
          Tending Our Gardens
          By Hatley, TomTom Hatley
          Vol. 6, No. 5, 1984, pp. 18-24
          
          I.
          My grandparents grew two kinds of sweet potatoes in
back of their farmhouse in central North Carolina. The main staple was
the orange-skinned type, so much like the color of the soil that you
had to look carefully not to miss them in the field after plowing them
out for harvest. These were the potatoes that the neighbors would
store over the winter in small mounds built on the edge of their
garden out of insulating layers of leaves and clay. This backyard
technology dated from the days when the potato was a folk remedy for
hunger, with the prescription, "take an old cold tater and wait."
Today the Big Star advertises them every day of the year. The other
potato variety was narrower and whiter, more root-like than the
orange-skin. This root was tended and planted for the sole purpose of
making smooth and reliable potato pies. The orange-skinned was
properly a sweet potato, with its roots in the indigenous agriculture
of South America; the second variety was a yam, first domesticated a
world apart in West Africa or Asia. Both had come to North America a
bit earlier than the time that my Pennsylvania Dutch forbearers,
pushed out of the Rhineland valleys, were moving onto the promising
new ground of Pennsylvania and later North Carolina.
          Large scale agribusiness today offers a simpler vision of
agriculture in the South. The fields that grow soybeans, cotton and
corn are as wide as the genetic base of commercial crop seedstocks is
narrow. Yet back of many farmhouses 

and even alongside suburban ranch
houses are gardens that still buck the trend toward uniformity. These
gardens often exhibit diverse horticultural and ethnic traditions in
Southern gardening. One of the most persistent as well as the most
hidden of these historical connections has to do with the
Afro-Americans and their gardens in the colonial Caribbean and
Southeast.
          The obscurity of this tradition which is renewed with every spring
planting of okra, milo, eggplant, peanuts or yams is partly due to the
fact that its earliest practitioners were Caribbean black slaves and
native Americans of the same region. The colonial Caribbean was a
cultural middleground, and Afro-Americans were among the importers,
brokers, and popularizers of new crops from their homelands. Yams and
okra as well as other plants with strange-sounding names--tanniers,
long collards, benne--all grew on small "provision gardens" which were
alternately ignored and encouraged by slave owners. Some plants were
carried northward into the fields of the Cherokees and other native
American groups as early as the seventeenth century, and were later
adopted into the kitchen gardens of German immigrants who had strayed
into the South. The openness of colonial farmers to all new crops
probably made some of the strange "provision garden" plants seem less
unusual than they appear to be today, when matched against the
cool-weather- and basic-soil-loving favorites of organic gardening
manuals such as Crockett's Victory Garden.
          However, these migrants were also able to move north and become
assimilated into the diet and gardens of the English and German
settlers of the Southern backcountry because of an ecological
compatibility between Africa and the warmer and wetter parts of the
American South. The native ground of yams, okra, and the like, is the
old and acid-weathered clay of the hotter latitudes. The red clays
breaking the surface and raising clouds of dust in schoolyard playing
fields are close kin, in soil family relations, to those soils of West
Africa and South America. The same closeness extends to plants, and
every summer these tropical crops, whether African or new-world
analogues of African plants, break through the soil in the American
South, retelling in many small harvests the achievements of the
AfroAmerican style of gardening.
          When the African plants first appeared in the new world, their
importers were Afro-American slaves, interested in the reform of
plantation agriculture on their own terms. When tall grass with tight
clusters of glossy black seeds called "guinea corn" first came to the
Caribbean, in the eighteenth century, it quickly became a preferred
grain raised in African new world gardens. The species was brought to
American ground by African hands, as an early botanist of the region
notes: "[the plant] is rarely seen but in the plantations of Negroes
who bought it from Guinea, their native country, and are therefore
fond of having it." When, as was more often the case, African plant
stocks could not be transported, new world plants cultivated by native
Caribbean peoples were at hand. Where enough latitude was allowed
them, free blacks and slaves traded back and forth with Amerindians,
and experimented with new-world substitutes for the crops left
behind. This was only a temporary transaction, however, as even
earlier than the advent of the slave trade, native Americans of this
region had been disappearing, pushed off their islands forever by
enslavement, disease, and psychological shock and depression. African
blacks, first transported as replacements, laborers substituted for
this dying people, thus became the ironic sharers in a new world
planting tradition.
          More often, blacks in the Caribbean or the American Southeast were
left on their own in finding their way with the plants and animals
upon which they were partly forced to rely. Sometimes a kind of
botanical dead reckoning guided them, with identifications made on the
basis of similarities of leaf shape and flower color. The names of
some plants growing in the Southeast today are reminders of their

