis)
“Then during the second quarter you plant your beans, your eggplant,
your muskmelons and stuff like that.” (Evelyn Lewis)
“The breast is the best planting sign.” (Evelyn Lewis)
“Never plant anything in the bowls... If they bear, they rot.” (Evelyn
Lewis)
“It don’t matter when you set em out, it’s when you plant the seeds”
(Virginia Tharp)
“I might plant my beans and corn maybe two weeks before I’ll set out any
tomatoes.” (Virginia Tharp)
“Now, when I plant cane I plant it in Cancer in the New Moon…. Your
seed germinates quick and whatever you plant will grow tall.” (Clifford
Murphy)
“Don’t plant corn in the new moon cause it’ll just keep on goin tryin to
reach the moon” (Juanita Murphy)
“The only sign I ever cared about was Aries, and I try to plant my flowers
in it. That’s a flower signs. You plant cucumbers or beans or anything
and they just bloom to death. Don’t get no beans.” (Virginia Tharp)
130
“Virgo is a barren sign. It’s a good time to cut weeds and destroy. And if
you plant your stuff, your tomatoes and green beans and stuff, you will
not get a full crop.” (Clifford Murphy)
“The things that bear their crops below the surface of the ground should
be planted in the dark of the moon they call it. And the things that grow
above the surface of the ground are planted in the light of the moon…You
plant radishes in the wrong time of the moon they’ll all go to bush too,
you know, and they don’t get very big radishes underneath” [dark =
waning, light = waxing moon] ( Lita Tunink)
“We had the prettiest vines you ever seen. They was waist high, prettiest
potato patch that you’ve ever seen. But when we went to dig em that fall,
the biggest one was about like a hen egg... They all went to tops.
Because they was planted in the new of the moon.” (Mary Jane Queen)
“If you want [flowers] doubled you plant em on the full of the moon. And
if you want em single, plant em on the new of the moon.” (Mary Jane
Queen)
“And if you plant potatoes or beets, carrots, onions, anything like that, if
you plant it when in the new of the moon, then lots of times…they’ll rot.
The onions will. Well I’ve never had carrots – but sometimes they don’t
make very much if you plant em on the wrong time.” (Mary Jane Queen)
HARVESTING
“When you’re picking apples and things… and you pick em when, I
think, the moon is decreasing, if you bruise em they just dry up. But if
it’s increasing it’ll decay. It’ll just get watery and decay.” (Evelyn Lewis)
“Stuff will decay if it’s in the heart.” (Evelyn Lewis)
“If you have apple trees, and you can’t get up high enough to gather all
the apples, you can shake em off. It always bruises em. But if you
shake em off on the full of the moon or you dig your arsh potatoes, your
sweet potatoes on the full of the moon when the sign is in the breast or
in the arms or in the legs or feet, anywheres from the bowels down… And
when you shake these apples off if it bruises em, if you shake em off on
the new of the moon they’ll rot where they bruised. If you shake em off
on the full of the moon it won’t rot. Or if you cut one potato when you’re
digging em, if you cut one when you dig it on the new of the moon they’ll
rot. If you cut one on the full of the moon it won’t rot.” (Mary Jane
Queen)
131
ANIMALS
“Castrate in the first quarter and it doesn’t bother em. They [castrated
sheep] didn’t bleed or nuthin. I came out a couple hours later and they
were jumpin and runnin all over the place. Didn’t bother em.” (Vesper
Lewis)
“You kill hogs right after the full moon, the first week. And your meat
will cure out. Then all the grease will cook out of it. And your meat will
not be spongy. It’ll be dry.” (Clifford Murphy)
OTHER
After the new moon “You wait until about the fourth or fifth day then
make your kraut. And I guarantee that that broth will be up over the top
and it’ll stay that way.” (Rosalee Blankenship)
“I have found it true, too, that whenever he plows the garden and he
plows it when the moon is coming up all the rocks come to the top of the
ground. And you go down the other way they don’t work themselves up
as much.” (Evelynn Lewis)
“If I wanna sow some grass seed. Yeah, sometimes I sow it in February.
And sometimes if the snow’s on the ground it’s better because I use a
hand seeder… in the last quarter when the moon’s going down, then the
grass seed will root right on down through the snow.” (Vesper Lewis)
When the moon is waning “it’s a good sign t’ nail boards or roof the
house or anything like that. Well, because if the moons’a rulin up it has
a tendency to pull your nails right out. It’ll cup a board… you can lay a
board down when the moons rulin down and it’ll cup in the middle.”
[Boards turn up on the ends when the moon’s waxing]. (Virginia Tharp)
“I don’t never fool with the garden when the signs in the Heart now.
