Talk: Gardening by the moon

Collected by Irene Carlisle Transcribed by Nathaniel Lucy Told by James M. Walden Busch, Arkansas Reel 140 Talk: Gardening by the Moon Irene Carlisle: Well the moon has an effect on a whole lot of things you don't think about. Crops like - you know some crops. And anything that grows above the ground you plant in the light of the moon? James M. Walden: Yeah, that's right. Carlisle: Maybe what's been the matter with my garden all these years. I imagine . . . Walden: Five years ago this winter . . . nephew over there and he worked on the highway and hadn't been married very long. He had a mortgage on his home and farm. We wanted to work on the highway to make a few dollars to buy him some cattle. So he came to where I was working and I following . . . Of course I couldn't work much in the winter time and not enough to where I could stay off and pay board and room somewhere. I wouldn't make enough to pay expenses. So he come and said, "Uncle Skeeter, what are you going to do this spring?" Well I said, "I don't know." He said, "You know Mabel and I would like to have you . . . at our place." He said, "I'm going to work on the highway a little." "I can't pay you much money," he said, "but you know you'll have a good home." And I said "Where is your car at?" I said, "My suitcase is always packed." So I went over and stayed with him and I just - he done his milking of his cows. I never milked a cow in my life. And the girls and my mother done that like when I was a boy. That was the women's job, milk and take care of the milk, butter, and the cows. And the men folks did the outside work. And so he'd go milk, I think anywhere from two to six cows what he was milking, and I'd take care of his hogs. And . . . hogs that winter and then we sent them to market. And then I'd splitted up wood. But he had a bunch of men cut . . . and haul it in to the house and got a bullsaw . . . and I had, oh I had a pile of stove wood high as . . . big as this room. I just split wood during the day. And of course I got tired. I would go in and sit down. It was sometime the spring of the year and he got ready to plant his garden and I said, . . . I said, "You're doing wrong. Don't plant any potatoes." He said, "What makes you think so?" I said, "Well it's the view of the moon." I said, "When it comes time to dig your potatoes, why . . . go down in the hill and dig out a few of them . . . potatoes. I said, "Half of them will be on top of the ground." "Well," he said, "I plant in the ground. I don't plant in the moon Uncle Skeeter." I said, "Well that's all right. I'm just telling you something." So along in the summer, I was down about the time that they was eating new potatoes. I went down . . . couple of days. So his wife went out to get some potatoes one day and come back in and said, "Smeed," said, "you know half of them potatoes are on top of the ground?" Ah let me tell you crazy "Well go out and look." She got four or five out of the bag and showed him and they were all sunburned and blistered on top you know. But he said, "Gall darned." He said, "I took that old potato hook" he said that you used to use in the garden. He said, "I took that and I raked dirt through those twice" and he said, "I pulled dirt up to them with the plow and I didn't ever think they would ever get out." So then I said, "Well now, let's get out and look." Went out and I said, "you remember what I told you?" Said "Yes sir but I can't believe it." Now I said, "Well there they are." He said, "Hell, I'm going to have to take a hole and go pour dirt over there to keep them from sun burning." But they were. They were - Oh, I don't know what percent of them but there was a large percent of them potatos just laying right on top of the ground. Carlisle: I've heard they . . . the tops. . . . And if you plant them on Rotten Saturday, they say they'll rot in the ground. Did you ever observe that Rotten Saturday? Walden: Well, I don't know about that. I can tell you another incident and I can prove that to you by some people in Eureka Springs. I don't remember whether you lived over there during Dr. Ellis' lifetime or not, did you Vance? Well he owned that building, it's burned down, got his brother . . . now. Well he had an office upstairs. And at one time, he had a - there was a big store there - the Perkins brothers run a big dry good store in there and each department there. But anyway, they had moved away and the post office was in there at one time. So they were just idle. Well Doc had got interested in a farm down on Leatherwood Creek down there and he had a man . . . and they went to raising cattle together on this farm. Well Doc was a great believer in this moon business. Well he take a couple of great white vessels and he takes them down to his farm and he fills them full of dirt right out of his barn . . . black dirt. And he brought those in and put them in the window up there. Right along the sidewalk you could just walk along there and look in and see them. And he put a ticket on the window every day as to how much those beans grow. He planted three beans in one vessel when the moon was full. Then he put another . . . over here and three beans in it on the new of the moon. Well he measured those every day. Well anyway, in six weeks time, the bean that was planted on the full of the moon was only eighteen inches high. And the one planted over here two weeks later on the new of the moon was thirty-one inches high. And he just kept alternating tapes ends]Funding for digitization provided by the Arkansas Humanities Council and the Happy Hollow Foundation