Joel McCraw

Partial Transcript: I’m Joel McCraw of Linda’s Plants and Shrubs, and our landscape division is Linda’s Plants. I also have Bad Apple Farms out here in Edneyville. Born at Pardee Hospital in 1968. My son just graduated from North High School; I’m hoping he’s gonna carry on what we’ve built here.

Partial Transcript: I guess I’m fourth generation. Yeah. I’m a fourth generation farmer. My grandpa bought this piece of land here from Grandma Leightum when he got out of the war and cleared the timber off of it and started planting apple trees. So, then my great grandfather followed up on Sugar Loaf.

Basically subsistence farming. Then everyone started planting apples after the war and apples became pretty big out here as a cash crop. Lot of truck farming out here on the ridge back then. There was even a cannery here at one time. There’s still a lot of produce, but just handled in different ways.

If you had land you could survive, so you sure wanted to take care of it. It was a major asset. Uh, you nurture the land; it nurtures you. So you sure don’t want to jeopardize that.

Partial Transcript: I just like watching stuff grow. Gives you a lot of satisfaction, and planting the seed and harvesting stuff like this. There’s been a lot of trials and tribulations this year. Ever since that two feet of rain in May, I’ve called it a character building year and here we are in September looking down the barrel of a hurricane. The battle continues.

Ah, next year’ll be better. Always next year.

Partial Transcript: Dad missed some apple crops back in the 80’s and started growing some row crops, couldn’t find good quality transplants so he built a green house on the side of the house out of locust posts and PVC pipe and it started to grow from there. A couple of hail storms later we figured out it was safer to grow under plastic than it was in the field, then figured out there was more money from ornamentals than there was from food, cause people seem to expect cheap food from our government. They’ll pay for decorations, but generally don’t like to pay for food.

Partial Transcript: I growed up playing in these creeks and rivers. I didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize my son from playing in the creek or river. It just made good sense. Good water we take for granted living here in the mountains, but you go to Florida and you see an awful lot of nasty water make you appreciate good water.
When I built a shrub nursery up on the head of Clear Creek I worked for the Dept. of Environmental and Natural Resources and designed the artificial wetlands to filter the water before it reentered the trout stream up there and here we’ve put everything we can on drip or spray stakes or, we still do a lot of hand watering, but not near as much as we did in the past.

Partial Transcript: We started up there working with Cliff Ruth of the Extension and decided to grade the site at a two percent slope away from the creek bank and back to the roadside. Then channeled all the water and created an artificial wetland to filter that runoff before it could reenter the stream. Then we installed like a cistern system to draw water from the creek without being actively in the creek.

Partial Transcript: Yes, we put in irises and hibiscuses and stuff like that that absorb the nitrogen. Uh, and use it for plant food instead of reentering the stream and cause an algae, like they have in Lake Okeechobee and the red tides like they have in Florida now.

Partial Transcript: Ah, hopefully when the plants do their job it’s clear water when it gets back to the stream. And we use a coated, slow release fertilizer. We don’t use any water soluble fertilizer; it releases over a 4 – 5 month period so you don’t have a huge dump of nitrogen, barring any hurricanes, floods, or whatever, theoretically anyway. It being a coated slow release like that.

Partial Transcript: Everything’s a cycle. If you do anything to break a cycle, it’s just, the cycle will get tilted. There’s enough talk of climate change without me knowingly doing something to impact that cycle. It’s a perfect cycle. It cleanses itself. I always tell people it’s the arrogance of man thinking he can impact a perfect cycle, you know.

Deep Water Horizon. We were never able to get a fish out of the Gulf of Mexico for ten years. Ha. It cleanses itself.

Partial Transcript: It’s just, I don’t know as I could speak to that scientific enough. I know in my mind how it works, but how to explain it, you know. It rains clear water, you cook off humidity, and it rains somewhere else. You know. And you’ve got to think about everything. Like going up to that nursery, there’s one point in the road where the water on one side goes to the Atlantic and the other side goes to the Gulf. There’s thousand mile journey, one drop of rain here in Edneyville to get to its destination. People don’t really think about that. Just cause it goes into the French Broad, well that’s.. that thing goes north. Then it goes into Tennessee, which goes south to Alabama. Then north through Tennessee and Kentucky and Ohio to go back south again. It’s a long journey, a drop of water.

