Crop Comments: Thanksgiving Season: Not Just a Single Day

As I wrote this column, the actual holiday was three days away.

The happening should be considered more a season, not just a single square on a calendar page displaying the fourth Thursday of each November. A look at early colonial history in Massachusetts supports my reasoning.

The first Thanksgiving Day was celebrated, according to New England historians, on Sept. 29, 1621.

The gathering of immigrating English folks, lucky enough to survive that first winter, joined up with Native Americans to celebrate their survival as well as gratitude to God.

But historians several hundred miles south of Plymouth dispute that colony’s claim to hosting the first Thanksgiving in the New World. In 1619, the ship Margaret of Bristol, England, sailed for Virginia under Captain John Woodliffe and brought 38 settlers to the new “Town and Hundred” of Berkeley. The Margaret disembarked her passengers at a port called Berkeley Hundred on Dec. 4, 1619. The “hundred” denoted the number of families that the parcel in question should be able to support.

The group’s London Company charter required that the day of arrival be observed as a day of thanksgiving to God. On that first day, Captain Woodliffe held a service directed by the charter which specified, “Wee ordaine that the day of our ships arrival at the place assigned for plantacon in the land of Virginia shall be yearly and perpetually keept holy as a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God.”

Because of this, the Berkeley Plantation had one of the first recorded celebrations of Thanksgiving in America, establishing the tradition two years and 17 days before the Pilgrims arrived aboard the Mayflower.

Moving back New England, Edward Winslow, the Plymouth Pilgrim community’s first historian, recorded that Squanto, the local Native American survival expert, told the settlers, “Except they got fish and set with it [corn seed] in these old grounds it would come to nothing.”

Further quoting Winslow: “Squanto showed them that in the middle of April they should have store enough [of fish], come up the brook by which they began to build, and taught them how to take it, and where to get other provisions necessary for them. All of which they found true by trial and experience.”

Winslow made the same point about the value of Indian cultivation methods in a letter to England at the end of the year (in the spelling of the day): “We set the last Spring some twentie Acres of Indian Corne, and sowed some six Acres of Barly and Pease; and according to the manner of the Indians, we manured our ground with Herings, or rather Shadds, which we have in great abundance, and take with great ease at our doores. Our Corn did prove well, & God be praysed, we had a good increase of Indian-Corne, and our Barly indifferent good, but our Pease were not worth the gathering, for we feared they were too late sowne.”

Most Native Americans, living not so near the ocean, built up soil fertility with something besides dead fish. Their agriculture was based on a practice called the “Three Sisters.” Quite a distance west of Squanto’s Wampanoag tribe, the Iroquois Nation used that term for corn, bean and squash, because they nurture each other like family when planted together. These traditional farmers placed corn in small hills, planting beans around them and interspersing squash throughout the field.

The Iroquois agricultural system was based on the hill-planting method. Iroquois women, who were responsible for farming, placed several kernels of corn in a hole. As the seedlings grew, farmers mounded up soil around the young plants, creating hills one foot high and two feet wide. Hills were arranged in rows about one step apart.

Iroquois women practiced interplanting; two or three weeks after planting the corn, women returned to plant bean seeds in the same hills. The beans contributed nitrogen to the soil; cornstalks served as bean poles. Between rows, farmers planted a low-growing crop, like squash or pumpkin. Their leaves shaded the ground, preserving moisture and inhibiting weed growth.

Corn migrated north from Mesoamerica (modern day Central America and Mexico), where it was first domesticated. The first ears of corn, descended from a wild grass called teosinte, were tiny. Over centuries, the Native peoples developed larger varieties of corn that could sustain them. Some of these varieties ultimately made it up to Wampanoag turf – and thus Massachusetts.

Fast forward exactly four centuries to where Certified Crop Advisor Tom Kilcer commented on Winslow’s “old grounds that would come to nothing.” In that mindset, check out his newsletter at advancedagsys.com, titled “Dealing with High Fertilizer Cost.”

As Kilcer deals with the “oldness” of a soil, let me quote his wisdom: “Thus, the first step is that if you do not have a soil test on every field you buy fertilizer for in the past two years, you are guessing the nutrients needed in the field. It is like driving through the field in a pickup truck and throwing money out the window. We sample forage for the cows frequently to optimize economic return. Why is it so difficult to do that for your fields? October through freeze-up is usually a slow time for fieldwork and so you can get it done in time for winter fertilizer orders.”

According to Kilcer, once you get the soil test results you can prioritize fields by nutrient content. Those with high fertilizer nutrient levels can get by with a minimum starter.

by Paris Reidhead