accomplishment. The small tree called the paw paw (best known in the
refrain, "What are you doing? Picking up paw paws") gained its name in
this fashion. In Amerindian language of the Caribbean, paw-paw
specified the papaya, a native tree of the region. The same name was
stencilled onto another tree of a different region, apparently because
of basic botanical logic: the yellow oval of the ripe papaya fruit
corresponded in color and shape with the fall leaves of the paw paw. A
colonial botanist recorded the salient facts about the plant in an
aside: "All parts of the tree have a rank if not fetid smell; nor is
the fruit relished but by a very few, except negroes." This interest
was more than a matter of taste, since the African kin of the paw-paw
had important medical uses in the homeland of blacks transported to
the new world.
          Identifications were not always on first sight, and an older
African botanical vocabulary often enabled Africans to read their new
world better and thus to estimate the help it would give them in their
radically changed lives. Part of this ability to translate between
these two worlds, as in the case of soils, stems from the underlying
environmental kinship of the Caribbean and the Southeastern Coastal
Plain and Piedmont. There are ancestral ties between tropical and
subtropical plants which, though distributed from continent to
continent, are all similar in appearance. The paw paw patches growing
along the rich bottomland of muddy Piedmont creeks are members of the
custard apple family which has outliers across the tropics, in Asia as
well as in Africa.
          Another set of plants provides a silent commentary on this
exchange. "Elephant ears" are familiar today as plants lined up along
the edge of main street porches along with pots of ferns, their
utility as a food crop long forgotten. The term "elephant ears"
encompasses, however, several distinct plants, all with starchy,
edible roots and all with an origin in tropical America, Africa, or
Asia. One of these plants is taro, a crop which came out of southeast
Asia, and then made its way under the African alias 'dasheen.' Once
across the Atlantic, dasheen was probably grown interchangeably with
South American root crops such as manioc or cassava, and tanniers. In
fact, all of these plants were aroids, resembling each other in flower
shape and growth form, even though originating in widely separate but
often tropical regions.
          The white yam grown in my grandparents' garden, much like the
dasheen, arrived by an earlier and equally confused route from Asia to
Africa and, eventually, to America. By the time that this yam variety
had been successfully naturalized in Africa and had taken its place as
a staple of the peoples who lived in the region bordering the Gulf of
Guinea in West Africa, the slave trade was already concentrating in
the same area. In the drier savannah lands bordering the north of this
region, grains like the millets--guinea corn--mentioned above already
had a long history by this time. But in the southern yam zone root
crops propagated by rooting cuttings instead of by planting seeds were
of preeminent importance. Among the Yoruba, and Fon, "new yam"
festivals were key ritual events, and this celebration even marked the
beginnning of the calendar year for the Ibo. The spiritual centrality
and meaning of the yam and its relatives in Africa must have been
remembered by men and women after their enslavement in the new
world. In this way, the millets and yams that were carried to the new
world and traded within it by Africans were more than a dietary
supplement. These crops allowed AfroAmericans to reject their temporal
white master's bread, to grow their own food, in what must have seemed
symbolic "victory gardens."
          II
          Not only the plants that grew there, but also the manner of tending
the new-world AfroAmerican garden set it apart. To the eye of the
former master, the garden of "Daddy Jupiter," his former slave on the
nineteenth-century Sea Island coast of Georgia, looked unruly and
unfamiliar. Daddy Jupiter cultivated "...on his own accord a small
patch where arrowroot, long collards, sugar cane, tanniers,
groundnuts, beene, gourds, and watermelons grew in comingled
luxuriance." This 'comingled' style had distinct antecedents in West
African gardens, and must have made the 'middle passage' as a mental
image of how a garden should look and function, no matter where it was
rooted. Plots resembling Daddy Jupiter's nineteenth-century garden,
still grow in the American Southeast (although the tradition' is
fading) and flourish farther south, particularly in the Caribbean.

