As I have written in previous columns, my late father was a tobacco man. If he were not working on his current crop he was thinking about next year’s. For my father and our family, February 24 held significant meaning. First, it is my older brother Tom’s birthday, and second, it was the target date every year for my father to sow his tobacco plant beds. I like to think he chose that day in recognition of the birth of his first son, but I suspect he also used it as a reason to get started a week before March arrived. This year’s soggy weather would have had him is a “tizzy.”
Come the first warm day of February, my father would begin preparing his tobacco beds. In some of the earliest years I recall, I can remember his burning off the plant beds to kill last year’s weed seeds. In later years, he gassed the beds under heavy plastic. Whatever his secrets were to starting healthy, thriving tobacco plants, or slips, largely remained his secrets. There were some jobs he seemed to enjoy doing alone. Preparing plant beds was one of them. By the time he was ready to sow the tobacco seeds, he had worked the soil until it was as soft and supple as powdered sugar. If by chance there were any small clods of dirt left, he would remove them with a hand rake.
When the seed bed was prepared to his satisfaction, he worked on getting the seed ready for sowing. He took ashes from the fireplace and wood stove that he had saved in various containers over the winter and began the process of sifting them, much like you would sift flour. When he had sifted out enough to fill a two-and-a-half bushel galvanized wash tub, he was ready for the envelope of tobacco seed. He would add the seeds and mix them thoroughly with the ashes by hand until he was satisfied the seeds had separated themselves sufficiently. Then, he would fill a five-gallon bucket with his mixture and, to use his word, “broadcast” the seeds on the plant bed. Back and forth he would go, seeding and over-seeding until all the seeds were sown. I can see him now in my mind’s eye, carefully walking down the middle of the plant bed sowing seeds and ashes from side to side. The grayish-white dust from the ashes would rise steadily from the ground like smoke from a slow burning fire.
When the seeds were sown, he tramped (some people called it “tromped”) the entire plant bed. Tramping a plant bed involved putting your shoe sole down on every single inch of the plant bed. Tramping accomplished two things. First, it forced the tobacco seeds into the soil and second, it compressed the soil so it would hold moisture better. My father tramped the bed from end to end and from side to side. I have vivid memories of seeing the first plants coming up inside a shoe print. After the bed was tramped, he called in help to set the plant bed poles.
My brothers and I have picked up the small end of many a plant bed pole in our time. They could always be found nearby lying in the tall weeds from last year. When the poles were in place down both sides of the plant bed and across the ends, we were ready for the plant bed canvas, a pocket full of small-headed nails and claw hammers.
Working in unison, we would drive nails in the plant bed poles, carefully lining them up with the eyelets in the border of the plant bed canvas, as we pulled the canvas taut across the plant bed. Greater care had to be taken if the canvas was old, as it tended to tear if pulled too tightly. Finally, everything was in order. My father smiled with satisfaction as we surveyed the finished work. But all was not finished.
In a few days he would begin to watch those plant beds like a hawk. After the first tiny tobacco plants began to make a showing, he would monitor the evening weather forecasts, observe the sun each day, and watch over those plant beds like a setting hen fussing over a netting of eggs. On sunny days he would pull back the canvas and let the sun warm the earth. If the weatherman spoke of a hint of frost, he would double the canvas to protect the plants from the cold.
In the days that followed he would bring daily progress reports to the house. “I’ve got plants coming through the ground,” he would beam. Speaking of the size of the leaf pairs, he would report later, “I’ve got plants the size of a thumb tack.” Then later, “I’ve got plants as big as a dime!” he would declare.
He especially loved to report to the farmers who gathered at Dewey Manning’s General Merchandise every spring. “Boys,” he would say, “I’ve got tobacco plants as big as a quarter!” He would be the first to make that brag every year. It had something to do with February 24.
My father sowed tobacco plant beds every spring for over fifty years. Every single one of those years he produced plant beds teeming with strong, vigorous tobacco plants.
Every year he had plants to give away. He was a tobacco man.
On February 24 I will celebrate my brother’s birthday. And I will find reason, again, to celebrate my father’s life.
I was down on the old home place a while back. I strolled out in the back yard and looked down on the field where we once raised tobacco. A west wind was stirring gently. My gaze was drawn to the western edge of the tobacco patch, just inside the tree line, where a plant bed once lay.
Suddenly, I was caught up in a dreamy fog. For a few fleeting seconds, I am almost sure I saw the dust from ashes rising slowly from the ground.
Copyright 2024 by Jack McCall
