Gardening Folk Customs

Since harvesting, gardening and preserving the bounty of fruits and vegetables seems to be the topic of the day, I thought I'd post some rather obscure (at least to me) gardening folklore. These beliefs were collected from throughout Appalachia, and while I have heard of some of them, believe a few of them, and even swear by a couple of them--by and large, I had not heard of most of these before.

I have previously posted similar folklore items and the readers of this blog seem to enjoy them, so I thought I'd give it another try.

Here's the list. Do you know of any other folk beliefs pertaining to gardening?

Eat sugar before planting fruit trees to make the fruit sweeter.

Apples with red spots inside means that the tree's root grew into the body of a murdered person.

Drive a rusty nail on the north side of the tree for better yields.

The number of seeds in an apple will be your lucky number.

Whip a poor yielding tree and it will bear better the next year.

Plowing on Good Friday will cause the ground to bleed.

Seeds planted on St. Patrick's Day grow better.

Gardens do better if seeds are planted on even-numbered days of the month.

Don't thank a person who gives you seeds or roots, or the plants will never grow.

Plant potatoes at night so the eyes don't see light.

If you laugh while planting corn, the kernels will have big gaps in them.

Planting peppers when you are mad makes the peppers grow hotter.

If a red-headed person plants peppers, they will be hotter than normal.

For a good crop of watermelons, crawl to the patch backwards on the first day of May.

Put a four-leaf clover in your shoe and make a wish. When you lose the clover, your wish will come true.

A five-leaf clover brings bad luck.

Grass won't grow where human blood has been spilled.

Catch a thistle seed, then blow it into the air. If it doesn't hit the ground before it gets out of sight, your wish will come true, but only if you don't tell anyone the wish.

Crushing rosemary into a glass of wine will boost mental powers.

Make a wish on a load of hay, but don't look until the load is out of sight, and the wish will come true.

Flowers which bloom out of season are evil.

Dreaming of thorns is bad luck.

Bury a hickory stick in a moist place, and it will turn to stone in seven years.

Weeping willows will bring the planter bad luck.

Conduct most of your garden chores during the waxing of the moon. Light nights make light crops: never plant when the moon is full.

All above-ground crops should be planted with the new moon.

Root crops should be planted during the last two days of a full moon.

If you burn potato peelings, your crop won't grow the next year.

Root crops should be planted under the sign of Taurus for quicker growth.

Seeds planted under Virgo will result in many leaves but not much fruit.

Sweet potatoes dug on a dark night will be sweeter and keep better.

It's bad luck to burn wood from a tree struck by lightning.

Planting on Friday is bad luck, unless the zodiac sign is right.

Tomatoes should be planted on Memorial Day.

Friday is a good day to plant crops which dangle from branches because Friday is hangman's day.

Don't plant seeds until after the apple trees bloom.

It's good luck to steal herbs.

Tobacco grows well if planted under the sign of Cancer.

Never plant under a north wind. Trees blossoming twice in a year brings bad luck.

When cutting wood, spit in your palms for good luck.

A snowy winter portends a good year for crops.

A saying for planting tobacco: "Some for you, some for I, some for the devil, some for the fly."

Hang a horseshoe in a fruit tree for a heavy crop.

After planting a hill of beans, press the soil with your foot for better luck.

If you point your finger at a cucumber bloom, the bloom will fall off.

Beans planted on dark nights will grow the best crops.

Plant beans early in the morning if you want to have the crop come in earlier in the season.

For a better cabbage crop, sew the seeds in your bedclothes on March 17th.

Corn should be planted under the new moon so that most of the growing will be done at the tip.

Wood cut on light nights will burn hotter.

Grass seed won't freeze if planted when the moon points down.

Corn planted under the waning moon grows slower but produces larger ears.

If onion bulbs are planted upside down, they will come out in China.

To keep away crows, kill one and hang it from a garden pole.

Onions should be planted in the old of the moon.

Trees are best trimmed in the full moon of February or November.

Peas should be planted as near to twelve noon as possible.

