[Granville-Hough] 28 Dec 2009 - Plums and such

[Trustees for Granville W. Hough]

Date: Mon, 28 Dec 2009 07:25:04 -0800
From: Granville W Hough <gwhough at oakapple.net>
Subject: Plums, and such - 28 Dec 2009

My friend, Harold Hopkins had some experiences with wild and domestic
fruits which I did not have.  I particularly did not know the mayhaw
bush, the berries of which are said to be used for making jelly.  My
brother Clifford was having trouble replacing all his fences,
and I asked him how he stayed on the line with his electrical fences
when the old fence was gone.  He said, "I just follow the Mayhaw bushes,
The birds sat on each old fence post and left droppings with seeds.  So
I just have a straight row of mayhaw bushes on the old fence line."  I
thought I would eventually remember what a mayhaw bush looked like, but
I never did.

---------------------------------------------------------------

Granville,

I enjoy the series you've been doing about the various life functions
on your farm in those good ole days beyond recall.

I thought yesterday about the "plum orchards"  boys around Mize used
to visit in those days. We had a small plum orchard near our garden.
These uncultivated plants, or bushes,  produced small plums, both
purple and yellow, but only the size of a  hickory nut at maximum
size, and the plum bushes grew close together in clumps that  formed
an "orchard," and sometimes boasted a bird nest or two.  I guess that
your Hough family -- being the only orchardists that I ever knew of in
Smith County -- didn't bother with those small plum bushes, none
taller than six feet.  A boy just crawled under one of the bushes and
ate his fill.    I'm still amazed at the size of the plums I buy in
produce stores  and markets here  in California.   Until I grew up and
left Mize, I never knew that some plums grew to the size of an apple.
There were Kieffer pear trees here and there, and I believe were the
ony pear trees that grew and produced well in Mississippi.  Kieffer
pears  did not ripen quickly as other pears and were often cooked and
canned by housewives.

The other "sweets" young boys around Mize enjoyed were watermelons,
robbed from some farmer's nearby patch and taken to the swimming hole
and while everyone enjoyed the swimming, the melons were floated in
the water to make them cool. After they'd cooled and after everybody
had feasted, the rest of the time at the swimming hole was spent
throwing pieces of watermelon rind at each other.  These melons were
usually "busted" instead of cut with a knife, and the hearts of  the
melons grabbed and eaten by the swimmers. Sugar cane was also a
popular sweet, but this was mostly at molasses mills where there was
almost always a dipper or gourd near the pans where one might drink
the cane juice, most of which heated boiled with pine knots and
skimmed by attendants with paddles until the molasses was finished and
poured into gallon cans.  There were occasional apple or crabapple
trees where hungry boys could feed.   The school athletics coaches
were always cautioned the players against sampling the juice at
molasses mills because doing so would "cut your wind," suggesting that
anyone who had been guilty of drinking cane juice would soon "run out
of gas" on the football field or the basketball court.

There were also "mayhaws," a fruit about which I never gained any
experience. And it was mayhaws or some kind of cranberry fruit that
was grown around millponds, so the fruit could be raked from the top
of the water and bucketed.
And there were huckleberres, which were uncultivated but could be
found in the woods, and the  fruit picked and bucketed.
These were smaller than culivated blueberries but apparently of the
same generic origins.  Down below the hill
to the east of the Mize High School there were small berry trees on
the hillside of gullies and sandbeds where one could go and stand at
one of these trees and eat one's fill.  Nobody that I know of ever
took a bucket to pick these berries, which were similar to
blueberries, but smaller.   It took awhile and required concentration
and  patience to fill up from one of these trees.

Harold H.