Sage (front) and Jennifer Billig in one of their hoop houses. Fayetteville, Arkansas

I’ve been spending some time lately visiting with gardeners, asking about not only what they grow but how and why they grow. This is part of a larger research project with Utah folklorist Nelda Ault. We will be presenting our research at the annual meeting of the American Folklore Society in October.

View of Sage's garden (from her son's tree fort) looking toward Jennifer's backyard.

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to visit with sisters Jennifer and Sage Billig.  

They live next door to one another and share garden spaces in the nutrient rich bottom land of south Fayetteville. Jennifer and Sage grew up in Madison County, Arkansas and learned to garden by watching their parents who were part of the back to the land movement. Their parents in turn learned a great deal from the long-time residents of the Ozarks.

Between their two backyards Jennifer and Sage raise enough food for both of their families to eat locally year-round. They can, dry, and freeze foods, sell to the farmer’s market on occasion, and also sell herbs to a few local resteraunts. They recently started a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) subscription, suppling food to a few local families. This winter they will be starting their first winter CSA, providing local greens and other veggies grown in their unheated hoop houses.

(If you want to learn more about CSAs and how they work there is a lot of information out there. Here is just one place to start).

More to come on Jennifer and Sage’s garden, but until then here are a few photos. Isn’t it a magical place?

Chickens in the Billig Garden. Fayetteville, Arkansas

Hoop house for growing greens in the winter.

Close up of garden.

Green beans inside a hoop house covered in vines.

Do you know any gardeners I should visit with? Email me at meredithmartin_moats at yahoo or leave a message here.

Aunt Francis's Garden. Yell County, Arkansas.

It’s gardening season here in Arkansas, and both my daily life and research seem to be circling things in bloom. The tomatoes are ripe; the pole beans are taller than me, and the peppers are plentiful. I love coming home from running errands to find squash, zucchini, snow and purple hull peas on my front porch left by anonymous kind friends who plant for a purposeful surplus. I enjoy the few calm moments I  spend in my own garden picking herbs or engaging in that necessary yet futile feeling task of weeding. And then there are the flowers. The magical, beautiful flowers. But I’ll get to them in a minute.

Here are just a few ramblings and ruminations on fieldwork, garden work, grief work, and dreams for the garden I plan to someday create.

Food

Raised beds of beans. Photo by Bryan Moats.

Within the vast field of cultural studies garden topics are becoming increasingly popular. Wholistic food education in particular is gaining national attention, and famous folks like Jamie Oliver, for example, are working hard to get kids interested in the food they eat. School garden projects are popping up everywhere, and it’s all just so inspiring. Recently fellow Arkansas folklorist Rachel Reynolds-Luster worked with teachers, students, and community members to create a Edible Schoolyard-inspired school garden in her home in Couch, Missouri. From what I hear, the upcoming issue of CARTS will feature stories about school and community gardens.   I can’t even begin to touch on the depth of all these wonderful goings on that fall under the community gardening and food topic. But I have inculded a a few links at the bottom of this page if you want to learn more. If you have a suggestion for a link I have not included please let me know.

Flowers

California Giant zineas next to the Greasy Grits beans.

I love flower gardening.  So did my mother. When she came to visit us in Kentucky in 2007 we took her to a local butterfly habitat and she was amazed and full of laughter, watching all those butterflies as they landed on our clothing. One of my future goals is to create a memorial butterfly/bee garden in honor of my mother and many others who have lost their lives to cancer in the Yell County area (and that’s a lot of people, folks). In my dream the garden will be on site at the McElroy House, in the same spot my grandfather once kept his flower garden. In fact, discovering some of his iris in the tangled weeds near his house first led me to think about the McElroy House as a concept.  This memorial garden will be right beside the center’s veggie garden, for which I also have big plans (If you want to know more about the goals for the McElroy House: Center for Regional Folklore and Oral History go here).

When I first started thinking about the butterfly and bee garden I spent some time reading articles and how-to books on the subject. The pictures were beautiful, and the articles somewhat helpful, but what has really helps me conceptualize future plans for the garden is experimenting with my own.  Everything I do outside these days seems to be garden practice. I’ve learned to pay attention to what leaf and flowers shapes work well together,  which plants seem to encourage one anther’s growth and which ones seem to stall when placed too close. I observe how the colors complement each other or drown each other out. Mistakes make the best teachers.  I’ve recently learned that bachelor’s button simply will not transplant, daisies have to be routinely deadheaded or cut to retain their beauty, and – just as the little tag said – blanket flowers really can’t take wet soil. Having learned these lessons from observation I won’t soon forget them. I also try not to over-think things and strike a balance between informed decisions and random accidents. I believe a good flower garden is a bit reckless looking.

