{"id":85001,"date":"2017-09-28T03:28:47","date_gmt":"2017-09-28T07:28:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/?p=85001"},"modified":"2017-09-27T20:48:36","modified_gmt":"2017-09-28T00:48:36","slug":"column-musings-of-a-simple-country-man-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/?p=85001","title":{"rendered":"COLUMN: Musings of a Simple Country Man"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A \u201cLocal\u201d digging up a Brookfield potato?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Big potatoes and other garden oddities<\/strong><\/p>\n

By Hobie Morris<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201d A sluggard does not plow in season, so at harvest time he looks but finds nothing.\u201d Prov. 20:4<\/p>\n

Englishman Peter Glazebrook is a celebrated gardener\u2014in a very big way! in 2011 he grew an onion weighing almost 18 lbs. with a circumference of 30 inches. It took Peter\u2019s two strong arms to\u00a0raise it over his head. Glazebook also holds records for the heaviest potatoes, parsnip and longest beet root. (Author)<\/p>\n

Rural Brookfield is widely known for being an area of extremes. The weather, for example, being at the top for most \u201clocals.\u201d This year has been especially cool and damp, putting a damper on many outdoor activities. The weather\u2019s unpredictability has been especially stressful for our local farmers.<\/p>\n

Corn planted in late spring\u2014sometimes several times\u2014will be well below the post-winter farmer\u2019s optimism and needs. The late August hay crop has greatly reduced crop protein compared to hay cut in June. For this simple country man farming is a constant \u201ccrap shoot,\u201d (obvious pun not intended).<\/p>\n

Sadly, very few farmers remain.<\/p>\n

Once upon a time the township\u2019s numerous upland hills and valleys contained many generational family farms. Vacant land was a rarity. The original forested hills had been cleared. The new fields plowed and the numerous stones dug up and piled, often carefully placed in long, majestic stone walls. Many hands joined in making these fence, dirt roads and boundary lines.<\/p>\n

The farms were generally small, virtually self sufficient, with small dairies. Any extra milk usually sold to a nearby \u201ccheese factory.\u201d Family food was grown in well tended gardens. Before electricity, food was stored in a variety of ways. \u201cRoot cellars,\u201d for example, were cooled bt the earth\u2019s 50 degree\u00a0temperature, preserving the essential winter eating \u201cin cold storage.\u201d<\/p>\n

In those years gardens were a necessity for farmers and most Americans. Today farmers seldom have\u00a0the time to grow their own gardens. They grow food for their livestock, nation and world, but ironically would starve if it weren\u2019t for the nearby Price Chopper, Hannaford, Aldi or WalMart.<\/p>\n

Driving through the Brookfield Hills, it\u2019s hard to imagine that this hard scrabble land, best known for its many \u201crocks of ages\u201d was at one time a proverbial garden of Eden. It wasn\u2019t easy, of course, especially with the highly unpredictable weather. A successful Boston area pumpkin grower tried his luck in the Brookfield hills. No luck. After five years of disheartening and demoralizing failures he went to selling a more reliable crop\u2014firewood.<\/p>\n

Successful gardening has always taken considerable time, plenty of physical effort and many months of daily toil. Failing in just one of the above usually produced a bountiful weed crop in September.<\/p>\n

Before World War II, the local Fair was a time-honored place to claim garden growers\u2019 bragging rights. Garden growers vied with each other to grow the biggest and tastiest produce that was judged at these fairs. The competitive jui ces were at the highest around Labor Day. (On Labor Day, 1943, the Brookfield Home of the Madison County Fair saw an estimated 25,000 people.)<\/p>\n

Amazingly, the Brookfield soil, conservatively containing mostly rock, clay and shale, often produced many blue ribbons. A blue ribbon gave you undisputed bragging rights for at least a year in the local post office, general store, tavern and community newspaper. It was all in good humor but with an undercurrent of serious competition among the \u201c Townies\u201d and local \u201cHay Seeds.\u201d<\/p>\n

This simple country man had an unofficial bragging right some years ago, with a huge parsnip with a 19-inch circumference at its top and a 19-inch length. With a smile, he likes to tell people he had to put a rope around it to pull it out of the ground.<\/p>\n

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this land grew, with a lot of hard work, a lot of amazing crops. In 1909, Fred Gustin raised on his 17\u2019x 40\u2019 plot 21 bushels of carrots, one weighing 4 pounds.\u00a0Al Cook, the same year, raised a turnip over 12\u201d in diameter, which weighed 20 pounds. In 1910 Ray Clark grew a cabbage 40\u201d around that tipped the scale at 18 lbs. Jared York grew a 4 \u00bd lb. potato (in recent times a farmer in Milo, Maine, dug up a potato containing a gold watch. (And who says you can\u2019t make money farming?)<\/p>\n

Walton Denison had a single potato hill with 29 potatoes. Will Chesebro husked 104 bushels of corn on 5\/6 of an acre. (One unverified story tells of a local farmer with a field of corn that grew so rapidly one warm evening that it pulled itself up by the roots and the whole field committed suicide, to the farmer\u2019s great loss.)<\/p>\n

In 1915 Department J \u201cFarm Produce\u201d contained a staggering 193 different classes. It was considered the largest and best ever seen at the fair. In 1893\u2014the same year as the Chicago World Fair, a local newspaper observed \u201cthe exhibit of agricultural products was immense, and a Brookfield section inserted in the Agricultural Building at Chicago would not suffer by comparison.<\/p>\n

While rural America may never return to the glory days of necessary gardening, we can only hope that some people will continue to grow their own food and buy locally. New seed catalogs will be out around the first of the year. Growing food will help you in many valuable ways as well as Mother Earth.<\/p>\n

Hobie Morris is a Brookfield resident and simple country man.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Big potatoes and other garden oddities By Hobie Morris \u201d A sluggard does not plow in season, so at harvest time he looks but finds nothing.\u201d Prov. 20:4 Englishman Peter Glazebrook is a celebrated gardener\u2014in a very big way! in 2011 he grew an onion weighing almost 18 lbs. with a circumference of 30 inches. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":85002,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23679,23677,23808,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-85001","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-agfarming","category-columns","category-opinion","category-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85001","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=85001"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85001\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/85002"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=85001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=85001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=85001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}