Channing Cope and His Vine of Hope

Okay, I know I said the FoodShed Summer Reading Pick of the Week was over, but two things have happened:

* It is clearly still summer here (it has been the hottest August on record, with more days hitting 100 degrees or higher that ever before. Our lawns are dying, our farms are parched, and our children look like wilted plants against the seats of unairconditioned school buses).

* I simply had to share my exciting find with you!

So, you know that kudzu post I wrote about a week ago? The one where I said we needed George Washington Carver to come find out what we can do with this abundant kudzu covering the South? Well, as part of my research, I located a book written by an Atlanta Journal Constitution writer named Channing Cope called Front Porch Farmer, published in 1949. I ordered it from Amazon for all of ten bucks or so. When it arrived, I opened it right there at the mailbox and knew I was holding a treasure. It smells like history or Heaven, I'm not sure which, and it is autographed by the author.

Turns out Channing Cope was a major proponent of kudzu for erosion control and as a food crop for livestock. Not only that, but he recognized that since kudzu is a legume, its inclusion on farms would result in inproved soil fertility because legumes fix nitrogen in the soil. What's more, kudzu is drought-resistant and is a perrennial, requiring planting only once. He suggested in detail a yearlong plan that provides different types of green pastures for livestock, moving the animals from pasture to pasture as the seasons progress. He treated steep hillsides, gently sloping hillsides and flat bottom land differently, and he used as his chief example his twenty years of success at his Yellow River Farm.

So, naturally, I got to wondering. What happened? Georgia is wall-to-wall kudzu--why isn't it wall-to-wall grass-fed livestock? Why don't we lead the nation in this? I asked Chad the Milkman if his cows like kudzu, and he said they did. So, what went wrong?

In my walkshed (that mile perimeter around my home that I am getting to know better and better, one footstep at a time), I pass patches of the stuff, and it is currently flowering, although the flowers are quite hidden behind the large leaves and they are just a pinprick of purple from the road. The flowers (those are kudzu flowers in the photo above) smell like grapes and honeysuckle rolled together. I have lived here almost 18 years and I have never seen nor smelled the flowers. Now, I pick a fistful every morning and smell them all the way home.

I'm drying kudzu flowers in the garage. I'm doing experiments to see if they make a dye. And I'll probably work some into homemade soap, which I usually make on Sunday nights once the heat passes and the long shadows of fall stretch across my garden outside my kitchen window. And I've already had success winding the soft, summer kudzu vines into wreaths, which then harden in time to decorate for the holidays with lavender and calendula flowers dried from my garden. I may not be George Washington Carver, but it's a start.

So, I clearly have much more research to do. What happened in the 58 years since Channing Cope and his vine of hope that has resulted in our state being overrun with kudzu instead of cows? Is there a way to put that vine to work for us now? I wonder what Georgia State Agriculture Commissioner Tommy Irvin thinks about this.

Hmmmm. Sounds like I have a phone call to make.

Channing Cope and His Vine of Hope