Never fool with it. Well if I do I pull weeds. Well, you know that’s a good
sign to kill weeds cause that’ll kill em.” (Virginia Tharp)
“Well now I like to do the canning when the moon’s rulin down. Because
your stuff won’t raise. They won’t hoove the caps.” (Virginia Tharp)
“Wood, you can even cut your wood in March the week after the full
moon. Your wood will dry out, it’ll burn like pine.” (Clifford Murphy)
“Set out your tomatoes and your potato plants when the sign’s in Cancer.
That’s a watery sign. And it’ll grow. Very seldom you’ll even have to
water them. They’ll just pick up and grow right on. But if you set it out
when the sign is otherwise, you can’t replace em fast enough. They’ll die
that fast.” (Clifford Murphy)
132
“Clifford’s great aunt used to be a hundred and one or something like
that and she lived in Hendersonville. And she told us an ever’thin before
she died, she said the best sign to plant your green beans is when the
signs is in the Secrets, that’s Scorpio… And we’ve tried it. We have more
green beans than you know what to do with.” (Juanita Murphy)
“Now if you want to deaden timber, do that when the signs in the heart.”
(Mary Jane Queen)
“And we used to get Indian Almanacs…that was put out by the tribe of
Indians, Cherokee Indians, and it told when they planted. And so that is
how we learned, how I learned a lot of it.” (Mary Jane Queen)
133
Appendix Two
Medicinal Plants
“I can remember as a child when we’d get a sore throat, Daddy’d run
down to the creek and get some yellow root an make some yellow root tea
and make you gargle it.” (Juanita Murphy)
“And they used to go out and hunt blood root and they’d treat things like
impetigo or ringworm with blood root and it would kill it.” (Juanita
Murphy)
“Lion’s Tongue” (pipsissiwa) “they claim it’s good for kidney problems.”
(Juanita Murphy)
“And you can take just the regular old Plainta [Plaintain]… And you can
crush it up and put it on a bee sting or on a place where you have an
allergic reaction and it’ll clear it up.” (Juanita Murphy)
Horehound tea is good for colds (Juanita Murphy)
“And for babies to make them rest good if they get the hives or something
like that when they’re little tiny things, they used catnip tea. You take
the dry leaves and you mash it up and make a tea out of it. Give them
just a few drops and they’d just sleep real good.” (Juanita Murphy)
“Snake root? He makes a tea out of it for his stomach” (Juanita Murphy)
– “This here is good for L.A.B.E. Now you’re gonna ask me what L.A.B.E.
is – that’s where you’re Loose At Both Ends, got vomiting and diarrhea.”
(Clifford Murphy)
“Do you know if you’ve got ringworm you can take that stain out of a
walnut hull, rub it on there, and it’ll kill it.” (Clifford Murphy)
“Well, Catnip, you know what that is? It’s real good for your nerves.
Don’t boil it.” (Mary Jane Queen)
“And ground ivy…they boiled it and make a tea. And then they’d strain it
and put just a little sugar in it… Well, it helps to break the hives out.
And if they have any kind of colic when they’re little you can give that to
em.” (Mary Jane Queen)
“And we used to roast an onion and the men would take and squeeze
that onion head in a spoon…and put it in a teaspoon and give it to the
baby if they had the colic and it’d make em sleep.” (Mary Jane Queen)
134
“Ginger is as good a thing you can take for them migraine headaches.”
(Mary Jane Queen)
“When I sprained my ankle my Mom went to dig the root of a comfrey
[and made a poultice], and it never hurt no more. No sir, it never hurt no
more.” (Mary Jane Queen)
[Story about giving bee balm root tea to a man who came down with
scarlet fever.] “He gave that man the tea, well, about this afternoon. He
was better the next morning, got up and went home. Yeah, that is good
to break up a fever. They called it horsemint. Now they call it bee
balm… and it caused him to sweat, and it sweated all that fever out of
him.” (Mary Jane Queen)
“Slippery elm is the best medicine that’s out there in the woods. It’s good
for sprains. They had horses up there and if they sprained their joints
they’d go peal that and bind it around that horse’s joint where it had
sprained it and in a day or two it was well. Well, people is the same
way.” (Mary Jane Queen)
“I had a toothache one time. Oh it was like to kill me. [And Uncle John’s
son went and got whiskey for her mother, who put it in a frying pan with
corn meal]… she said, lay your head on that poultice… and I hadn’t slept
I think in two nights for that pain. Well, that eased that tooth and I went
to sleep. Well the next day sometime they woke me up. Well it eased
that tooth and it never did hurt no more til I went and had that tooth
pulled.” (Mary Jane Queen)
“But, since the fast food’s come along, even children has cancer.” (Mary
Jane Queen)
135
Appendix Three
Odds and Ends: Practical Skills
“I used to can on a wood cook stove. And I canned out there one year we
had a flood and washed all that driveway out. There was a ditch about
eighteen inches almost two feet tall and we didn’t get it filled in. So I just
set me a washtub across it, and gathered up scrap wood and that’s
where I canned in the summer time.” (Evelyn Lewis)
“Now, it was Ash Wednesday - I think that’s in February - the old timers
used to save their ashes and on Ash Wednesday they used to sprinkle
them over the cow’s backs. For the lice.” (Evelyn Lewis)
“If you want to use natural pesticides… you could make your own
nicotine brew. But you have to be very careful. Cause it’s very
poisonous… And you could take and drop on your roof poles – maybe
three drops on every roof pole and it would – the lice would leave the
chickens.” (Evelyn Lewis)
“And I made my own lye… I didn’t use water other than rainwater. Just
put the ashes in an old iron kettle, set it out and let it rain in it, and let it
sit there and the lye would come up to the top in the water. And they
you just dip that off. And it’d burn – you had to use hickory wood to get
the acid.” (Evelyn Lewis)
“Well I put the walnuts in a bucket, poured water in em and let em sit in
the house. With the bark on em, now, don’t peal em...you don’t put
much water on em, cause you know how they rot and that ol black juice
comes out of em. And land, I had thirty some odd walnut trees here in
that upper end up here… they all sprouted and I just set em out.”
