Living on the Organic Side

We searched high and low for the right kind of land. We settled on this one, but the only drawback was the sogginess of the soil. But, after looking it over, I felt we could drain it. A creek ran along the southern side of the property some two hundred yards from the edge. Another drainage ditch was on the northern side and with these close enough, I felt we had found the soil we wanted and needed for the perfect organic farm.

The reason for this search was because land never used is much easier to bring into full production and can be done much faster than with soil that is worn out. It only takes around four years to bring new ground into the realm of good soil, whereas, it takes around eleven years to bring back the depleted soil.

When working a full time job, it takes longer to bring the soil around to the point of production we wanted. I found a chicken house that had litter for sale. If I loaded this by hand, it cost only two dollars a load, but had a huge amount of sawdust in the mix.

Using a tiller, we made the first garden on the land. When it began to flood, I used that tiller to ditch the ends of the rows. This gave the plants good drainage and we made some good watermelons as well as tomatoes.

The road we live on is located some two miles and six inches from the Interstate. Okay, if one wishes to argue this point, it may be two miles and eight inches. The reason I mention this is because I had to haul the watermelons out to a station there and put out on consignment. After this season, no more consignment was ever called for because folks came from all over for the veggies and melons we produced on the land.

When a local store ran out of cotton seed meal, I went to the co op in Hattiesburg and ran into dealer that wanted okra. I agreed to sell, but had to get the soil ready for the crop the following year.

Burning the ground early in the morning made it easier to till and helped get rid of unwanted weeds and grasses. That particular area was one hundred fifty feet square. It took me seventy two hours to till that soil down the full depth I wanted.

This was a front end tiller and when I began to plant, I did every other row, skipping the rows to give us room to gather the okra. Using the saw dust and chicken litter, I made a good crop of okra that year. I put the seed down in the furrows made when tillering the soil and after covering it, I put the chicken litter on top to let the rains do their job of washing down the fertilizer to the seed.

Even with rubber gloves, Anna’s hand was blistered and I had the chore of picking the okra, but I didn’t mind.

We took thirteen bushels of okra to the dealer and he gave me a total of three dollars and fifty cents after he went through those thirteen bushels. All he wanted was baby okra, three inches or less. One can say for certain that he never got another pod of my okra unless he purchased same in the groceries we sold to that year.

A wiser head than mine told me I needed lime on this soil for optimum growth patterns. So, I went to the local co op and asked if they could spread some for me. With the price being too high, I purchased the lime in Hattiesburg and spread it by hand. It was so heavy I could only take a half bucket at a time.

Spreading and trying to remember where the last hand full had gone, I finally got the land limed the way I thought it should be. This is a task that is difficult for those that can see good, but I am legally blind and this made it all the more so. For me.

Our little five acre farm was going good and beginning to grow those things we needed for survival until along came Camille. This hurricane destroyed the entire farm, even the trailer we had lived in for those first years.

Many weird things happened on that fateful day. The trailer was so badly damaged that it seemed at least five pieces of dynamite was placed under it. The barn was gone along with the pump house and the addition I had built onto the trailer.

So, the problem left was to begin again or tuck my tail between my legs and run like it was on fire. Out of the destruction of the trailer came a fine brick home.

I had the opportunity to clean out a silage pit on a farm and saw a tractor under a shed as I passed this on the way in and out. The raw silage I got was mixed with cow manure and made the ground swell and the tilth was better than ever. The one drawback in using this material was the weed seed we found in the garden after putting this material down.

I helped other farmers clean their pits as well and got many weeds I wish I had never seen, but the silage helped our land and this was the intent in the beginning. A feeder operation was found and we got the truck load of cow manure for five dollars if we cleaned the lot. Sometimes, this was pushed into a pile at the rear of the lot and I could load this much faster.

After I lost my job, we tried to find other means of getting money. We settled on fish bait, mainly worms.

Using some of the tin from the barn, I built worm beds and laid a thin layer of rotted sawdust on this, adding cow manure and putting the worms into this bed. We found that we had fat worms and the best kind of soil one can find for planting seed.

I mention this because we got an order for all the bell pepper we could raise.(I should have investigated this order further before jumping into the work.) With no money to buy peat cups, I found the school would let us take the little milk cartons and after they were brought home, cleaned out and stacked back, we put the soil mix into this. That soil mix being the worm castings.

We had been given some old cast off bread boxes made of wood and these really came in handy when it came to handling the pepper plants. They could be stacked on top of one another and this made it easier to stack in our room every morning when the frost was due to be so heavy as to kill plants.

All this time, the worm business was growing, giving us more customers so that we could make ends meet as we went along. Every time I went to Hattiesburg to get supplies, I purchased concrete blocks. They were slightly defective and were only ten cents each, so when the truck returned home, it was always loaded with farm needs plus the blocks.

For some reason the cottonseed meal went up at the co op, so I searched for another source and found it in the next town north at twenty dollars a ton. That meal was used in planting as well as in the worm beds.

When I found the barn was built on land that didn’t belong to me, I purchased the four acres behind me, giving me a total of nine acres. I sectioned this off into five equal pastures and we began to farm in earnest, paying our way all along the way with the sale of the worms. They went out at fifty cents a box and during the summer months we sold as many as five thousand boxes a week, so one can see we were doing okay on the farm.

With a wonderful lady called wife and three healthy children, we learned how to work a farm and how to gather the fruits of our labors.

Just as soon as the peppers were about ready to put into the ground, I acquired the tractor and found a pan plow to help in breaking the land. That tractor had a muscle lift and I built them up fairly well during this time. Setting the rows off with the pan plow, I made sure each row was high enough for the peppers to grow without lying on the ground.

After the rows were up and ready, I dug the holes with a post hole digger, digging just down to the edge of the metal of the digger. As I did five or so, I went back and put cottonseed meal, bone meal and lime into each hole, making sure each hole had the same amount.

When Anna pulled the paper from around the peppers, they found a square foundation of roots and put this into the hole to begin the growing season for the peppers. When finished, we had forty rows of one hundred plants each. All planted about twenty to twenty four inches apart.

Many neighbors came and went, trying to get me to lay in some kind of inorganic fertilizer to make the plants produce the best crop they could, but I let this run off my back like water does on a ducks back.

By this time, we had acquired a cow and calf as well as chickens and had the hens in a pen where we could get eggs without having them dirty or cracked by the chickens. I tried to keep the barn clean because as you should know, I don’t see as well as I should and I do not like to step in a fresh pile of manure. I kept that barn clean and I had just completed this chore when Anna came and said, “ We have army worms on the peppers. What are we going to do?”

“Pray.” I didn’t mean to make the answer short, but this was the only solution I could think of at the moment. Two days later, she came and said there was truly an army of ladybugs in the pepper field. Those little red spotted beauties stayed in the field, growing and keeping all other worms and bugs off those peppers. Even as we picked, the bugs stayed in the hampers, going to the stores and where ever they would go.

Needless to say, if we had used any kind of spray to rid the field of army worms, the crop could not have been called totally organic. We harvested forty bushels of peppers per week from this field and sold every one as fast as we took them to the stores. The instigator of the pepper idea took only one bushel and only then after I twisted his arm somewhat.