Partial Transcript: Not a real Example. Just work hard and lead by example hopefully. Like an old Boy Scout, try to leave no trace. There’s a lot of stuff you learned in Boy Scouts, is what you need to know to lead your life by.

Partial Transcript: Yeah, we’ve got some much labor involved in hand watering, I started looking at different systems and I didn’t really want to put any overhead irrigation in down here because didn’t have the water volume here that I have up there on Clear Creek, so I had played with this system inside for a couple of years on hard to water crops that really don’t want water on the foliage into a system made in Canada that seems to be real durable. But basically, all it is, is drip tape sealed up inside of a capillary mat. So, ah I found a system made in Canada. It’s basically a capillary mat inside of a geotextile fiber with drip tape in it and you turn the drip tape on and it saturates the capillary mat and the plants wick the water up through the soil through the bottom, so, number one, you save on water and pesticide applications cause you’re not wetting the foliage every time the plant’s watered and it’s extremely hard for it to overwater with this system because it will not wick up but the holding capacity, whereas the human factor, ah, you know, a cell phone or a blue tooth’s killed a lot of my plants. Laughter. He gets talking on the phone and the water just goes every which a way.

Partial Transcript: Probably Theron Maybin, he’d be the first one that’d come to mind. He’s an awesome farmer, awesome leader, awesome steward. Miss him a lot.

He taught me just how to be a good steward of the land. Like I say he’s led by example. He had a lot of wisdom. Cliff Ruth, Corporate Extension. He’s very knowledgeable, very helpful. He helped… wrote the grant that helped install the plants in the wetland and all that. He’s very helpful. What’s in… my life time, farming’s turned dramatically from everything was turned and tilled, and plowed. Now we have all the no till and lot less soil intrusive techniques than in the past. And now of all the computer technology, not per se here on our farm, but in the big farming areas it’s changed a lot.

Partial Transcript: If you don’t learn from history you’re messing up. There’s a lot of things figured out for you instead of you having to figure em out on your own. If you just look around. Just ask around. There’s a lot to be said for the people who first settled this wilderness and carved out a life and a farm here. They learned a lot of different tricks for this area; it’s not an easy area to farm in. Lot of micro-climes. Lot of…It’s just different. Like I tell people, just because they move 500 miles south don’t mean they can farm two months more out of the year. It’s basically the same climate. It’s definitely… has advantages and sometimes disadvantages. Like a hurricane or a graphic cliff could be brutal thing.

Partial Transcript: I’m just doing it to make a life. I don’t know. I hope my son enjoys it as much as I do. I don’t know if he will or not. He’s more into the landscape and hydrolic thing right now, but that might change. But we have a lot of fun together growing the pumpkins and stuff. It’s challenging and kind of fun to see what you’re going to get. Just trying to make a living and have a little fun along the way.

Partial Transcript: Well, I think it’s come full circle pretty much. It’s…the whole ASAP program and all that it’s definitely got away from the corporate model here in this area. I think it’s headed back that way in a lot of great ways. All the young farming kids over in Asheville, that’s really good to see as an older farmer. A lot of interest. I have people email wanting to intern here and I’m not really a tail gate market kind of guy and there’s a lot of interest out there in it and I’m just glad to see that cause a lot of us aren’t getting any younger and, I don’t know, if any of those people eventually end up trying their hand at apple farming. If they plan to stick with the tail gate model, I don’t know how that will play out; it’ll be interesting to see. But I’m considered one of the youngsters out here these days and I just turned 50. There’s a lot of elderly farmers out here and I don’t know what we’re going to do about this whole apple deal. I’m starting to look at the hemp thing. There’s a patch right below my house that we’ll go by and look at as we go by the nursery, it’s could be a good thing.

Partial Transcript: Try to keep farming. Try not to plant houses. I know town’s kind of growing this way and I know there’s a lot of elderly farmers out here and I’m afraid it won’t bode well for open space. I appreciate your time and interest.