I’m rather new to flower gardening, and I have so many lessons yet to learn. This experimental garden I am creating in the front yard is only my second. The first real flower garden was the small flower-lined walk we had in Bowling Green, KY. It started out as a kind of afterthought, but I soon became obsessed with waiting for things to bloom. I can remember walking our walkway in the mornings, barefoot, coffee in hand, to examine each plant’s daily changes.

Bryan in our first flower garden in Kentucky.

I started the garden for two reasons. When we came back to Arkansas we moved across the street from my parents. My mother was dying of cancer, and I knew she  was going to be spending a lot of time on the couch. She loved flower gardens, had a passion for the color red, and admired hummingbirds and butterflies. When she looked out her living room window every morning I wanted her to see nothing but color, motion, and life.

Arkansas Garden in June of 2010.

The second reason was purely selfish. I needed the life it would bring. Caregiving is terribly difficult.  Helping someone face their final days leaves the caregiver craving any semblance of growth and renewal. Moments when my mother was resting, and I felt overcome by the weight of knowing I was losing her – and there was nothing I or anyone else could do to keep her here – I would cross the street to my front yard and just start digging.

Two years later I am still digging, and I’ve managed to dig up a rather large portion of the front yard. My end goal (with this house or wherever we wind up making our home) is to leave nothing but a few walking patches through the grass. Just enough to get the reel mower through. The rest of the yard will be covered in wild, crazy, colorful flowers. I imagine myself walking through my flower-filled yard remembering my mother and calling out the different flower names to my playful boys. In talking to others who have lost loved ones, I have discovered that the urge to plant a garden during illness or after loss is quite common. Every time I see a flower garden I wonder which of their plants have ties to people they have lost. Maybe that makes me morbid, I think more likely it’s just part of the mental landscape of anyone whose lost someone very close to them.

Close up of garden.

A few days before my mother died she asked me to push her wheelchair to the front door so she could look at the flowers. It was October, but the zinnias were still fuschia and pink, tall and bright; the orange, red-trimmed marigolds had grown round and heavy with blooms, and the deep purple morning glories wound around the bamboo poles and front porch columns, reaching all the way to the roof. I pushed her to door and she stared out through the glass for a few moments, said something about the flowers looking pretty, and then asked me to help her lay down again. It turned out to be the last time she got out of bed. Almost two years after her death I still think of that moment almost daily.

After she died I found out that gardening was actually nothing new to me as I had originally supposed. According to my mother’s detailed daily planners, which I began reading after her death, she gardened often when she was pregnant with me. Her jotted down notes reveal which flowers were planted on which days. A few marigolds put in the ground on Monday, a hibiscus on Tuesday, cannas on Wednesday. Coming across these notes brought back forgotten memories of helping her tend to the flowers, deadheading the petunias and marigolds she always kept on the front porch. In fact, her hydrangeas, hibiscus, and liliacs still bloom each year, reminding me that some things we put in the ground will outlive us by decades.

So until I can create the McElroy House garden I work in my own. I watch which flowers bring in the bees, the butterflies, the hummingbirds. I try different varieties; I save seeds; I talk to farmers and gardeners; I try different plants in different places and combinations. And as a folklorist, I pay attention to how plants have a way of connecting us to other people.

Research: The Garden and the Gardener

Surprise squash in the compost pile.

Recently myself and Utah folklorist-extraordinaire, Nelda Ault, began working on some garden research, looking at how home gardens differ between central and northwest Arkansas and her native Utah. Both of us are interested in the realm of folklore and education, and one of our goals with this fieldwork is to look at the garden through the eyes of its caretaker. How did the garden come to be? How did the gardener learn to garden? Why do they keep doing it year after year? These are the kind of questions we’ll be asking.

We’re both very interested in how regional traditions can help connect youth with older members of their communities and vice versa. Learning more about both the passion and practicality that gardeners bring to their creations hold such promise for community youth education projects. We will be presenting our research at the 2010 American Folklore Society Conference held in Nashville, Tennesse.

