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Generations of Appalachian families provided most of their food by growing and preserving it themselves. On this program naturalist Ila Hatter visits Inez and Marlon Johnson, of Graham County, who still do it the traditional way.
In their mountainside garden, Inez and Marlon grow an amazing variety of fruits and vegetables, many of them heirloom varieties that the family has grown for decades. Marlon devotes many long days to plowing, sowing, weeding, and harvesting the crops.
In her kitchen, Inez spends many days each summer cooking and canning beans, corn, tomatoes, squash, okra, pickles, several kinds of soups and sauces, and numerous jams and jellies.
These delicious treasures are stored in a 'can house' that Marlon built to keep a year-round supply of good things to eat.
Ila gets tips on how to prepare and can beans, several ways to dry them, and takes a tour of the garden and can house. It's an authentic look at a way of doing things that will amaze the current generation used to convenience foods, microwaves, and super markets.
Next Ila visits the demonstration homestead farm at Great Smoky Mountains National Park to see how sorghum is turned into molasses. It's a daylong process that starts with horse or mule power turning a grinder that squeezes the juice from the cane. Then it's taken to a nearby wood-fired cooker that slowly cooks the juice down into a syrup over many hours. At the end of the time it's poured into jars as delicious sorghum molasses. Ila helps some local children take the syrup and turn it into an old-fashioned "taffy pull".
Park Ranger Tom Robbins shows Ila how a homestead family would have grown and used corn. Each week a sack of dried and shucked corn would be taken to a nearby grist mill. The Park has two working grist mills run only by waterpower and we get a demonstration of how each one does its job. It's a fascinating look at a centuries old technology.
Back at the farm, Ila visits a 125 year-old log cabin to see that corn meal turned into delicious corn bread over an open-hearth fire.
"From Seed to Supper" shows a way of life still followed by many in the mountains. But for many more it's a glimpse into a way of life only our grandparents would have found familiar. It required methods and skills now almost lost to a generation raised on modern conveniences.
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