I had the opportunity to clean out a silage pit on a farm and saw a tractor under a shed as I passed this on the way in and out. The raw silage I got was mixed with cow manure and made the ground swell and the tilth was better than ever. The one drawback in using this material was the weed seed we found in the garden after putting this material down.
I helped other farmers clean their pits as well and got many weeds I wish I had never seen, but the silage helped our land and this was the intent in the beginning. A feeder operation was found and we got the truck load of cow manure for five dollars if we cleaned the lot. Sometimes, this was pushed into a pile at the rear of the lot and I could load this much faster.
After I lost my job, we tried to find other means of getting money. We settled on fish bait, mainly worms.
Using some of the tin from the barn, I built worm beds and laid a thin layer of rotted sawdust on this, adding cow manure and putting the worms into this bed. We found that we had fat worms and the best kind of soil one can find for planting seed.
I mention this because we got an order for all the bell pepper we could raise.(I should have investigated this order further before jumping into the work.) With no money to buy peat cups, I found the school would let us take the little milk cartons and after they were brought home, cleaned out and stacked back, we put the soil mix into this. That soil mix being the worm castings.
We had been given some old cast off bread boxes made of wood and these really came in handy when it came to handling the pepper plants. They could be stacked on top of one another and this made it easier to stack in our room every morning when the frost was due to be so heavy as to kill plants.
All this time, the worm business was growing, giving us more customers so that we could make ends meet as we went along. Every time I went to Hattiesburg to get supplies, I purchased concrete blocks. They were slightly defective and were only ten cents each, so when the truck returned home, it was always loaded with farm needs plus the blocks.
For some reason the cottonseed meal went up at the co op, so I searched for another source and found it in the next town north at twenty dollars a ton. That meal was used in planting as well as in the worm beds.
When I found the barn was built on land that didn't belong to me, I purchased the four acres behind me, giving me a total of nine acres. I sectioned this off into five equal pastures and we began to farm in earnest, paying our way all along the way with the sale of the worms. They went out at fifty cents a box and during the summer months we sold as many as five thousand boxes a week, so one can see we were doing okay on the farm.
With a wonderful lady called wife and three healthy children, we learned how to work a farm and how to gather the fruits of our labors.
Just as soon as the peppers were about ready to put into the ground, I acquired the tractor and found a pan plow to help in breaking the land. That tractor had a muscle lift and I built them up fairly well during this time. Setting the rows off with the pan plow, I made sure each row was high enough for the peppers to grow without lying on the ground.
After the rows were up and ready, I dug the holes with a post hole digger, digging just down to the edge of the metal of the digger. As I did five or so, I went back and put cottonseed meal, bone meal and lime into each hole, making sure each hole had the same amount.
When Anna pulled the paper from around the peppers, they found a square foundation of roots and put this into the hole to begin the growing season for the peppers. When finished, we had forty rows of one hundred plants each. All planted about twenty to twenty four inches apart.
Many neighbors came and went, trying to get me to lay in some kind of inorganic fertilizer to make the plants produce the best crop they could, but I let this run off my back like water does on a ducks back.
By this time, we had acquired a cow and calf as well as chickens and had the hens in a pen where we could get eggs without having them dirty or cracked by the chickens. I tried to keep the barn clean because as you should know, I don't see as well as I should and I do not like to step in a fresh pile of manure. I kept that barn clean and I had just completed this chore when Anna came and said, “ We have army worms on the peppers. What are we going to do?”
“Pray.” I didn't mean to make the answer short, but this was the only solution I could think of at the moment. Two days later, she came and said there was truly an army of ladybugs in the pepper field. Those little red spotted beauties stayed in the field, growing and keeping all other worms and bugs off those peppers. Even as we picked, the bugs stayed in the hampers, going to the stores and where ever they would go.
Needless to say, if we had used any kind of spray to rid the field of army worms, the crop could not have been called totally organic. We harvested forty bushels of peppers per week from this field and sold every one as fast as we took them to the stores. The instigator of the pepper idea took only one bushel and only then after I twisted his arm somewhat.