People

Site of McElroy home place. Cotton Town, Yell County, Arkansas

As a child my mother often took me to the sight of her father’s old home place, pointing out the tree near where her grandparents— Rostus and Ivy McElory— built their home in what used to be the  Cardon Bottoms community. Last year when visiting the site with my cousins I dug up some wild yarrow and brought it back home to my garden.  It took root and began blooming this year. I often wonder if that same yarrow was growing when my grandfather was young.

I placed the yarrow right next to the lilies I had recently bought from a woman in Dardanelle who was having a plant sale to scale back her large garden. Her husband was ill, and she was his primary caretaker. We talked about flowers and care giving as I made my purchases, which also included orange dayliless that remind me of my good friend Tonya Taylor. The lilies are next to the marigolds I’ve been growing from saved seeds my mother gave me the year I moved back to Arkansas.

A garden is naturally filled with the flowers of interesting people, and I’ve worked hard to make it so. After my mother died and I tried to figure out what to do with my hands now that my caregiving duties were over, I emailed friends requesting they tell me their favorite flowers so I could purposefully plant them along side the ones I stumble onto. There are Texas bluebells from Mo, Coral Bells for Kristen, Tulips for Wendy, roses for Rebekah, and the daylillies for Tonya, as I mentioned above.  There is a Gardenia Heather helped me plant; a Peony from Marcia, and the tulips from Kristin, all presents I received for my birthday, an event Rachel helped to make happen . Many of the flowers come from plants  people dug up from their own yards, leaving them on my front porch for me to find and transplant. I have zinnia seeds my mother gave me the first year I moved back; mums from the woman who used to live in my grandparents house, plants given to us for my mother’s funeral. There are dogwood trees on the garden’s outskirts sent from fellow folklore graduate students in honor of my mother.

Dogwood tree sent in honor of my mother

I’ll keep going. There is a thrift plant from my cousin and sorrel  from my grandparents home. There are hollyhocks from Nelda. There is a butterfly bush, which we purchased per the suggestion of the honey vendor at the Pope County Farmers Market when we asked him what we could do to help combat the decreasing bee population.  And I have hundreds of daisies, Mom’s favorite flower, all planted from seed after she died.

Gardening is such an exercise in storytelling.  It’s about listening, observing, putting down (sometimes pulling up) roots. All those plants I water every morning  have a story and a larger community of people connected to them.  Sure, I’ve pushed my hand to make my garden especially story-populated, but talk to pretty much any flower gardener, and they’ll have similar tales of their plants origins .  In a sense the plants are tradition bearers in their own right. They tell their own story and help to tell ours as well.

Daisies for Mom

The analogies are endless and spill over one another. It would be easy to perhaps over analyze how the garden and folklore research are alike. But I am reminded of what poet besmilr brigham’s daughter, Heloise Wilson, told me once during an interview about her mother’s work. She recalled how she and her and mother and father once spent an afternoon discussing John Galsworthy’s story “Justice.” Her memories of that discussion have stuck with me and come to mind today:

And with anything, [we discussed] how did the writer give a certain sense of the story      to the reader? What did they do to achieve that? trying to take things apart and        analyze them and not kill it.  Be careful you don’t kill it in the process. Keep a little  distance there.

So I think it will suffice to say that what amazes me most about gardening is that in the peace and quiet of working the soil— whether I’m working to grow food or just create beauty—I am lost in thoughts about the human experience with all it’s struggles and grace.  When I first started gardening I set out to grow flowers. But I wound up listening to stories.

Started in 1983, this organization was one of the founders of RAFT (Renewing America’s Food Traditions ), and safegaurds seeds native to Native American communities in the southwest. What’s even more amazing is not only do they safegaurd the seeds, they also maintain what they refer to as a Cultural Memory Bank. Their website explains it this way:
“In the late 1990s, NS/S undertook to expand our seed bank efforts to include a cultural component, integrating cultural information – the agricultural practices, stories, songs, and recipes associated with specific crops in the seed bank – with our existing database of collection information. In effect, we would combine the geneticist’s concern for conserving unique traits of a crop with a folklorist’s concern for conserving oral history about the crop.”

Creating the Cultural Memory Bank was not a part of the original plan. According to their webpage, they actually set out to interview elders and share this information with those outside of the community. But in conducting the interviews with elders, they soon began to realize that this traditional knowledge was desperatly needed within the community as well. So they began documenting the stories of the elders in the community for the younger generations. One of their first projects was a student-centered CD-Rom focusing on Navajo agricultural traditions. Their work in documenting the community for the community is ongoing.

