People have to live for quite a few years to realize that many old words from our common language fade away over time, and new words or new meanings come into general use. This usually happens as technologies change.
I’m thinking especially of gardening practices right now, but the new words/old words thing applies to many areas of life. For people who have become accustomed to a money-based economy, such as we have today, the expression “the garden” often evokes a sense of what used to be, and with it a sense of nostalgia.
Referring to “the garden” to many people sounds like a gentle longing for the old days at Grandma’s house on the old family farm. Being “well-off” in earlier times was not so much tied with how much money was coming in, or how much money we were saving, or how much we had available to spend.
In earlier times, being “well-off” meant having a comfortable house to live in, productive fields, a good garden to rely on for food, a healthy family, numerous and healthy livestock, a good buggy or carriage, wagons and farm equipment in top shape, and a fine strong barn for storing harvests. Of course some money on hand was always good. But wealth was measured more in the means available for one’s living and providing, not so much in the money one was bringing in.
Many of us today have lawns almost entirely devoted to grass. Sometimes there may be a few trees, a few shrubs, a few flowers, but the grounds around our houses are usually thought of as grass areas.
In my earlier life, families would have been more interested in where shall we have the garden? I’m still embarrassed if someone asks me about my garden and I have to say, well, I’ve lived here two years and I still don’t have a garden.
When I was growing up, sometime in February or March was time to “plow the garden.” Sometimes a person would say, I need to get my garden turned, or I need to get my garden “broke.” Those were all ways of saying about the same thing, since almost everybody started a season’s gardening by using the moldboard plow to turn the soil. We also called the moldboard plow a “turning plow,” or a breaking plow. I think the expression “breaking plow” came about when the pioneers were breaking new ground. They would break the turf, turning over the upper layer of soil, with a moldboard plow.
We sold the last moldboard plow on our farm in 2010, after my father passed away. He had continued to use it to plow his garden. After he was 90 years old he would let me do the plowing, but not because he couldn’t do it.
I had first used that same two-bottom plow back in 1950, when we still had our first Ford tractor. There’s no telling how many tons of soil we turned with that plow over those 60-some years. But these days, when people think of preparing the garden soil, assuming they have a garden, they usually think in terms of tilling up the garden. They may have a 5-horsepower front-tine tiller, or a rear tine tiller with a similar motor, or if they are working on a large scale, they may have a tractor-mounted roto-tiller. That’s today’s Cadillac way to till the soil.
The moldboard plow which used to be such a mainstay in farming and gardening, is apparently on the way out. I have a certain sense of loss and nostalgia about that, but even I think that today’s tiller methods are better. At least one of the great farm implement companies got its start in building moldboard plows. John Deere started as a blacksmith who took up plow making. He was able to design a moldboard plow that could handle the challenging soils encountered as people moved to the great mid-west. His plow would scour in the troublesome gumbo soils, where the soil would stick to the moldboard of earlier plows, making a mess. I wonder how often you have heard that expression about “how well a plow scours” in the last year or so? Some even say John Deere’s plows tamed the west.
When I was still in high school, I began losing my devotion to moldboard plows. I had read a book called “Plowman’s Folly,” by a writer who was convinced that rather than turning soil upside down and burying the ground cover, tillage needed instead to mix the plant growth into the upper layer of soil. He advocated using a disk to till the land, without plowing first, as was the old custom. I think he would also have liked today’s power tillers, but he was writing in the days of horses, and obviously horses could handle disks far easier than power rototillers.
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Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.
Community, Pages 5 on 04/03/2013