4-H Story for My 2022 Record Book, Excerpt Ashtyn DeVries, Calvert County 4-Her
Our Calvert County Heritage 4-H Club grew at the University of Maryland farm in Upper M
arlboro, and learned all the steps to growing and harvesting tobacco. The project kicked off with Dave Conrad, retired UME tobacco specialist, coming to our club meeting and teaching us the history of tobacco. For planting, first off, you have to plant the seedlings. We used a machine where the plants go into a small slot then they are put into the ground. Then as the plants mature, we had to check the plants for a certain type of bug. Then we had to take the tops off the plants, this is called topping. As the plants are finally mature, we then had to manually cut down all the plants and let the dry for about thirty minutes. Then we speared the plants onto tobacco sticks. Then we had to load all the sticks full of tobacco onto trailers for transport. Each stick had an average of four plants.
Then the fun part of the whole journey was hanging all these plants into a barn. It was about a fifteen-person process. Two or three people working up in the loft rafters, then three or four people passing sticks up into the loft rafters. There were three or four people unloading the trailers and three or four people bringing the unloaded sticks to the people who were passing them up.
The last part of the tobacco project was going back after the tobacco had dried. We then put the tobacco in order and made bundles out of it for the fair. Each bundle could not have more than thirteen leaves. We tried to pick the best leaves for our bundles. We entered in bundles of tobacco and tobacco on the sticks. My mom told me some of the older retired tobacco farmers were in the barn on the day that she took the tobacco to the fair. They had heard our 4-H club had raised tobacco. They were excited to see our finished product and were happy to see the most tobacco hanging at the fair after so many years of barely any entries.
Overall, all this project was a very good learning experience and a brand-new exposure to the hard work of raising and hanging tobacco.