Additionally, anyone can order the seeds and try them out. In fact, if you plan on growing the seeds you can also become a part of the Gardener’s Network where you provide feedback and share your experiences about growing the seeds.
Gardener’s Network

A Model for Human Rights Education
In preparation for a grant writing project for Kentucky Remembers!, I have been spending a lot of time thinking about what makes education human-rights based. What is human rights education anyway? Human Rights education is not just about the subject matter. It’s also about the approach. In other words, it’s not just about the kind of knowledge that’s being shared but also how that knowledge is being shared. I am constantly on the lookout for education programs that connect human stories with our daily lives and help us connect our daily lives with others daily lives. Stories that teach us how to take care of our fellow humans, take care of the land, take care of ourselves.
What I like most about the mission of this project is its ability to be intrinsically open and forever ongoing. For example, the goal of keeping a cultural memory bank is not just about the past. It’s about the future. And why just save the seeds for the communities from which they came? Instead, they share these seeds with anyone who wants to grow them.

I think, ultimately, what human rights education is about is making connections between ourselves, our community, and world. But for human rights education to be sustainable it has to not just teach us what those connections are, but also provide insight and inspiration which can in turn lead us as humans to to be more diligent in understanding how these connections fit together and to begin to look for these connections on their own.

I think a big part of what human rights education is teaching and learning how to always be asking, ‘how do these things work together?’

What do you think?

I am learning more everyday about the importance of eating locally grown food, especially food grown from heirloom seeds (a catchall term for seeds that have not been genetically modified). A few recent conversations with a close friend who is involved with Slow Foods and the Fayetteville Farmers Market reminded me about how I have been wanting to post some information about a great place to get heirloom seeds in Arkansas.

Heirloom seeds produce food that tastes much better, has a wider variety, and a higher nutritional value that genetically modified seeds. But that’s not the only reason to invest in growing them and/or support farmers who sell them. Heirloom seeds and the farmers that grow them operate in direct opposition to major corporate seed/pesticide companies like Monsanto and Dow. Huge companies like Monsanto and their non-diversified seeds that produce sub-par vegetables have purposefully put generations of small, local farmers out of business both in the United States and around the world. They have polluted our food sources and water sources with chemical fertilizers and made it so that farmers have to produce food on a mass scale if they want to make a living at farming.

To make matters worse, these genetically modified seeds and their vegetable offspring have little power to withstand changes in climate, new strains of disease and other such instabilities.

In fact, if you begin looking deeper into the information about food shortages around the world, you will discover that one of the problems creating these shortages can be traced back to the lack of crop diversity and mass-scale farming created by major seed/chemical companies like Monsanto.

In short, I think heirloom seeds are (or at least potentially are) radical little specks of plant and animal resistance to a cooperate owned food system that pits urban dweller against rural farmer and creates environmentally stupid situations like shipping in tomatoes from Florida even though we can grow them just fine right here in Arkansas. I think also ties in with the injustices that happen every day at meat and poultry processing plants across our state.

I just recently found out about the Northcentral Arkansas Heirloom Seed Shop and Food Bank when trying to hunt down some heirloom seeds in Arkansas. What I find so potentially wonderful and amazing about this place is not do they sell heirloom seeds; they also operate a food bank to help bring a sustainable solution to food insecurity in Northwest Arkansas. It’s one of those ideas that is so creative and ingenious because it makes so much common sense.

This is a direct and regional solution to the low nutritional deficit, food insecurity, and instability caused by genetically modified crops, and this Seed shop and foodbank seem to be addressing that link in a practical, solutions-based manner.. I am curious about how things are working out for them and once I get a chance to learn more about the operation I will post some more information.

The website has information about the difference between heirloom and hybrid seeds, the importance of getting away from genetically modified food, and an online catalog from which to order seeds.

They also have a blog about the Foodbank. It has not been updated in a while, but it still has some interesting information.

I am in the midst of writing a post about what I have been learning about the importance of growing our own food and the heirloom seeds and who this all relates to folklore and a food culture of social action. But I wanted to make sure to get this information up now.

If you want to learn more about the fight against Monsanto in particular, go here: Millions Against Monsanto.

If you want to learn more about the importance of heirloom seeds, Barbara Kingsoliver’s book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life has some great information, especially chapters three and four.
The book also has a website
If you have any other reading suggestions, please let me know!

Also, I would love to hear if anyone has ever been out to the seed shop, knows anyone who saves/grows heirloom seeds, or any other related comments.