This has been a long, difficult growing season in Salvisa. Farm crops and the garden were parched. Groundhogs, with little else to graze, went whole-hog on the 27-acre organic corn crop, leased by our Mennonite neighbors. Corn on the cob was grab-and-go for these cunning rodents who ate al fresco and, for insult, left stripped cobs outside their burrow.
Portions of the Salvisa garden looked beyond needy this summer.
There was a remedy that didn’t ease the pain of last month’s water bill but reminded me how to even out ups and downs during a long dry spell or, for that matter, life in general.
Paul McKinney, 1940s, photo courtesy of Enka Voice.
I am sharing an essay called Singing through the Soil that I wrote in 2012 for the Human Flower Project about an extraordinary man who once lived near my former North Carolina farm and nursery, 20 miles south of Asheville.
Paul McKinney held hope when others, including me, became worn down by stress and anxiety.
During this year’s drought, I found comfort because of words once spoken to me by Paul, one of the smartest, most humble farmers I’ve known.
It wouldn’t matter the circumstance. I would ask Paul, for instance: “Is it ever going to rain again? He’d been through dry summers before. “Oh, yeah,” Paul would tell me. “It’s going to rain again someday.”
It rained again, as prophesized, but Hurricane Helene did it the hard way with 50 mph winds and downed trees. We got off easy. I doubt Paul could have foreseen the extraordinary natural disaster in my beloved western North Carolina.
As Alan Weakley put it:
I so love the Southern Appalachians and all its people and biodiversity, and this is such a sorrowful time. We have yet no full idea of the impact of Helene (the fog of war), but this is not a simple “rebuild and it’ll all be fine in a decade”. The human devastation is almost unbelievable. Biodiversity will be mostly fine, in this most functional and intact of all eastern US ecoregions — but there will be loss.
–Alan Weakley, Professor of Biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Director of the UNC Herbarium
In times of uncertainty Paul turned my world around. If he were here today, Paul McKinney would be pitching in to help his community in need.
This is my 2012 Human Flower Project tribute to a great man who orchestrated crops and equipment, and sang gospel music, too.
Up Avery’s Creek and around Mills River in the North Carolina mountains, between Asheville and Hendersonville, folks love Paul McKinney. He is a good man, a remarkable man. He and his wife, Mary, own McKinney’s Small Fruits and have been partners in love for fifty-nine years. Paul is old school though not old-fashioned, except for his customary overalls. He stands tall, over six feet, a wise, handsome man who shakes hands as firmly as he strung barbed wire.
Paul and his trusty 1949 Farmall 2009
I lived a half mile down the road from the McKinney’s between 1979 and 1995. Paul came down to introduce himself soon after I arrived. It was the neighborly thing to do. I had bought 37 acres and started Holbrook Farm, named after my mother’s side of the family. They had come from Trap Hill, a few ridgetops away in Wilkes County. My retail mail-order nursery published a spring and fall catalog and shipped rare and unusual perennials across the country for fifteen years. I moved to the farm from Louisville, Kentucky, after a year’s training at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, England. The summers were cooler and the winters milder in western North Carolina. I was a suburban boy turned nurseryman, full of myself, but not quite sure what I’d gotten myself into.
Paul drew no distinction between sinners and the saved. Mr. McKinney worshiped Jesus, loved his family, and made no pretense. He was fair to everyone, especially his newly arrived, suspect, bearded neighbor. I was young, had some backing – the support of a family and new wife – and fell into the might-be-saved-someday category. Paul and Mary McKinney had bought a small place up the road, two years before I arrived.
The McKinneys began their marriage on an 800-acre farm that Paul and his father sharecropped a few miles away on Avery’s Creek. After the Second World War father and son made a gentleman’s agreement with the landowner to turn forest into farm. Stump by stump they cleared land, nurtured their homestead and made a living for three daughters and a son. Over time, it was understood, the land would grow productive, farm profits would be shared, and the land would eventually become the McKinneys.’ Paul says the landowner promised, “If we make it, the land will be yours.” He died 30 years later. His wife and son followed in quick succession. All bets were off. A handshake so long ago meant nothing this far down the chain. This mountain farm, so much a part of the McKinneys’ lives, was sold from underneath them.
Paul, then 53, downsized. He bought six and one-half acres on Fanning Bridge Road. The McKinneys were not going to be caught short again. He put up a pole barn for farm machinery and a shed for a milk cow.
Paul tending a row of Baptisia alba for Jelitto Perennial Seeds.
He took “public work,” as he called it, for the first time. Paul accepted a job a mile away at the North Carolina Mountain Horticultural Crops Station doing farm and maintenance work. At the end of the day, he came home to work until the daylight dwindled.
He and Mary tended strawberries, blueberries,blackberries, and vegetables that they canned and froze for themselves. He had some fine equipment stuffed inside the open-sided pole barn, but nothing he loved more than the Farmall that had been his first tractor, bought in 1949.
Mary, Paul and Molly Bush 2006
Paul grew corn and cut hay on farmland he leased all around Henderson and Buncombe County, but he looked forward to coming home. He loved his new place. There was never any hint at bitterness over the loss of the bigger farm on Avery’s Creek. Paul was peculiarly magnanimous in his outlook: life’s ebb and flow even out over a long, blessed life. Pick-your-own fruit was grown to perfection by an artist in harmony with crops and equipment. Seeds of Stokes’ aster and baptisia were contract grown for Jelitto Perennial Seeds. I envied Paul’s practical skills. I had none. My father once said that, tools in hand, I was “like a bear with boxing gloves on.” (Paul McKinney astounded me with his know-how. He once poured Coca-Cola on a rusted chain and untangled frozen metal.)
Paul loved to sing gospel music. He and Mary never traveled far, but they began going a day’s distance to meet other folks who enjoyed singing. And sometimes the group came to the McKinney’s. They would gather to sing on the back porch after supper, surrounded by the majesty of this small place. You could hear Paul’s magnificent, deep voice down the road.
Singing through the Soil originally appeared on GardenRant on September 30, 2024.
The post Singing through the Soil appeared first on GardenRant.