(Virginia Tharp)
“Now my [crocheted] table clothes, most of them I made right out cher
while I rested in the garden…. And I’d work till I got rested, thirty
minute, thirty-five minutes, and then I’d go back to the garden.” (Virginia
Tharp)
On dowsing: “I cannot locate water that surfaces on top of the ground.
Now any water that’s a runnin from sunset to sunrise, it don’t have no
pressure on it under the ground. And so I can’t locate that because that
water is on the surface somewhere. So I have to locate water that’s
runnin from Maine to Florida… And it travels so fast that it builds up a
static electric field – cause that copper wire to cross each others. I
haven’t never missed one yet. It’s really something to me.” (Clifford
Murphy)
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“We had a waterwheel we made and put up and put a belt on it, with a
generator. And we’d take the car battery down there and charge that
thing up – Boy, we was getting ready for Saturday night.” (Clifford
Murphy)
“Dad would always fix a hot bed they called it to put the sweet potatoes
in to sprout em then set your sweet potato patch out…So he would lift
that dirt out with a shovel and he put horse manure about that deep –
it’d be about a foot deep… and then he would put the dirt back over em
maybe a finger length deep. And then he laid the potatoes on that, you
know. And Mother would sow her seed. And they’d push the potatoes
down till it wouldn’t move. And Dad would cover them back and Mother
always would just sprinkle dirt over her tomato seed. Well it wasn’t long
till they was up.” (Mary Jane Queen)
“We had two holes for sweet potatoes and two for arsh potatoes. One for
seed and one to eat out of. And they would always put straw around
those potatoes and then they covered that over with dirt.” (Mary Jane
Queen)
“But, since the fast food’s come along, even children has cancer.” (Mary
Jane Queen)
[About a nurse wanting to give Clifford Chemo] “I said Boy, do you know
who you’re talking to? I said, there’s women out here on the street that’s
giving their husband rat poison, and they ain’t charging a thing. And
here you’re wanting to charge me.” (Clifford Murphy)
WILD EDIBLES
“I don’t believe the locust bloomed at all this year. Did you ever eat
those? You dip them in a batter like you do a fish. They are good. They
are good. And elderberry blooms are good, too. I’ve made elderberry
bloom pancakes and they’re good cause they do have a vanilla-y flavor.”
(Evelyn Lewis)
“Now when I pick greens in the spring, now I like to get – now I learned
this from my mom – I like Dandylion. But I get the fuzzy kind. There’s
two kinds of dandylion, there’s the bitter kind, there’s the kind that’s not
bitter – the kind that’s right fuzzy like. They’re wee little.” (Virginia
Tharp)
WEATHER
“And one thing I do know for a fact, that if you watch even that creek out
there and the water will raise for no reason. Say it’ll raise that much,
quarter of an inch, that’s a sign of stormy weather. And I’ve watched
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that. And the water – the water in the commode – that’ll change too. It’ll
come up if it’s gonna rain.” (Evelyn Lewis)
“And in the winter time when the water freezes and the ice freezes in the
creek and if it freezes from the bottom up…it’ll look like frozen
mush…that’s another sign that there’s gonna be falling weather.” [snow]
(Evelyn Lewis)
“You take a persimmon seed and it’ll tell you how to determine what kind
of weather we’re gonna have this winter…you take the seed and you split
it open…[Looking at the cotyledons] See that? That’s a picture of a
spoon. See how pretty that is? That means that we’re gonna have a lot
of snow. Represents a shovel…If it’s a knife it’ll show if it’s gonna be real
cold and the cold air’ll cut you just like a knife. And if it’s got a fork in it,
that means it’s gonna be pretty mild weather like cutting hay and putting
it up for the winter. Let that be a lesson to you. Take that with you.”
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