Farming With the Seasons

While working as a librarian a year or so before my first book was published, I met an old farmer with no formal education who taught me more about the works of William Faulkner than any professor I’d ever had. Teford Sullivan had started reading Faulkner in his young days, by lamplight.

He also taught me about farming. His method for successful vegetable crops, year after year, was to farm with the seasons. Though our four distinct seasons, here in the deep south, are beginning to merge somewhat, we still have spring, summer, fall and winter.

Sweet garden peas, onions and lettuces thrive in spring; peppers, yellow squash, tomatoes, peas, beans, corn and red potatoes grow well in summer; sweet potatoes and other varieties of squash are fall crops; collards, mustard and turnip greens flourish in winter.

Teford Sullivan, one of the wisest men I ever met, knew about balance. He knew who the loser would be in a battle with nature.

Likewise, I've found that what works best for me is to write with the seasons. I don’t have to rely on memory for the nuances of weather or what’s flying or floating on the air. I can set scenes in the appropriate weather--a rain storm, a sunny day full of birdsong, a bleak gray day in winter. And I can make it all real for my reader because it’s real for me.

For instance, when I was working on my latest novel Just Doll I visited the Agrirama, in Tifton, Georgia, on a sweltering June day because the first chapter of my novel is set in summer. This, my first historical novel, is set in southeast Georgia, from 1870-1900. Same period as the Agrirama. I’d never thought much about visiting this re-creation of the rural south till I began writing a rural historical novel. Much of my research had been done for me; genuine sensory detail was waiting. Sensory detail is important to a story to draw the reader in through the senses, to make them “see”, as Joseph Conrad would say.

I stood that hot summer day and listened to the way-off barking of dogs, to donkeys braying. The whine of a sawmill somewhere; a horse whinnying. A bucket clanging hollow down a well. The swishing sound of a brush broom on bare dirt yards. The rumor of a train, it’s bright whistle and toot.

Closing my eyes I breathed in the smells of raw dirt, oak smoke, turpentine and cooking. Lime, used as disinfectant in outhouses and to keep snakes away from the homes, was a new acrid smell for me. I ran my hands along a picket fence that I knew would end up at the Baxter house in Just Doll. I walked down the hallway of a house, soon to become the big house at Staten Bay plantation. Detail became plot. I tasted water from a well, cold as the weather was hot, sweet as a lover’s kiss.

My characters’ clothes came from the Agrirama. I made dresses for my women and shirts for my men from the bolts of material in the Agrirama commissary. I got home remedies for my plantation workers from the commissary. I even bought them a corn sheller at the Agrirama hardware store. For Christmas, at Staten Bay, my main character Doll gave her sister Baa a woven leather saddle blanket for her mare, ordered straight from the Agrirama