October was an exciting month for the LAHC GA Program. We participated in the Daniel Boone Festival parade. We decorated our float with homegrown veggies and local flowers. We also won first place in the parade and we were also awarded “Overall Winner President’s Choice Award.”
Here is Irma’s recent newspaper article reflecting on the fall.
Stinking Creek News
Irma Gall
Lend-A-Hand Center
November already? Well, we have already had several cold frosty mornings and even one morning it was a real freeze. That changes life for many people on Stinking Creek.
It puts end to most of our gardening and farming. We used to say we could begin to harvest our field corn after a good hard frost. It loosens the shucks making it easier to get the ear out of its jackets. Old timers used to predict the type of winter by the tightness of the shucks. I do know from experience that a hard freeze made picking corn by hand a lot easier. It killed the leaves making it easier to walk through the corn as well as loosened the shucks. Another advantage was it made it easier to break the corn off the stalk. I speak from experience as we used to pick as much as twenty acres of field corn by hand which meant many truck loads. It also meant several of us working together. Interestingly enough, we enjoyed those nice days in the cornfield.
I have already planned for the next year by gathering flower seeds, sun flower, pumpkin, cushaw, sweet dumplings, squash like butternut, and even my giant pumpkin seeds. They are drying in my little corn cribs which are protected by fine screen door wire to let the air in, the small seeds from falling out and, most of all, the rodents such as mice, rats, bats and other birds from feasting on all my labors. I built several of these small corn cribs to protect my harvest of the small popcorn. I can put the small cribs on my little red wagon, which is yellow, pull them out by day to take advantage of the natural drying agent, the sun. Then I can easily pull that wagon and its load back in the garage during the night or on rainy damp days.
Then after harvesting the late beans and the seeds I mow all the vegetation down to rot on the ground to replenish the soil for next year’s growing season. The rainy late summer produced lots of vegetation so I wanted to get it down. It constantly amazes me how well our earth is made to grow things and then replenish the soil to grow even more. We can learn a lot about recycling from the earth itself. How wonderful it is to work with the earth for its good as well as our good.
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