Tie a piece of white string across the garden to keep birds away.

Cut briars and weeds when the moon is waning to kill them.

Plant flowers under Virgo for the best blooms.

Corn should be planted when the dogwoods are in bloom and the poplar leaves
are as big as squirrel ears.

Wheat always ripens in the light of the moon, not the dark.

To make hydrangeas blue, put rusty nails at the roots. Plant watermelons before breakfast for best results.

Cobs from seed corn should be placed in running water and not burned.

If two people's hoes hit together, they will work in the same field next year.

Be it ever so humble!

When Jason started to school we still lived up Johnson Holler at Earls and his Kindergarten year he rode across the mountain to catch the bus in Monkeytown, where it would take him to Circleville School. So Mom and Dad came up with the idea to move closer to the school since I would be starting the next year and so Dad would be closer to work.

Sometime between Jason’s kindergarten year and mine we moved to John Mallows farm in the Harman Hills. I don’t recall anything about the move but I do recall that we had to really clean the house before we could move in. It seems that someone let some sheep into the house and they used it for a barn for some time prior to us moving in. I recall Dad, Granddad, and my uncle using scoop shovels to scrape sheepshit out of the house, while Mom and my Aunts operated a bucket brigade full of water and spic-and-span. I remember that the crap on the floors was at least 8 inches deep, a normal person would have give it up for a lost cause and moved on, but just show a Burns an impossible thing and tell him he can't do it...and see how fast it gets done!!

After a few days of hard work and even more cleaning, we got to move in to a huge old farmhouse situated on 570 or so acres of farmland. I think everyone who stayed at John’s (as we called the place) just loved it. We got to live there rent free as long as Dad helped out with some farmwork, a non-issue really since Dad was always out doing something on the farm anyway. There was only one major drawback to John’s…it was ¾ of a mile off of a backroad. In the wintertime, you had to walk in and out. It was a real ordeal to get us kids to walk out to catch the bus in the dead of winter. Dad went to work at the same time so he would walk with us, and sit in the car with us until the bus came.

The old farmhouse has seen better days, this is a current photo of the old place.

I remember one Christmas we all decided to go have Christmas at Dad’s older sister Barb’s house in Virginia. It was blue-assed cold when we walked out to the car carrying presents. On the way the wind whipped some of them out of our hands and blowed them into a nearby holler. Later the next summer Jason and I were still finding some of our Christmas presents in that holler. Most of the time we would spend Christmas in Monkeytown at the homeplace up on the hill where my Granddad lived.

Seasons came and went while we grew up on the farm, looking back we only lived there but a couple of years, but it seems much longer to me now, we loved living on the farm. We had a huge garden on the farm, of course we needed a big garden to grow enough food for all the kids mom and dad were raising. I remember helping in the garden, I’m sure I was more in the way than anything but helping nonetheless.

While working in the garden, mom would inevitably find a toad or at least she’d pretend to find a toad and chase us kids with it. We’d all run and hide wherever we could find a place to hide and get away from her. You'd have thought it was man eating toad the way we carried on about it. I remember a bunch of us locked ourselves in the attic one time to get away from her. There was a big ball-hornets nest up there and hornets were flying all around our heads, but it was still a much-preferred location over the garden with mom and her toad. I’m sure she thought it was big fun but even to this day I am scared to death of frogs and toads.

Below is a photo of the farmhouse today, complete with the ball hornets nest!

Stay tuned for more of the continued exploits of Matthew growing up.

Life at "Earl's"

Some of my earliest childhood memories took place in an old ramshackle farmhouse that we referred to as “Earl’s”, named after the man who owned the house, Earl Huffman. The house was located up Johnson Holler on Friends Run. I don’t remember any of the other places we lived before that, so my earliest memories take place at Earl’s.


Below is a photo of my brother Jason and I playing dress-up in mom's nightgowns!


