On the Moraine, Part VI

By Jim Thompson
HCP columnist

During our years on the McNary Farm, my Grandfather Beekman (who we called Poppy, as I am called by our grandchildren) would often come to visit on the weekends.  

He lived in Portsmouth, so it was a fairly short trip. During this time, he was in his mid to late 70s and it was a pretty easy trip for him. My grandmother had died in November 1954, so he was alone.  

There was a small room off the living room that he took over, and we called it Poppy’s room. It had a cot and a little table.

Poppy especially like to come to the farm during blackberry season in the spring and hickory nut season in the fall. He would go out to the old pasture in the mornings, before it got too hot, to pick wild blackberries. He would pick two or three gallons a day on the late spring weekends that they were ripe. Mother made preserves out of them.  

In the fall, we would pick up hickory nuts by the burlap bag full. We would take those back to Troy and when Poppy came there in the winter he would crack the hickory nuts and fill the old large peanut butter jars (like we use to get when I was a kid) with them. He liked to crack the hickory nuts in a big vise in our shop and do it in a way the two halves came out perfectly, not just a bunch of pieces. 

A family in the neighborhood that we interacted with regularly were the Wagners. Mr. Wagner died early in our years on the farm, but his grown sons were always around. Stanley lived on Briar Hill Road as did his brother, Harold. They had two other brothers, Eddie, who worked on Dr. Benner’s dairy farm which abutted the back of our farm, and their youngest brother, David. Dr. Benner was a veterinarian in Bainbridge.

We had a tobacco allotment in those days, and someone from the Wagner family was always handling that as a sharecropping enterprise with us. Dad was always conflicted with this – not the Wagners but raising tobacco. No one in our family used it and he did not want my brother or I to pick up the habit. More on this later.

Our garden raising exercise, of course, moved to the farm. My parents started raising a huge garden and all of our vegetables year around came from the garden. Green beans were in abundance. My mother would always can 100 quarts so we had two quarts a week, year-round. I remember several summers when the green beans were really producing, my mother, brother and I would make a mid-week day trip from Troy to the farm to pick green beans. Back in Troy, mother even sold the surplus to the local grocery store.

Maybe it's one thing wrong with kids today. You haven’t lived until you have sat in front of a bushel basket of green beans and told to snap them. Mother also canned 25 gallons of tomato juice each summer.

But potatoes were a different story. Dad would buy 100 pounds of seed potatoes each spring. These would need to be prepared for planting. That meant cutting them up so you had one “eye” on each piece. 

Summertime for the potatoes just meant hoeing. But in the fall…

In the fall we dug potatoes with a potato fork, a relatively short handled, heavy tined tool. In the middle of the potato patch we raised up a circular place about six feet in diameter with a “moat” around it to take water away. Then we placed straw in the middle of this. As we dug the potatoes, we placed them in this space, on top of the straw and built a cone out of them. When all the potatoes were dug, we put more straw over the whole pile and then shoveled about six inches of dirt on top of that. When we were done, it looked like we had a dirt pyramid in the middle of the potato patch.  

When you wanted potatoes over the winter, you started a hole in the side of the pyramid and pulled out what you needed then covered it back up with straw and dirt. To my knowledge, we never froze the potatoes, and they would last until the next summer.

Jim Thompson, formerly of Marshall, is a graduate of Hillsboro High School and the University of Cincinnati. He resides in Duluth, Ga. and is a columnist for The Highland County Press. He can be reached at jthompson@taii.com.