A Gardener’s Rites of Spring

“Why he ain’t a professor; he’s just an old dirt dauber.” Several decades ago that’s how a woman known to locals as the “plant lady” described me to another customer who mentioned that I taught at the local university. Seldom in life have I been paid a finer compliment than being styled “an old dirt dauber.”

Living close to the good earth runs as a bright, meaningful thread through the fabric of my life. Some of my fondest memories of a Smokies childhood revolve around helping my father and his father plan and plant crops in the spring. To this day, recollecting the first time Grandpa Joe let me cut up seed potatoes alongside him, using my first pocket knife, warms the cockles of my heart. I still adhere to his simple advice: “Cut a good chunk of tater, son, and always make sure it has at least two eyes.”

Each of the four seasons in the Smokies has distinctive characteristics, but most gardeners, including this one, would pick spring as their favorite. Earth’s reawakening brings bounty in many forms—namely, a profusion of wildflowers, beginning with pussy willows and sarvis in March and on through May’s    riotous blooms, which brighten homes as well as the forest understory. There are also delicious dietary changes, such as poke salad, ramps, lamb’s quarters, cress, branch lettuce, and fried trout fresh from the stream. Increasingly warm weather makes communing with nature an exercise in pure pleasure. Even the administration of traditional spring tonics such as sulfur and molasses, or sassafras tea sweetened with sourwood honey, holds a certain appeal. In tandem with wild vegetables of early spring they seem to cleanse the system or, as old-timers often put it, “set you free.”  

Most of all, the beginning of another cycle in Earth’s eternal rebirth means time to plant and the promise of the coming months. These links to the land and its mountain folkways—often subconscious but nonetheless emotionally powerful—have succored and sustained me all my years.  

Smelling freshly plowed ground and feeling humus-rich soil in my hands sooth my soul like a balm. My garden has long been a place of quiet refuge, and I have planted at least a few things every year since completing undergraduate school. So strong is my love affair with the land that when I finally could afford a home, the key consideration was not the design or square footage but rather availability of at least two acres for fruit trees, berry bushes, and a garden.

Certain gardening principles have always guided me. My gardening mentors never specifically mentioned “three sisters” cultivation, although they certainly practiced variations on it by planting corn, climbing beans or field peas, and pumpkins or winter squash in harmony. For those unfamiliar with the concept, the technique emphasizes a symbiotic relationship between plants learned from Native Americans. Corn provides a way for beans to climb; legumes fix nitrogen and enrich the soil; and the large leaves of pumpkins keep weeds at bay.

My overall approach has also integrated a different triumvirate—the three “Cs” of continuity, change, and cultural tradition. In other words, I adhere faithfully to lessons passed down through many generations—slicing seed potatoes for planting, removing all suckers on tomatoes except the first one, saving proven seed from year to year, regularly rotating crops, shaking tomato vines to assist pollination, and dozens of other tricks of the gardening trade. I cling fast to tradition as I plant by the signs, use time-honored means of saving seed (such as powdered tobacco, or dry snuff), select the best plants for that seed, and “read” the weather cues on when to plow.

Yet it’s wise not to get “sot in your ways.” Accordingly, I try a few new plants each year. With the renaissance of heirloom varieties and the increasing availability of long-forgotten seeds, there are new “old” varieties of tomatoes to try every year and different creasy or cutshort beans to test. This spring will see candy roaster seeds in the ground for the first time in decades; I can already smell the pies and preserves that warmed my boyhood.

Through it all, my garden is a place to pause and ponder—to observe in unhurried wonder—as I derive an ample measure of pleasure from the miracles wrought by soil and sun, water and wind, and my helping hands.

Fresh Pickings

POKE “SALLET” WITH EGGS AND BACON

Among the first “pot herbs” to become available in the spring, thanks to having exceptionally high levels of vitamin A, poke needs to be cooked three times before serving to rid the poisonous weed of toxins. Also, only the new growth, when it is three or four inches tall, should be used. After washing the greens, place in a sauce pan and bring to a rapid boil and continue for 20 minutes. Repeat the process twice more, draining and starting with cold water. While cooking the poke, fry several strips of bacon (or streaked meat) until crisp, and save the drippings. When boiling the poke greens has been completed, add the drippings and cook in the pan in which the bacon was fried. Top with crumbled bacon and thin slices of hard-boiled eggs. Proper preparation of poke sallet takes time, but as one of the earliest greens of spring the effort is well worthwhile.

SASSAFRAS TEA

My grandmother often said: “Drink sassafras tea with honey in early spring, and you won’t need a doctor for the rest of the year.” She also believed it was a fine way of staying slender: “You can get so thin drinking sass’ tea you can hide behind a three-quarter-inch water pipe.” She might have been overstating the effects of this traditional spring tonic, but it’s pleasantly palatable (unlike any of the tonics using sulfur) and easily prepared.

Dig up sassafras roots in winter when the sap is low, then clean and dry them. To prepare tea, place a cup of roots, which have been chopped into small pieces, into three quarts boiling water. Reduce heat and simmer for half an hour. While it is piping hot sweeten each cup of the brewed tea with a tablespoon of honey. Then, as Grandpa Joe would say, “sasser and slurp. It’s mighty satisfying.”