I remember Mom setting up a table and chair on the back porch of Earls and feeding us breakfast in the sun. Me and my brother would eat our cereal at this table nearly every morning that the sun was shining. Mom always made sure we had neat little bowls to eat out of, a fact that isn’t lost on either of us all these years later. She and Dad always made sure we had the perfect childhood, probably stemming from the fact that Mom didn’t have one herself as she was placed in foster care at an early age.


Below is a photo of Jason and I at the breakfast table that I mention in the above story. We'd have breakfast here nearly every morning.


A sad memory I recall from Earls was we had a little brown puppy, whose name has been forgotten through the years. He was a playful little puppy and Jason and I loved him. One wintry evening Dad went out to get wood for the stove and the puppy followed him out, and when Dad’s arms where full of wood and when he started back inside, the puppy got under his feet and Dad unknowing stepped on him. Dad was then and is now a big man and of course the little puppy didn’t stand a chance. We all heard a yelp and that was that. I think it hurt Dad more than anything to know that he had accidentally killed our puppy. Of course, the next day we had a puppy funeral.

Yet another memory of Earls is that of the Chipmunk. We were walking around with mom one day and found a chipmunk that was “charmed” by our cat Sylvester. The chipmunk was in a daze and I’m sure ready to be lunch for Sylvester. Mom picked up the chipmunk and held it for a few minutes until it came out of the charming and then it bit her on the thumb. Of course, while mom was yelping in pain, Jason and I were laughing since we thought that was funny.

It was at Earls that I’m sure I got my love of the land and planting. One day while “looking” some Pinto beans for supper, Mom gave me some of the broken beans and told me to go plant them. I’m sure she was just thinking of something to get me out from underfoot, but I took her advice and went out to the garden, punch a hole in the ground with my finger and planted a bean in every finger hole. Lo and behold a few weeks later we noticed that my beans were growing. I don’t remember ever picking those beans, perhaps we moved before they were ripe but I do remember that they grew.


Below is a photo of Jason and I playing with our sticker books, this was taken about the time I learned my numbers and colors.




At Earl’s I also remember learning my colors and numbers out of the Sears Catalog. My brother who is 18 months older than me, was preparing for grade school, and he knew his colors, numbers and could read. I remember not wanting to be left out so I told mom that I wanted to learn them as well. She set me down on the couch with the catalog and showed me different colors and numbers, and then she gave me some crayons and told me to draw a green “1” on the wall. I did. Then a Red “2” and I did that as well. That is how I learned my colors and numbers, it was fun to learn when you got to write on the walls, a fact that I’m sure wasn’t lost on my mother. And all it cost her was a little paint.

Earl’s was up a holler than was full of rattlesnakes, you had to be careful when you got out to open the gate as there was, more often than not, a rattler laying around the gatepost. Mom and Dad would never allow us out of the mowed yard without them because of the snake problem. I don’t remember ever personally dealing with a snake while at Earls, but I do recall Dad and Aunt Tam killing them on pretty much a daily basis, but then again I was only 4 years old.


Below is a photo of Jason and I playing with our new "horses" at Earl's.



It was at Earls that I also got my cracked foot. I got a wagon somewhere, God only knows where… it could’ve been Rio Mall or the Dump, or perhaps a yardsale, but let’s suffice it to say that I got a wagon and was playing with it in the yard. I would ride in it and Aunt Tam would pull me around. I got the bright idea to roll down the hill into the road one day in my wagon. It was not a steep hill, but a hill nonetheless. Unfortunately for me, directly in my path was my Grandad’s truck. I knew I was going to hit the truck so I started flailing my arms and legs. I hit squarely into his truck rim, and unfortunately for me, my leg was between my wagon and the rim. I squalled and Aunt Tam came and got me and took me to the house. I remember someone jokingly saying “Well, we’ll just have to cut it off.” And they got out their pocketknife. I’m sure they thought I was putting on but it liked to scared me to death. Upon closer inspection, my grandad pronounced my leg broken, so off I went to the hospital. Sure enough my leg was cracked. Oddly enough, to date that was the one and only broken bone that I have ever had. That could lead into another story… the exploits of me in my cast, but I’ll save that one for another day.