          Anthropologists working on intensive gardening practices today have
abstracted the technical reasons for the common success and widespread
occurrence of this style of cultivation. The "comingled luxuriance" of
Daddy Jupiter's garden partly owed its productivity to the way in
which his selection of crops mimicked both the structure of a natural
plant community and its characteristic closely-packed assortment of
plant species. Given the mixture of plants in his garden, Daddy
Jupiter may have employed a two- or three-tier layering of the plants,
as is often practiced today in the Caribbean, where tall crops such as
corn, cassava, or sugar cane are commonly grown together with
ground-hugging yams. In this way a local, 'garden climate' can be
fostered to reduce insect populations and shade out weeds. Soil
nutrients and water also are conserved and sometimes increased
relative to row crop gardening. The intensive garden style thus blends
agricultural and ecological logic to achieve its high yield. And the
logic of this pattern of food growing is not confined to the garden
plot, but will also work on a larger scale. Whether in gardens or in
farm fields, tightening the land's hold on potassium, phosphorus, or
nitrogen provides a kind of inexpensive crop insurance for succeeding
harvests.
          Very often American scientists have probed nutrient and other
efficiencies of small-scale agriculture in order to seek food-growing
alternatives for supporting the increasing populations of the
"developing world." Ironically, the impetus for their work has often
been the failure of the agricultural technology supplied by the
"developed world" to provide nations with a dependable food
sufficiency. Yet Americans are slow to apply this lesson at home or to
direct the same kind of attention to our self-development that we are
willing to offer abroad to a "developing world" that always seems
outside our borders. An effective effort at agricultural change at
home will, however, require remembering the lessons and traditions of
the past and applying them to our future.
          Just to the south, in the Caribbean, a historical crisis in
agriculture occurred many years ago which prefigures some of the
change Southern agriculture has faced and may face again. The sugar
plantations in the Caribbean pioneered an industrial style of farm
management that was modernized and adapted to the north, in our own
region. Like many modern farming operations today, the plantation was
from the beginning in chronically poor ecological health. Erosion,
insect and plant diseases, and soil infertility, once they had taken
hold, worked together to cause a constant drain against the land. In
later years the economic vigor of these operations lagged as well, in
spite of the involuntary subsidy drawn from the labor and farming
skills of black slaves.
          When the system faltered for the final time, blacks were left to
apply their horticultural skills to their own ground, and the
intensively cultivated garden plots that resulted became a lasting and
reliable survival tool amid the poverty of postcolonial times.
          The end of the plantation system in the American South was not
succeeded by the integrated world of small farmers that some reformers
had envisioned or, as happened in the Caribbean, by a peasant society
granted autonomy by poverty, isolation, and resistance. Instead, the
scale and manner of cultivation that marked pre-war times in the South
carried over into the postwar period, bringing with it many of the
problems that still shadow Southern agriculture today.
          The major theme of the region's agriculture continued to be a
simple one of dependence on a handful of major cash crops. The amount
of land turned over, fresh and damp, for planting each spring in the
South, thus depended and has continued to depend on off-farm factors
such as export demand end shifting government policies. Over the past
150 years, corn, then cotton, and most recently, soybeans, have played
leapfrog for first place in the market. A kind of boom-and-bust cycle
has resulted and has left its mark on the Southern countryside. In the
down times of the thirties, when small farmers facing price declines,
pest losses, and the cost of mechanization, walked away from their
land, millions of acres in the South, abandoned and reclaimed by old
field-grown pines, slowly pinched down the horizon with green. The
remarkable scale of abandonment is reflected by the ninety percent
share held by harvested "old field" pine in the Southern softwood
market today.
          During the boom times that followed World War 11, the cycle
reversed itself temporarily, and in order to accommodate a ten-fold
increase in Southern soybean acreage by the mid-seventies, new fields
were opened in the former 

