Back when his neighbor Cotton was still alive, my dad would call out to him on the morning of a fire. “Come on over,” he’d wave his arm. And Cotton would bring over a few limbs he’d been saving or anything wooden he wanted to get rid of, set up…
Over a period of weeks, sometimes months, my dad would collect bits of debris to burn. He would back up to his growing stack of brush at the edge of the dormant garden ...…
Mulch seemed to be the magic element in all the books about gardening. If you just had enough mulch, the weeds couldn’t grow, the soil would remain soft and moist, and the plants would be so superbly healthy that bugs would just pass them by. The only threat would be…
It seemed only proper that we should grow as many things as possible. Cold winter days trapped us in the house yielding the perfect opportunity to give deep study to the seed catalogs.…
We were lucky to have a lower field of fine sandy loam, hardly a rock to be found. I’ve heard an old yarn about settlers who gave up ridding their Ozark fields of rocks and just pried them apart with an iron pole and used a rifle to fire seed…
A reformulated plan quickly emerged. The backhoe dug the hole large enough to hold a concrete tank, which was nestled on and surrounded by a two foot margin of washed gravel. With the feed line in place to the pump in its new house and the lid on the tank,…
It was another 10 years before Beaver Lake water made its way down the road, and then anyone who wanted it could get a tap if they could pay the money. …
