Now, I’m not a farmer, or a Mississippi delta sharecropper, so I don’t know enough to say for certain that Bobbi Gentry’s family is well out of the business. My extremely rudimentary understanding of agriculture is that one plants seeds in the spring, and harvests crops in the fall.
That said, is there likely to be a lot of hay ready to be baled on the third of June?
How about cotton to harvest?
And isn’t early June a little late to be still plowing the fields?
Many thanks for any insights y’all can provide.
Here in Tennessee, it’s not unusual to bring in three cuttings of hay. It’s just grass, after all, and when you mow it, it comes right back. Cotton isn’t harvested until after the first frost. (I had a problem with the Johnny Cash movie because it showed them picking cotton in the heat of summer) Many crops are sown in May after all danger of frost is past. I suppose if you’re plowing by mule and have a lot of acreage, you could be putting crops in at the beginning of June.
StG
Winter wheat is sown in mid to late fall and harvested in early summer. It’s not grown in the South, though.
Okay, I’m in Indiana, not Mississippi. It seems to me that with a long growing season, a farmer could have harvested some veg crops, and be reseeding something else in early June.
Here in Indiana, a wet spring kept farmers from planting corn in the muddier fields through most of May. The Dept. of Ag. folks were saying June was too late to plant corn, but if the fields dried out, soybeans could still be planted for a few weeks. In Mississippi, both those deadlines would be stretched out.
Nay, nay–the singer was chopping cotton. Choppin’ ain’t pickin’.
Okay, another [set of] agriculture question[s] I don’t know the answer[s] to. What is “chopping” cotton? That is, what is the next stage of a cotton crop’s life cycle once it’s been chopped? And is June third the day for it?
Freddie – it’d be nice if you defined “chopping cotton”. It looks like “planting cotton” in that picture, but evidently it means chopping the weeds and thinning the crop.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb4303/is_200208/ai_n15014894
Chopping is weeding, yes. The picture I linked is dated June 1941, so June seems about right.
I’m a Yankee city boy, but so far as I know after choppin’ comes layin’ by . . . and then it’s pickin’ time. At least, that’s what Johnny Cash says.