Life Lessons From My Foxfire Buddy

A recollection from Sandy’s past.

When I first moved to Appalachia, one of my closest neighbors, Sam, was a man in his seventies who lived to be 101. Right from the start we hit it off, as we were two minds who thought alike. We both believed if something was worth doing it was worth doing right, hopefully the first time. If there was an easier way to do something, Sam was on it. There were so many things he taught me, from how to manage a garden to canning to making wine.

I remember one year I had the brainy idea of mulching my garden, a traditional 100 x 100 foot square. Oh yes, I read and researched mulching to the nth degree. Yep, mulching seemed to be the way to go; I mean it would keep the weeds down, keep moisture in the soil, and give me a means of walking in the garden without stepping in the mud when it was wet. Sounded perfect.

So, that year I proceeded to mulch with old straw. I mulched and I mulched and I mulched my little heart out. Everything looked wonderful and neat; not a weed to be seen.

Then, oh my, there came the weeds! I didn’t know what I did wrong. Well, for one thing I didn’t have enough mulch to continue to keep the whole garden mulched, and the weeds, bless their little hearts, found spaces to poke thru, and that they did… everywhere. My garden looked horrible and worst yet, I didn’t know what to do; hoeing at that point seemed impossible.

The very morning I saw the mess I had created, Sam came over to take me wild apple tree searching. When I told him I could go later after I took care of the mess in my garden, he proceeded to tell me the cons of mulching from his own experience.

Why is experience something you get right ‘after’ you need it? He helped me pick up all the mulch we could and then began pulling out the large weeds and hoeing the rest. Working up the onion patch was the worst because all the green parts were lying on the ground every which way. Ugh, yes, I remember it well. After all that, apple tree searching sounded great to me. As a bonus, we did find some early apples that were ready to pick.

Then there was the year I decided to plant my pole beans with my corn, just like everyone bragged about. Yep, another nightmare in the making. What you do is plant one corn seed and two pole bean seeds in each space so the beans would have the corn to climb on. I would like to talk to the person who got that bright idea started. Yes, the beans grew climbing up the corn stalks just fine, but after a hard rain beat down the corn and beans right along with them, it was murder trying to walk between the rows, let alone pick the beans, with the fuzzy corn leaves rubbing your arms. As you can see, I always had the neighbors in stitches with my newbie antics.

Then came the bees. Yes, bees. Honey lovers that we were and trying to be as self-sufficient as we could, keeping bees seemed to be a wonderful idea. Sam always said it was wasteful to spend money buying bees from some company when there were plenty of bees for free just by getting some when they swarm. Swarming bees got my interest up, so we put the word out that we were on the lookout for swarming bees.

A friend was timbering several miles away and called one day to say that his men had just cut down a bee tree (a tree that swarming bees take up residence) and asked if we would come and get them (the bees of course, not the men!). Since one guy already got stung and another guy was afraid of bees, they couldn’t proceed working with literally thousands of bees buzzing around. I understood the urgency of the situation.

Sam gave me a list of things to bring to the “bee tree”: a white sheet, a bee gum (wooden bee hive), small piece of wood, hammer, nails, bee veil, smoker, old blue jean rags, matches and a little courage, since it was my first bee-getting experience.

And an experience it was! Immediately upon walking up to the downed tree with the bees flittering the area, I got stung just under the eye. Luckily my eye didn’t swell shut and I didn’t react to the sting or I probably would have needed to be carried out of the woods.

Have you ever seen a picture of someone covered and I mean covered with bees? Yep, that was me. I wish we had a cell phone back then to take a picture. You see, Sam had me spread the sheet out on the ground with the bee gum on one edge and the gum opening facing my back. Then he gave me a tree branch with leaves on it and told me to gently brush the bees toward the opening of the bee gum. It would take some time, but once the queen goes in, all the worker bees follow her. At that point you nail the wood over the opening the keep all the thousands of bees in there and you are then ready to go home. It took a few hours to accomplish this bee roundup. While I was just sitting on the sheet covered with bees waiting for all of them to get into the hive, I watched this one bee rub its eyes as if to clean it like a cat does. That was a once in a lifetime experience.

But wait… the adventure didn’t stop there. After capturing the wild bees, we brought them back home in the truck and had to then carry the hive by hand a mile in the dark through a farmer’s field of sleeping cows. I really don’t know how much the hive and bees weighed, but suffice it to say we were tired pups at the end of that day.

I’ve come to refer to Sam as my Foxfire buddy. In the 1960’s, a teacher had his students engaged in a project of interviewing local people about traditions in rural Appalachia as a means to preserve its culture. It became a mixture of how-to information and folklore with topics ranging from apple butter, banjos, and beekeeping to hide tanning, log cabin building, and other traditional life skills. Folks of the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970’s used these books as a kind of reference of learning self-sufficiency and the simple life. These interviews led to a magazine the later developed into a series of books, The Foxfire Books.