prairies on the region's western edge. In
other areas, such as the Piedmont, the fast growth of soybeans allowed
double cropping, in effect double timing the land to produce two crops
per year. Yet there is trouble on the horizon. Already the world
markets fueling demand for soybeans are spurring competition for
exports. Argentina is planting nearly six million acres of former
pampa rangeland in soybeans, today, and is rapidly increasing the
acreage devoted to this crop. Other potential commodity competitors,
such as Brazilian-produced palm oil, have appeared on the horizon as
an effective substitute for soybean oil as well, and the future for
the latest Southern staple crop is less than bright.
          Whether in Argentina or Missouri, the land itself always pays part
of the cost of one- or two-crop dependency in agriculture. The most
important damage comes from simple physical phenomena such as
erosion. Today forty percent of Southern cropland is undergoing a rate
of erosion that federal agencies concerned with the problem consider
excessive. The process of erosion is elemental: rainfall on bare,
plowed ground, as well as the steady scraping of the wind, removes the
best part of the soil, the top soil that is alive with the soil
organisms which are the essential agents of soil fertility. In older
agricultural areas of the South, generations of erosion have clotted
rivers and built deltas out of the subtracted fertility of farmers'
fields. In these sections successive new technologies--the iron and
then the steel plow, chemical fertilizers, and herbicides--have masked
the loss of soil fertility by raising average yields through the
region. Yet lately, small signs are appearing that indicate a limit to
the ability of new technologies to make up a cumulative deficit in the
land. An indication of things to come may lie in the recently reported
decline of Southern soybean yields--sometimes as much as ten bushels
per acre--over the past few years. This sudden, small reversal in the
upward trend of harvest yields can be explained in more than one
way. Weed and nematode problems dampen harvest yields by competing
with the growth of soybeans. And in areas of marginal fertility,
erosion may be exerting a downward pull on production that will become
stronger as soil depth and structure is further damaged. Yet these
explanations could be read alternately as symptoms of the same
underlying problem, of a Southern agriculture showing signs of nearing
the limits of its productivity.
          The newest strategy in Southern farming, called no-till or
conservation tillage, is working only to hold onto the yield advances
in Southern agriculture, instead of dramatically forcing up the yield
of crops. Under "no till" a crop is planted in a field in which winter
wheat or another crop has just been harvested, and in which weed
problems (and a share of erosion damage) have been controlled by
herbicides. The adoption of "no till" has been closely linked to the
increase in Southern soybean acreage, in part because the method
reduces the cost of double cropping, or taking two crops per year off
the same piece of land. As we have seen, soybeans are naturally
adapted by their fast growth and maturation to this agricultural
strategy.
          Although "no till" and soybeans (and corn) are natural partners,
the "no till" system has also been aggressively marketed from two very
different quarters. On the one hand, chemical companies have been in
the fore. The "Southeastern No-Tillage Conferences" have been partly
funded by chemical companies such as Chevron, which holds the US
license to manufacture paraquat, a herbicide applied on approximately
five million Southern acres this year. (Chevron has also been in the
news recently to insulate itself from personal injury lawsuits
stemming from the accidents with its very toxic product.) The second,
and more objective voice proposing the expanded use of this new method
has come from agronomists and soil scientists, who because of their
intense concern about soil erosion put the stress on the term
"conservation tillage" rather than "no till."
          In the final analysis, however, "no till" and the pattern of
conventional tillage practiced over the past two decades in the South
are surprisingly similar: both make use of nearly equivalent amounts
of chemical herbicides and fertilizers to sustain high yields, and
both are adapted closely to an export-based staple crop style of
farming to which small and large producers are increasingly tied.

