Planting Corn with Hoe Handles?

The year was 1948.

We had a large creek, Williams Creek, which cut through our bottomland farm. The creek made an S-curve around our 40acre cornfield and whenever it rained real hard it would overflow its banks, making a path right across a corner of Dad’s corn patch. Some years it did this when the young corn was about one or two feet high. The water current undermined the stalks and laid them flat on the ground.

So, while the ground was still soft, we had to go bare-foot and pick up each stalk and push dirt around it and pack it tight with our bare feet. Talk about a tedious and boring chore, but Dad said that he didn’t plant that corn there just to see it fall over and die.

We also had a few low spots in the cornfield which sometimes, for one reason or another, some rows would be missing plants when he planted the corn. Dad wasn’t one to waste precious row space. One year the planted rows were lacking a lot of plants. Either it was too dry or insects got to the seed, but the stand was rather sparse. It wasn’t bad enough to replant, so what were we to do?

Well, Dad soaked some corn seed in water for a day or so, then gave each one of us kids a nail bag to tie around our waists and with a two-foot hoe handle, sent us off to plant corn. The reason for soaking the corn seeds was for it to puff up and get a head start in germinating and pop out of the ground sooner to catch up with the rest of the corn crop. We went row by row, made a hole with the stick handle, dropped a kernel of corn into the hole, and covered and stomped it shut with our bare feet.

Now how many youngsters these days would put up doing work like that for their parents? To us it was just another chore in the daily life of a kid on the farm.