Watermelons
In the years before World War 2, most of America’s food came from small farmers, some tenant farmers like my Daddy’s side of the family, and some from farmers who owned the land they and others farmed on.
My Mother passed along this story from her youth growing up in Ashe County, North Carolina.
Nobody knew watermelons better than my Grandpa. He could thump a watermelon, listen to the sound, and tell you everything about that watermelon. He never cut a melon that wasn’t perfect inside. He knew how to grow and harvest them just as well.
Unlike Daddy’s family, Momma’s family owned land, and while Grandpa was never rich, he was a carpenter, a logger, and ran a sawmill which left him with newly cleared land that needed to be farmed rather than left to erode away. Like most everyone in Ashe County, Grandpa grew a few crops, but never considered himself to be a farmer. So he built a house and allowed a sharecropper to move in and farm the land on the share. Grandpa furnished the seeds, the house, a mule, wagon, feed for the mule, a plow, wood for cooking and heating, a good spring, and the land in return for a share of the crop no matter how big or how small.