          The pattern of consolidation and increase in the scale of
agriculture today is accompanied by a technology powerful enough to
temporarily screen out small but real difficulties that may make the
future of agriculture in the South more uncertain than it promises to
be today. In Southern agriculture, like Southern forestry, uncertainty
will be compounded by a lack of fundamental knowledge about the land
and the impact of its cultivation. Some problems are as simple as
teaching farmers to prevent spills, runoff from fields and
misapplications of agricultural chemicals which can trigger kills of
aquatic life in farm ponds and streams. Others promise to be more
complex, as in the rapid establishment of weed strains genetically
resistant to the chemicals designed to control them (as has happened
in Virginia recently, with a paraquat-resistant strain of pigweed). Of
course, fine tuning crop and herbicide rotations, responses to weed
outbreaks and soil conservation in a well-managed farm is not
impossible. But new and more powerful agricultural technologies as
well as market demands for farm products will mean that good
management will become increasingly difficult, with shorter response
times and greater possibility of damage. Both new technologies and new
farm programs are tools that foster a kind of optimism that problems
can be calculated and managed away. Yet if the agricultural past and
present of the South are any guide, the future will be accompanied by
a high level of economic and environmental uncertainty.
          One trend that adds appreciably to this trend toward instability is
the increasing scale and corporate sponsorship of Southern
farming. The capitalization of Southern agriculture by banks,
insurance companies, and individual investors increases the problem of
oversight. This is especially true in light of the willingness of
corporations, buoyed by a managerial optimism distant from the
traditions of farms and a set of government subsidies, to expand into
lands formerly regarded as marginal. The superfarms purchased by
Prudential Insurance Company subsidiaries in the sandhills of Nebraska
and the peatlands of the North Carolina coast are one of many good
examples. I he North Carolina operation, for instance, is centered on
the production of staples such as corn and soybeans which are made
profitable because of government price supports. This "subsidised"
profitability then often depends on a margin of yield that can be
achieved by large-scale farmers only through using new mechanical and
chemical farming methods such as "no till" cultivation. In this way
much of the intensification that is pushing the capacity of the
Southern soil to a kind of natural limit may, in fact, be a surplus
product.
          Southern agriculture today is a game of limits, of shrinking
margins of investment and crop yield, of the health of the land and
with it the long-term security of food production. The problem down
the line is more than one of credit and chemicals. Food crops must be
grown in areas like the South, where food can be grown for regions
where it cannot, and agricultural chemicals are one of many valuable
instruments of cultivation. The problem is therefore one of social
goals, of, in Wendell Berry's phrase, a "culture and agriculture"
challenged to break out of a dependent past in order to create a
farming economy that can be stable over generations rather than riding
the old roller coaster of uncertainty and jeopardy.
          III
          Among the lessons that the Southern past offers is that there is
time enough for change. The Southern land, which has shown resilience
in the face of centuries of damage, allows this time, and remembering
the diverse cultural terrain of the South can open up new and needed
possibilities for the future. European, Amerindian, and African
approaches to growing food in gardens and fields are among the
Southern traditions of ethnic cultivation that can teach their own
lessons. The Afro-American way of gardening in particular seems to
have a special message concerning the value of caution in
agriculture.
          In contrast to Southern agriculture today, the Afro-American logic
of cultivation has been deeply conservative. In the coastal South and
Caribbean, long after the business of the plantation was defunct,
blacks tilled their gardens and survived. And in this sense the
Afro-American gardening style deserves to be called a tradition,
since, like all 

traditions, it has an active meaning and application
for the present.
          The Afro-American cultivation tradition offers a way toward
changing Southern agriculture in a practical as well as a
philosophical sense. Its ecological logic, tested and sound, can be
applied to planting crops in fields as well as gardens. Stressing
diversity and sustainablility, both key aspects of the tradition, may
open up some acreage now growing soybeans at a loss to crop mixtures
designed to allow both farmers and fields to benefit. And though not
incompatible with chemicals, machines, and technology, its
conservative nature can discipline change in farming in order to avoid
stumbling into costly agricultural blind alleys.
          Yet the overriding importance of this among other farming
traditions in the South is that it was largely built out of a
combination of desperately held tradition and improvisation as
AfroAmerican slaves faced a new world forced upon them. Thus, it can
provide a precedent to guide the personal experiments that many
farmers, faced with difficulties, are already making on their own in
intercropping crop varieties in a single field, in switching away from
dead-end crops such as tobacco, in using new biological techniques to
control harmful insects, or in adopting more efficient cultivation and
irrigation techniques. Advocates of small farm diversification such as
Booker T. Whatley in his Small Farm Technical Newsletter, build on the
same tradition in arguing that farms can be managed as profitable
market gardens, rather than simply as staple crop productions
sites. Tending to the full agricultural past of the region will
increase the ability of Southern agriculture to face the coming of a
new and restrictive world, something like that encountered by Africans
in the Americas. This world will be created partly out of three
hundred years of damage to the land, and partly by the jostlings of
the world markets for food and wood fiber in which the region
continues to play a dependent role. Yet a groundwork for meeting this
challenging new world flexibly and positively is already in
place. Like the Afro-Americans on Jamaica who "took care to preserve
and propagate such vegetables as grew in their own country, to use
them as they saw occasion," we should' not forget to tend our own past
in looking toward our region's agricultural future.
          
            Tom Hatley lives in Durham, North Carolina. His article
"Forestry and Equity" appeared in Southern Changes for
July/August, 1983.
          
        