Horticulture Writings

“All delight in orchards. For whereas every other pleasure fills some one of our senses,
and that only with delight, this makes all senses swim in pleasure. What can your eyes desire to see, your ears to hear, your mouth to taste, your nose to smell that is not to be had in an orchard, with abundance of variety.”
William Lawson (1553/4-1635)
https://www.gla.ac.uk/myglasgow/library/files/special/exhibns/month/july2006.html

I am a big fan of our county library and all the special outreach programs offered. It is imo, the most important government organization we have out here in the country. The ladies working there always seem to find something for me, often they make the suggestions and locate the books in the state system. That’s why I posted, came across William Lawson’s writings in a modern apple orchard book.

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I asked Scott about a topic for agriculture writings, literature, films, etc. He suggested simply posting in general section. I am a huge fan of our library and the NC Cardinal system, and keep an active card for ASU, Boone library. (matriculated after spanning just a decade)

This place is an anomily in this century. We have no cell phone, no dsl, no cable, no fiber, no TV. Always tried to keep a girlfriend with a nice set, but some things just aren’t as important as they used to be.

So are there members who might suggest literature, poems, technical papers, movies, songs, about growing or foraging fruit/foods/gardens/orchards?

Just read an interesting human interest piece about Wendel Berry (I am not enamored by some of his writings), none the less, a good read. Finished a book titled APPLES by Frank Browning, (a bit flowery styled).

If anyone wants to have a grand heartfelt laugh, find the film shorts produced by young country Appalachian folks: Appleshop in Whitesburg Kentucky, Catfish Man of the Woods and The Chairmaker are my favorites. Used to go down to the ASU library basement, check out a 16mm projector and sit and savor. I laugh too loud and the staff laughed at me. Well I was cloistered in the basement, haha.

From a monkish abode beneath the pines, Best Wishes from the Brushy Mtns.

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I just came across this useful site: George Washington Carver|George Washington Carver's Tuskegee Institute Experiment Station Bulletins · Carver's Bulletins|NAL|USDA

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From 1910. Publication that created the commercial Blueberry industry.

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Have looked high and low for 2 days, must have loaned a book and some so and so didn’t return it!

I raised 30 pigs, old breeds/mixes a few years ago pasture based. Ran across an old text book. It is beautifully bound and as current to modern husbandry as anything else published nowadays.

Frank Morrison: Feeds and Feeding. How it used to be done is now done the same way!

Free online from UPenn.

I am going to order another 21st ed, beautifully bound in the dark heavy cover. I think I remember who borrowed mine.

Last evening the very fine ladies at the public library delivered a dvd about gardening. It’s one of my favorites, a 1979 satire filmed just up the road in Asheville. Being There with Peter Sellers as Chance the Gardner, still a topical romp.

It was also Seller’s last movie. Worth a visit.

Some fun with songs: earth, place, being? How about good attitudes?

Used to see Hampton back in college years, he laid down on his 70th B-day party and died on stage…always the showman. Be careful of what one predicts, ehh?

APPLES: Tom Burford, recently deceased

The newly released book is fun. The forward, introduction and summary are good reading. A funny…how he meets Liz Taylor, haha. I love the public library!

Here is a link to a lot of old USDA bulletins. Lots of good info from the past.

https://archive.org/details/usda-leaflet?utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery

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I have only scraped the surface of these pamphlets. Thank You Wisner. The subjects and the titles are a hoot!

I hope they keep them available in the future. I’m sure a lot of them recommend insecticides that have been long banned. They have a lot of information that you won’t see in the newer literature.

Here are a couple from our county library, all those flowers I deliver summer-long get me anything I want to order. If not in the NC system, I buy the book and donate.

This one is not for the faint of heart or politically correct book critics:

It reminds me much of many of my neighbor families back 50 years ago, except the violence wasn’t as extreme here, just at the beer joints maybe a few times a month. Alcohol and gunpowder don’t mix too good.

A second is a brisk telling of ancient and nearly gone fruits, grains, libations and food staples being rediscovered, and hopefully, in regenerative recovery:

Both of these books are readable by skipping chapters as in a short story collection, and I like that style, much as long in-depth magazine articles are read.

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Today is Wendell Berry’s birthday, so here is his poem The Apple Tree.

In the essential prose
of things, the apple tree
stands up, emphatic
among the accidents
of the afternoon, solvent,
not to be denied.
The grass has been cut
down, carefully
to leave the orange
poppies still in bloom;
the tree stands up
in the odor of the grass
drying. The forked
trunk and branches are
also a kind of necessary
prose-shingled with leaves,
pigment and song
imposed on the blunt
lineaments of fact, a foliage
of small birds among them.
The tree lifts itself up
in the garden, the
clutter of its green
leaves halving the light,
stating the unalterable
congruity and form
of its casual growth;
the crimson finches appear
and disappear, singing
among the design.