College Hill Farm

  I posted this on our College Hill Farm Website some time ago. Since the website is now defunct and with Halloween fast approaching I thought it appropriate to revive it for this site.   Now my family, especially my grandparents, loved to tell tales to us kids. Whether it was haint(ghost) tales, myths, or hunting excursions. There was always a tale to be told sitting on the porch breaking beans or shelling corn. Granny, mom’s mother, loved to tell haint tales. Every time we were working on the porch breaking beans we would be talking of old times and a haint tale or two would come about. They were always told as if she was there and witnessed the event as all good tales are. My great uncle Floyd used to say never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Now that is the way of it in Appalachia, the old folks told family lore and information by way of oral traditions. The tales always included sisters, brothers, grandparents, so you had a frame of reference and you could dr

  Harlan County is not owned by the people who live there. I know some will argue with this but it is true. My home county is actually 80% owned by absentee land owners. Many are large coal or gas corporations sitting on the land waiting for a time when it would be economically feasible to get at the minerals below. Even some of the folks that own the land don’t even own the minerals nor timber on it. At one time people could purchase your rights to minerals or timber and leave you the land. This practice lead to all sorts of strife in the Appalachian Mountains. But, that is not what this piece is about. It is about the abundance left behind by these absentee land owners. My great grandmother was a granny doctor of sorts. She was an herbalist that knew an herb for every human frailty. Some called them Granny Women, Granny Doctors, Granny Witches, or Granny Sages. She didn’t know about herbs grown in China or Russia or the far flung places in the world. She knew about the herbs that g

  When I was a kid we ate dried beans all the time. Mom’s mother, a.k.a. Granny, bought pinto beans in 50 pound sacks. They were the staple, along with corn bread, that saved the lives of plenty of Appalachian Children. Moms dad was killed when she was just 4 years old. So Granny did the best she could with two children in the 1930’s without a society safety net. She owned her own place and raised as much of their own food a possible on a little ½ acre homestead. Like the pioneers of old they ate much of the same thing day in and day out with beans and taters today and taters and beans tomorrow.   Mom said it was rough grub but there was always plenty of it. Meat was reserved for Sunday diner. Salt pork or canned meat like pork or the occasional canned beef could be on the menu or whatever came out of the smokehouse. But most Sunday dinners consisted of chicken, killed that morning, either fried or made with flour dumplings and some sort of green bean and a tater or two. In the summe

  The world of homesteading is full of buzz words. Sustainability is one of the big ones. So let us get at the question “can you be sustainable on your homestead?” In 1930 my dad was born on a little homestead on 5 acres in Harlan County Kentucky. Paw worked every day in the coal industry and farmed every evening. He and Maw had 5 acres of as sustainable a homestead as anyone around. They raised a huge garden, smoked their own meat, raised hogs, had a milk cow and a mule, raised chickens, rabbits, a huge garden, had sheep, turkeys, and the occasional duck. Paw loved to hunt small game because that was pretty much all that was left. But, were they sustainable or not?   We have it so easy today. We set a slider on our heat pump and our house is warm in the winter and cool in the summer. Back then if you wanted heat you chopped wood or hauled coal in order to heat your home. There was no air conditioning. Even when I was a kid they still heated with coal. Maw would get up at 4:30 in t